Columnist Thomas Friedman’s Two-Item Graphic of What Is Wrong with the American Situation Is Something a Leadership-Oriented President Would Be Spouting at Every Opportunity

© 2010 Peter Free

 

06 December 2010

 

 

If he weren’t the sparkless non-entity that our current President has apparently become

 

I can excuse non-action in the face of undefined problems.  But not in the face of problems so obvious that they simulate vampires sucking blood from a near-corpse.

 

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most accurately forward-looking columnist, wrote a couple of days ago that the WikiLeaks exposure of secret Department of State communications reveals nothing more clearly than the decline in the United States’ ability to leverage its interests around the world.

 

He thinks that our dependence on (a) Middle Eastern oil and (b) Chinese credit have ruined America’s ability to get important things done around the world.

 

 

Citation

 

Thomas L. Friedman, The Big American Leak, New York Times (04 December 2010)

 

 

Dependence on Middle Eastern oil

 

Preserving access to Middle Eastern oil causes the United States to act in ways that strengthen Middle Eastern and Islamic hostility toward us.

 

Oil-dependence prevents us from parting ways with hypocritical tyrants, who:

 

(i) oppress their people,

 

(ii) secretly ask the U.S. to take care of Iran’s nuclear aspirations so they don’t have to,

 

(iii) excoriate America in public,

 

(iv) take our oil money to fund the terrorists who are killing American warriors, and

 

(iv) rope us into diplomatically supporting their tyranny against their own citizens.

 

Oil dependence weakens us.

 

 

Debt and China

 

Our debt — and China’s status as a major creditor — prevents us from metaphorically getting in China’s face about:

 

 (i) its under-valued currency

 

and

 

(ii) its unwillingness to keep North Korea from shipping missile parts to Iran.

 

In my view, our debt also:

 

(iii) prevents us from properly exposing China’s irresponsible support for North Korea’s dangerous military attack on South Korea,

 

(iv) weakens our ability to support American workers at home through appropriate trade modifications,

 

 and

 

(v) diminishes our investment in the infrastructure of the future.

 

 

Is President Obama asleep?

 

Thomas Friedman’s short essay could be transformed into a persuasive call to action.  Its easily visualized simplicity makes for effective persuasion.  Oil and debt are subjects most Americans can relate to.

 

Making such a call to action would require that the President leave the Doldrums Couch.  He would have to start punching domestic opponents (of a sensibly-planned American future) in a thoroughly un-professorial manner.

 

He probably doesn’t have the necessary willingness to battle stupidity, thoughtless resistance, avarice, counter-ego, and unprovoked hostility.  Academics generally aren’t used to mean streets or fields of combat.

 

Most law professors (as the President legitmately claims to have been) choose instruction over law practice because they dislike the dirt they had to swim in while practicing.

 

That’s why I suspect he is going to be a one-termer. He seems to have an aversion to traipsing through the fields of human obtuseness that effective political leadership requires.

 

 

An aside on the irrelevance of “liking” the President

 

I’m tired of people saying they like the President, despite an immediately following string of objections to his lack of leadership.

 

Liking is beside the point.  The President wanted his office.  It is the democratic equivalent of king.  Having achieved it, he should get off his increasingly lame posterior and do something with his quasi-regal pulpit and his self-adored brain.

 

 

Sinking, while the Captain drinks with Marie Antoinette

 

The Ship of State is sinking.  I don’t see President Obama bailing much water.  Much less trying to remanufacture the ship’s hull to meet the faster waters that are already upon us.

 

What kind of a Captain is that?  His performance should embarrass even himself.

 

 

If we wanted to grow moss, we’d be in horticulture

 

Watching lackadaisical moss grow on a spiritless, uninspiring president is no one’s sense of fun.  Or progress.