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Twenty Years Too Early, Ten Years Too Late and the Relic From Rome
BELMONT CLUB"I still say Kayla should be here, and if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been," Marsha Mueller said, referring to the death of her daughter at the hands of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. "After Kayla's death, the Muellers became outspoken critics of the American government's handling of its foreign hostages. They had been encouraged to keep her captivity secret, and discouraged from attempting to free her or pay a ransom." Leaving aside the question of whether Obama ever had a good tactical option at rescuing Kayla Mueller, "decisive" is probably the wrong word to characterize the former president's style. Obama knew what he wanted and valued signaling and appearances in a sincere way. He was always signaling. ...Obama was not indecisive. He simply decided on a different course and held to it. The only problem is it led nowhere. Ironically it was Maureen Dowd in the NYT who most clearly understood this. "Obama ‐ Just Too Good for Us." "'Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,' Obama mused to aides." Persuasion was his sole and sometimes insufficient weapon. Dowd saw Hillary's nomination as the machine politics backlash against the ineffectual idealism of Obama. ...Alas for Hillary the candidate, if Obama came 20 years too early she came 10 years too late. By contrast, Trump's reaction to Mueller's murder was far more Roman and atavistic. It was frankly tribal. In the video clip below mentally replace Caesar's line upon seeing the head of Pompey, "he was a consul of Rome" with "she was a citizen of the United States" and one gets the sense of what Delta Force conveyed. Not very enlightened, but there it is. I wonder, could McRaven's outburst on 17th been motivated by service jealousy? Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-10-29 |
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