By Victor Davis Hanson
July 7th, 2013 - 10:52 pm
A Plodding Goddess
Like a broken record, for the last five years I have invoked the
Greek concept of Nemesis, or divine retribution for unchecked hubris, to
explain what was in store for the Obama administration.
Most readers have sighed, “OK already, but where’s
the divine retribution, given this president’s overweening arrogance and the
damage that he’s doing to the economy, our social fabric, and foreign policy?”
Patience — Nemesis takes her time surveying human
kind before figuring out the properly ironic punishment.
She must soak
in vero possumus, the fake Greek
colonnade, the “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” narcissism, the cooling
the planet and lowering the rising seas riffs, the tingling
legs, the “perfectly
creased pant,” the Obama “as god,” the
smartest president ever, and the Obama who is by his
own admission better at each of the crafts of his
specialized staff.
Then she must consider “punish our
enemies,” “fat
cat bankers,” “you
didn’t build that,” “bitter clingers,” “spread the wealth
around,” and dozens of additional slurs and banalities. To digest all that
takes even the goddess some time.
The Non-Olympian
The young, inexperienced, but haughty Obama is a
stereotypical figure right out of Greek mythology. Sometimes he is poor
arrogant Icarus — flying too high on his frail and melting waxen wings. Or is
he arrogant young Phaethon? The latter demanded the reins of his father’s sun
chariot — only to end up in flames as his out-of-control divine car scorched
the earth (unfortunately we are the earth). Often Obama seems a know-it-all
Oedipus who believed that he was so smart that the far older world of chance
and fate had to yield to his superior reason. Or is he vain Narcissus, so taken
with his image in the reflecting pool that Nemesis allowed him to stare forever
transfixed at himself?
Do we remember the bloody battle over health care in
2009: the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the war against Catholic
institutions, the advice to pass the bill unconditionally to learn what was in
it — all at a time of massive deficits and high unemployment, when we could ill
afford such a divisive and costly boondoggle?
Obama in hubristic fashion got his wish, as he
sought his own “legacy” or “signature achievement” over what was good for the
country. Obamacare became the law of the land. Its freebies of wider
coverage supposedly at first came at no cost.
Obama vs. Obama
Who, after all, was against putting their
24-year-old kid back on the family health plan? Then started the insidious new
taxes, then the planned diversions from Medicare to pay for new humane
coverage. Now looms the awful reality of its 2014 enactment and the burdens to
come on small businesses that are desperately preempting the law by converting
full-time positions into part-time jobs.
Once again comes the ancient warning: beware of what
you wish for. Suddenly the 2014 election looms. Democrats in mixed districts
are anxious. The new Obamacare rules are slated to hit voters right before most
of the Congress seeks reelection. The signature achievement of the Obama
administration is ending up as the proverbial albatross around its neck. When
the author of the bill, Sen. Max Baucus, dubbed his own creation “a
train wreck,” the description stuck.
Then Nemesis struck. Not Republicans in the House,
not right-wing judges, but Obama himself tabled much of the most important
parts in the implementation of the bill. For now he has almost killed off his
own offspring, not in the promised most transparent fashion in the history of
the presidency, but cheaply and perhaps cowardly on a little read website at
the start of a long holiday. It is as if the president can pick and choose
which laws he administers and which he simply ignores, but is terribly ashamed
to admit such.
Nemesis warns us on the eve of the immigration
debate that if Obama will ignore the legal requirements of his own bill, then
he surely will be even bolder in subverting
the legislative work of others. When shortly he will
again lament that he is not a king or tyrant, remember that the disclaimer
usually presages his attempt to act like one. Also remember that the best
warning about Obama always comes from Obama: when he sermonizes to us about
cheap photo-ops, endless campaigning and fund-raising, spiking the football,
going after enemies, etc., then we expect that he is shortly to do all that and
more.
The Whole World Is Watching
Abroad it was more ironic still. Bashar Assad, we
were reassured, was a “reformer” whom Bush had unfortunately alienated. Bush’s
neocons had emboldened Israel to be obstructive, and thereby sabotaged peace in
the Middle East. Leading from behind, dialogue, reset, soft power, the Nobel
Peace Prize — all that and more would make the world love us.
Those abroad wanted in on the giddy American
experience that Obama had ushered in. Balance of power, deterrence, alliances,
notions of good and bad, and military readiness belonged to the ossified world
of the past, the Risk board games that our fancy-pants elites played so
distant from the hearts and minds of foreigners on the ground. It was as
if the very little our Phaethon president knew about foreign affairs, so the
more he boasted about his soon-to-be successes.
