Saturday, September 20, 2014

Noonan: Obama's Poor Judgement Did Him In

Peggy Noonan is out with an astounding column in the Wall Street Journal. For its sheer simplicity and searingly clear analysis this column is a stunner.
Here's part of it:
At this dramatic time, with a world on fire, we look at the president and ponder again who he is. Mr. Obama himself mocked how people see him, according to a remarkable piece this week by Peter Baker in the New York Times. "Oh, it's a shame when you have a wan, diffident, professorial president," he reportedly said, sarcastically, in a meeting with journalists before his big Syria speech. Zbigniew Brzezinski told Mr. Baker the president's critics think he's a "a softy. He's not a softy."
Actually, no one thinks he's a softy. A man who personally picks drone targets, who seems sometimes to enjoy antagonizing congressional Republicans, whose speeches not infrequently carry a certain undercurrent of political malice, cannot precisely be understood as soft.
But we focus on Mr. Obama's personality and psychology—he's weak or arrogant or ambivalent, or all three—and while this is interesting, it's too fancy. We are overthinking the president.
His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment.
Click here to read the rest of this illuminating column.

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