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Obama's empty intellect
Richard Cohen, Washington PostOne of the great masters of liberal conventional wisdom, a card-carrying member of the herd of independent minds (and the guy who cuckolded Peter Jennings), takes a hard look at Obama and sees . . . well, here, let him tell you: It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all. It consists instead of a series of challenges -- of problems that need fixing, not wrongs that need to be righted. As Winston Churchill once said of a certain pudding, Obama's approach to foreign affairs lacks theme. So, it seems, does the man himself. For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much. This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?... Now, while Mr. Cohen may be the perfect example of a standard-issue Mk.1 Mod 0 factory-spec conventional Washington liberal who parrots all the "right" thinking, he's actually on to something here (emphasis added): Fortune has not smiled on Obama's presidency. His one uncontested attribute -- a shimmering intellect -- has become suspect. I wouldn't call it "uncontested," but go on. A world of smart guys has turned against us. Everyone at Goldman Sachs is smart, but they seem to have the amorality mocked by the songwriter Tom Lehrer in his sendup of the celebrated American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi (" 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun"). The oil industry is full of smart people, and so is the mortgage industry. Smart people seem to have brought us nothing but trouble. Smarts without values is dangerous -- threatening, scary, virtually un-American.... Posted by: Mike 2010-06-22 |
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