Barack Obama: Turning America Into A Schlimazeltopia

The two Yiddish words, schlemiel and schlimazel, are closely related but have quite different connotations. The best example of the difference that I’ve seen goes as follows: a schlemiel is a klutzy waiter who spills soup on a customer; the schlimazel is the customer on whom the soup is spilled.

But what happens when a president spills soup on the entire country? I’m afraid that we are now staring at the ghastly reality of becoming citizens of a schlimazeltopia, as our schlemiel-in-chief stumbles from one disaster to another, bouncing from gaffe to faux pas to genuine catastrophe, whizzing along a dizzying course of incompetence like the metal sphere colliding with targets and bumpers in a pinball machine.

And this is no ordinary maladroitness; it is ineptitude of Homeric proportions, epic in sweep and far-reaching in consequence. From great matters to small, Obama and his hand-picked team demonstrate the reverse-Midas-touch, turning the treasure of American tradition into so many smelly little cow pies of special-interest pandering and daft leftwing nostrums.

The fact that practically all of this administration’s domestic and foreign initiatives have been driven by purposeful thought and action - and even the possibility that everything is going exactly as planned - does not undermine the charge of gross incompetence, which is directed not at the manifest clumsiness with which the administration and its allies in Congress have executed their plans, but at the sheer imbecility of the worldview that gave rise to those plans in the first place. At least the Marxist revolutionaries of the early 20th century had the excuse that they were trying something brand new. Today’s statists can’t make that claim, since the whole, sordid, tragic record of their ideological predecessors is laid out in plain view for all to see.

Let us look at some of the events of just this past week:

1) After bullying Honduras into a compromise that would permit would-be strong-man (and victim of secret Jew rays), Mel Zelaya, to serve out his term, the Obama administration finally said that the U.S. would recognize the elections scheduled this month whether Zelaya was returned to office or not. The whole Honduran farce was the result of (a) Obama’s attempt to show how badly he wanted to hang with leftist chums like Chavez, Castro and Ortega, and (b) the initial ignorance of, and the ultimate indifference to, the legal justification for the Honduran Supreme Court’s decision to have Zelaya removed from office, which action contrasted sharply with the stereotypical Latin American coup.

2) It didn’t start this week, but Obama’s dithering on Afghanistan continued, with no end in sight. The fact that Joe Biden is even allowed into the room during discussions, let alone designated as a key adviser on the matter, is stupidity on stilts.

3) While the nation tuned in to see the President’s response to the Fort Hood massacre, Obama spent several minutes delivering his prepared remarks to a group of Native-Americans before he condescended to address the murders at the army base. Bad enough, but adding to the sense of cluelessness was his identification of someone in the crowd as a “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner, when, in actuality, the gentleman was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. And while the President plans on retiring to Camp David for the rest of the weekend after addressing the House of Representatives on the health care bill, George and Laura Bush have already made a private trip to visit the victims and their families at Fort Hood.

4) Largely at the instigation of Obama, who wants to make health care reform the crown jewel of his presidency, the House of Representatives passed legislation that will destroy our system of health care, and may well contribute to the collapse of the economy because of its enormous price-tag. It is an insanely Byzantine bill that nobody voting on it has read, cobbled together in secrecy and in defiance of the concept of bipartisanship, and anyone who truly thinks the bill is a good idea has a brainpan stuffed with cloth.

If, as one of Obama’s campaign slogans had it, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, then “we” ought to be ashamed of ourselves for letting this jug-eared snake-oil purveyor hoodwink us. Comparisons with the hapless Jimmy Carter are becoming increasingly pointless as Obama begins to make the Grandee of Georgia Goobery look like a veritable Solomon; the one thing that I do hope they will both wind up having exactly in common is one term.

I’ll give Obama this, though; he is a miracle worker. He has actually caused me to have the occasional kind thought for Bill Clinton.