Your Dose of Steyn...

Sometimes, you need someone much smarter than I am to tell you things that are painfully obvious, and make it both interesting and fun.

Here's Mark Steyn on:

Harry Reid's Racism.

Barack Obama's "Leadership".

(In-) Security at Newark International Airport.

The three articles deal with different subjects, but taken together they paint a picture that is not flattering of Barack Obama and his Presidency to date.

Reid's stupidity is simply Harry saying out loud what he thinks privately, and which is simply a reflection of Democratic Party politics and Party-elite attitudes. Obama is the Showpiece President; he's the ultimate symbol of all of the Progressive political whizz-bangery wrapped up into one (a hyper-educated black communist, but without all the ghetto talk that makes Whitey uncomfortable); he's a stereotype and a prototype!

He's also just symbolic. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi really run this government, and all the things that Obama now claims credit for (and ultimately take the blame for) have been engineered by the Democrat-controlled Congress, behind closed doors, with the President's only input being his signature on the final document. Barack Obama is irrelevant to the process of government. His democratic allies make him so.

They don't respect him.

The second is about a foreign policy that encourages the enemies of the United States, rather than give them pause. Iran is still building nukes, as one diplomatic deadline after another falls by the wayside, and even though the country is in the midst of a revolution,the President doesn't wish to antagonize the regime. Al' Qaeda is still sending terrorists to American shores hoping to kill us, and the President can't interrupt his vacation to make a statement, and when he does, finally, make one, it's limp, has no fight in it, and sounds as if he just ginned it up in the Men's Room five minutes before. He initially defends a security apparatus that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss Cheese, and is run by boobs who insist that when disaster is averted by an innocent bystander who has to confront a terrorist that the Security people had forewarning of, that the "system worked" --- only to have to about-face three days later when the facts become known.

It is indicative of a lack of hands-on leadership which makes it appear as if the President would rather the whole terrorism thing just blow away and be forgotten.

The third is about a bureaucracy that is rudderless. It spends an awful lot of money to gather and process information, which it them makes no use of. It spends a great deal of money on technology, which then fails because no one turned it on. It inconveniences law-abiding passengers by making them drink breast milk, remove their shoes, and subjects them to "random" searches, and then ails because someone is on a cell phone, or takes an unscheduled pee break without calling for a replacement first. It's all about a vast bureaucracy that gets no instructions from the top, or worse, contradictory instructions, and then finds that inertia and complacency are perhaps the best course of action.

Because Barack Obama and some of the winners he's picked (like Napolitano) can't or won't admit to themselves that there are people out there who want us dead, and who need to be stopped with something other than flowery language and best wishes, then don't be surprised when "model employees" keep their jobs after they've been identified as the person who failed to pass on information about a known terrorist, revoke the visa of a known terrorist or abandon their post, causing a major airport to shut down for six hours.

The Chief's don't take this shit seriously, so why should the Indians?

Update: Professor Hanson agrees..in fact, he predicted it last February...