AROUND THE CORNER…. Noting some of the oddities in Jonah Goldberg’s latest column, Kevin Drum observed the other day, “Obama really drives conservatives to the loony bin, doesn’t he?”
It’s an observation with broad applicability, especially when it comes to the team at National Review.
Over the weekend, Victor Davis Hanson did his level best to read President Obama’s mind before concluding, “Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained), and whose estrangement alone offers opportunity for Obama’s sophisticated multicultural insight and singular narcissistic magnanimity.”
Today, Andy McCarthy keeps pushing the envelope, explaining his belief that the president is “steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America’s history,” but willing to yield ideologically “in order to maintain his grip on power.
“It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs [in Iran], so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters. As this position became increasingly untenable politically, and as Democrats became nervous that his silence would become a winning political round for Republicans, he was moved grudgingly to burble a mild censure of the mullah’s ‘unjust’ repression — on the order of describing a maiming as a regrettable ‘assault,’ though enough for the Obamedia to give him cover. But expect him to remain restrained and to continue grossly understating the Iranian regime’s deadly response. That will change only if, unexpectedly, it appears that the freedom-fighters may win, at which point he’ll scoot over to the right side of history and take all conceivable credit.”
I expect some hysteria from The Corner — McCarthy, after all, has expressed concerns about the president’s birth certificate — but the quality of the attacks are getting increasingly delusional. Cornerites can’t bring themselves to refute the fairly obvious argument — intervention in Iran would be counterproductive for everyone except Iran’s ruling regime — so we get this bizarre hybrid of pseudo-psychology, cheap smear, and conspiracy theory.
Jason Zengerle added, “I suppose McCarthy at least deserves some credit for creating a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario for Obama on Iran: If the protestors in Iran succeed in toppling the regime, then their success will have come in spite of Obama’s reticence (and Obama’s subsequent embrace of them will be cravenly cynical, since we know at heart, like the always insightful Hanson, that Obama really prefers the mullahs); and if the resistance fails, it will of course be because Obama didn’t make a big enough speech on their behalf. Either way, guys like McCarthy and Hanson needn’t adjust their myopic world view in the slightest.”
They never do.
Update: Chris Orr adds to the criticism, with an amusing comparison involving magic unicorns and ravenous zombies. I wish I’d thought of that.
