What a week it has been.
In the past week, the IRS, the agency dedicated to holding accountable hundreds of millions of Americans to maintain precise records to defend their economic interactions and responsibility to proffer taxable income, admitted that somehow more then two years of emails sent by Lois Lerner beginning in the critical pre-election year of 2011 were somehow lost when her computer crashed and can not be recovered. In an unrelated event, hundreds of marauding commandos of an islamist terrorist sect, ISIS, a group so violent and uncontrolled Al Qaeda has disavowed supervisory influence, slammed across western Iraq and took control of Mosul Iraq’s second largest city, and a third of Iraq’s sovereign territory, driving tens of thousands of fleeing and deserting Iraq army soldiers before them.
What could the potentially criminal actions of a government agency and a sunni-shia conflict that has been fulminating for hundreds of years possibly have in common? The connecting word? -Catastrophe. The connecting meme? – a Catastrophic Presidency.
Try as one might to seek a reasonable explanation for an individual’s self destructive and wanton behavior, families are often aghast as to their lack of influence with their wayward relations, and helpless in the face of their destructive spiral downward. What to do, when it’s the President of a country, and the destructive behavior will potentially take a whole country down with him.
The coalescence of catastrophe around domestic and foreign policy decisions made by this President are not a surprise to those who have experienced the process in their own families. The usual signs of spiraling self destruction are there. The flaunting of laws and modes of behavior as if norms apply only to other people. The blaming of others for outcomes that were uniquely created by the individual’s own action or inaction. The cloying need for unconditional acceptance for their actions as indicators of their right to act anyway they want to, and be rewarded nevertheless.
The one stabilizing force in Obama’s first administration was at least there were a few adults in the room at times to corral his baser instincts. Now?…not so much. There is no William Gates, General Petraeus, Leon Panetta, or even Raul Emmanuel to at least form an argument on a subject. Surrounded with failed Presidential hopefuls and syncophants, the President is finally the smartest man in the room and that’s apparently not saying much.
There is no one to stop him from claiming there is not “smidgen of evidence” of criminal behavior in an IRS scandal that has not even been investigated and already shows enormous signs of criminal obstruction at the highest levels. There is no sage voice preventing him from again from sending his stooge ‘National Security Advisor’ Susan Rice out to spout completely unsupported tripe regarding his trade of 5 Taliban terrorist critical generals for a disserting private turned sergeant. There is no available wise man present to keep him from trading his personal integrity time and time again for convenient short term political spin.
No conceivable pattern of awareness or understanding is present in decisions to abandon unilaterally hard won victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, allow Russia and China to flaunt America’s helplessness to the countries that have counted on us for support, or secure America’s energy infrastructure on the altar of global warning lunacy. No sequence of logic is present to solve the country’s immigration dilemma of millions of unsupportable illegal residents by the active opening the gates to millions more.
Like a clueless alcoholic on a binge, the pattern of behavior from the IRS to the NSA, Benghazi to Baghdad, Venezuela to Iran, illegal immigration to ignoring illegal behavior in his own agencies, the fawning over enemies and the humiliation of friends, the President has determined to turn a deaf ear to any rational disagreement or warning as to the consequences of his actions.
We are all aghast at the deafness to our concerns, the tin ear to those who would try to prevent further calamitous actions. America, your President is not listening because he cares not what you say or believe in. Its about him.
What a sorry, sorry state of affairs.