It’s clear that the events in the Crimea have revealed Russian President Vladimir Putin as true to his KGB and Cold War era roots. And it’s also clear that your head can almost explode if you surf talk radio, read blogs and listen to politicians now when it comes to President Barack Obama and the Russia-Crimea-Ukraine crisis.Welcome to an authentic tower of (partisan) babel. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank nails it:
President Obama is such a weak strongman. What’s more, he is a feeble dictator and a timid tyrant.
That, at any rate, is Republicans’ critique of him. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Obama’s critics pivoted seamlessly from complaining about his overreach to fretting that he is being too cautious. Call it Operation Oxymoron.
Perhaps its because a)our politics more often than not resembles partisan flailing aimed at those who already agree with a given politician than in trying to lay out a specific argument to shift opinion, b)our news may have the “long form” for the most leisurely, but it’s increasingly dominated by short sound bites, partisan charges, articles or blog posts on incidents or comments or videos, c) there’s seldom any ideological coherence because we have a 24/7 partisan and ideological struggle. Bipartisan statements such House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s are hard to find.
The late Republican Sen. Arthur Vanderberg’s idea that “politics ends at the water’s edge” — that politicians put aside political jockeying and try to unite in foreign policy crises — has been seemily replaced now by some to “let’s see if we can create a tsunami to rally our side, get this guy’s poll numbers down and our teams’ up.”
Last Wednesday, I sat in a House hearing and listened to Republicans describe Obama exercising “unparalleled use of executive power” and operating an “uber-presidency.” They accused him of acting like a “king” and a “monarch,” of making the United States like a “dictatorship” or a “totalitarian government” by exercising “imperial” and “magisterial power.”
But after events in Ukraine, this very tyrant was said to be so weak that it’s “shocking.”
“We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proclaimed Sunday on CNN.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told the annual gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Monday that Obama has “a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”
Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) told Bloomberg News that “we’re projecting weakness.” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) told CNN that recent events make “the administration look weak.” And Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) told Fox News that the administration is “playing marbles” and that the Russians are “running circles around us.”
In theory, it is possible for Obama to rule domestic politics with an iron fist and yet play the 98-pound weakling in foreign affairs. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense that one person would vacillate between those two extremes.
And here is Milbank’s you-got-it-buddy line:
A better explanation is Obama’s critics are so convinced that he is wrong about everything that they haven’t paused to consider the consistency of their accusations.
As that great sage Daffy Duck would say, “Consistency, conshmistency what does it matter? It’s Obama we’re talking about.”
Obama is neither tyrant nor pushover. In general, the criticism of him being inconsistent and indecisive is closer to the mark. But the accusation that he has been feckless in Ukraine is still dubious, because those demanding a stronger response have been unable to come up with one.
Come up with one? In 21st century American politics?
Actual policy content alternatives are generally now elusive in our politics and in our political discussion. Attack and defining a political foe is now the priority. There were many eras in our history when political foes opposed and then outlined a specific alternate course of action. Increasingly that is oh, so 20th century.
I get tons of emails from groups and people on politics. Within a second of seeing most of them I can fully guess the content, snark, phrases they’ll use as soon as I see the name. In this crisis, you can take a second and think about what former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would say and how she said it — the GO HERE and see if your prediction was correct.
So welcome to the age of the feckless dictator timid control freak Enjoy don’t enjoy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.