Then Iran ignored five deadlines. Syria thought our
red lines were pinkish. Russia dubbed reset a cruel joke, as Putin played with
Obama as a spider does a fly. China was bewildered about whether their good
fortune in having Obama as president had to be some sort of American preplanned
trick.
Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, North Korea? The more we
reached out, the more these corrupt nations thought us weak and guilty rather
than formidable and proud. Turkey was no more a new nexus of American interests
in the Muslim world than had been Pakistan. The best way to create a nuclear
tinderbox in the Pacific was to assure Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the
Philippines that we already had too many deployable nukes. The more Obama
talked about the new American morality, the more our allies were puzzled that
such abdication of responsibility seemed to them immoral.
So Nemesis proved even busier, as Obama’s polls
dived abroad, as he expanded or embraced the very protocols he had once
derided, as he saw his own reset reset
by others.
Nemesis Is Also Busy Elsewhere
John Kerry in 2004 railed about the need for high
taxes to prevent the rich and greedy from having too large a slice of the pie.
Nemesis struck a bit then, too. We learned that the multi-billionaire,
redistributionist Kerry was not much of a redistributionist himself — not when
he docked his multimillion-dollar new yacht off Rhode Island to avoid paying
the high sales and excise taxes on yachts that his beloved high-tax
Massachusetts levied.
Now when the Arab world from Syria to Egypt is going
up in flames, Kerry either is irrelevantly hectoring Israel or back
on his infamous yacht, as a coup takes out the Muslim
Brotherhood government in Cairo. The secretary of State serially jets to
Israel, the one stable oasis that is not the problem of unrest, while at home
his sailing reinforces the image of privilege, tax avoidance, and escapism.
If a right-wing critic lambasted Kerry as a
hypocritical naïf about the Middle East, more interested in yachting than the
dirty work of dealing with an explosive crisis in Egypt, he could level no
better cheap shot than what Kerry has leveled at himself. Nemesis so often
allows the hubristic to craft a divine punishment all their own. Ask liberal
and green Al Gore. The former vice president somehow, in vain hopes of avoiding
new higher capital gains taxes that he supports, managed to rush the sale of
his failed left-wing cable channel to an anti-Semitic news agency, which is
funded by a zillionaire authoritarian sheikdom that was enriched by trafficking
in planet-heating fossil fuels (which he opposes). Only Nemesis could pull
off those
myriad hypocrisies.
That Was Then, But This Is Now
When a newly inaugurated president stays fixated on
his predecessor, trashing him for endangering civil liberties, for waging a
hyped-up war on terror, for bogging us down in a no-win bad war in Iraq while
neglecting the good war in Afghanistan, he should beware of Nemesis. Again, if
in 2009 a reactionary critic had written that Obama was an abject hypocrite who
would keep Guantanamo open, expand renditions and tribunals, protect
preventative detention, keep the Patriot Act intact, up the drone
assassinations by a factor of ten, and lose the inherited peace in Iraq while
suffering more casualties in Afghanistan in four years than Bush had in seven,
he would have been considered a cheap partisan hack. All that, however, Obama
did to himself, as he became the anti-Obama no opponent could.
Do we remember when Obama soared about an end to
lobbyists in government, the cessation of the revolving door, or the new
transparency?
Imagine if a skeptic in 2009 had rejoined: “No, your
IRS will ruin its reputation by crude efforts to punish enemies and ensure you
reelection. No, your State Department will lie about four American deaths to
ensure that a silly fiction about a video preserves the re-election myth of
al-Qaeda on the run and Libya on the mend. No, your NSA will be exposed as a
vast spying octopus, as the most delicate national security secrets are
revealed abroad, and by a two-bit, high-school dropout hacker who earned six
figures as he outsmarted the NSA’s best and brightest. No, your own Justice
Department will monitor the private communications of the Associated Press, as
your attorney general lies about such surveillance in the manner that your
director of national intelligence lies while under oath about the activities of
the NSA.” Barack Obama, not Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, engineered all that.
Leopards and Spots
If five years ago some pundit or some politico had
predicted that Chicago conmen do not change when they come to Washington, that
ends-justifying-the-means radicals never become across-the-aisle moderates,
surely we would have dubbed him unhinged, delusional, a racist, and a hater.
Yet Obama’s own hubris accomplished all that and more — in a way that his most
vehement critics could never have imagined.
So there is a Nemesis, after all.
Omnipotent and omniscient, she watches all of us to
ensure that we do not fancy ourselves gods rather than mere humans who are no
better and no worse than those around us.
Keep humble and avoid Nemesis.
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