After Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, almost everyone who ever knew him lined up to say what a shit he was. Moaned Richard Cohen, “I hate Richard Nixon’s friends. They make me feel sorry for Richard Nixon.”1
Well, Barack Obama is no Richard Nixon, and I don’t hate him, but still. I don’t like feeling sorry for the guy, particularly not when he’s just doubled the number of U.S. “advisors” in Iraq, who are totally not “boots on the ground” but are rather hovering six inches above it. But with all that, along with the Tuesday “drubbing,” I can’t help groaning at the repeated servings of smug CW ladled out by NYT Lit Crit Queen Michiko Kakutani in her review of The Stranger, Chuck Todd’s portrait of the president’s first six years, all to the effect that Obama always gets it wrong.
Throughout her review, Michiko does nothing but nod her head sagely as Todd trots all the old cliches about Obama: Why can’t he schmooze and groove like LBJ and Clinton? Yeah, like the guy who screwed up the country so badly that he didn’t even dare to run for re-election, who divided his party so badly that, after winning seven of nine presidential elections, the Democrats went one for six? Or like the guy who didn’t pass health care reform but did manage to get himself impeached, for only the second time in U.S. history, for, um, banging a twenty-something intern? He’s supposed to be like those political geniuses?
Michiko keeps nodding as Todd repeats a long litany of self-serving “If only the president had listened to me” drivel, which, frankly, I can read in the Times every day. “He [Todd] writes that as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton felt that Mr. Obama’s White House, in Mr. Todd’s words, ‘tended to micromanage American diplomacy to an extent unprecedented in previous administrations,’ adding, ‘It’s one of the undertold stories’ that ‘the Obama national security team sometimes treated Clinton almost as a figurehead, and they certainly drove policy and the agenda.’
If poor Hillary could cast her mind back to heady days when George W. ran free, and the way the Bush White House used, abused, and discarded Colin “Fuck yeah they got weapons of mass destruction” Powell, she might not feel quite so put upon. Michiko follows that up by unloading, with a perfectly straight face, this masterpiece of blame-shifting: “Mr. Todd reports that a prominent, recently retired Democratic senator argues that the Obama White House made a ‘fundamental policy mistake’ in ‘getting involved in Egypt, which led to Libya then Syria,’ and sending mixed messages to the Middle East. Well, if a prominent, nameless (and, I would say, ballless) Democrat said it, it must be true.
As it turns out, Todd’s Barack bashing doesn’t quite go far enough for Michiko, so she tosses in some of her own, free of charge:
“This volume fails to grapple seriously with how the White House’s eagerness to exit that war (and failure to make a concerted effort to persuade the prime minister at the time, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to make a deal regarding United States troops) helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State today.”
In fact, the Obama Administration made a very concerted effort to get the Iraqis to agree to a continued U.S. presence, undoing the agreement made by President Bush, but as then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, scarcely an uncritical admirer of the president, has pointed out, that wasn’t going to happen, because about 80 percent of the Iraqis wanted us gone. A lot of them pretty much hated us, for some reason. In fact, the more we try to do for those people, the more they seem to hate us. Funny!
I almost forgot to bitch about the fact that Michiko and Chuck also blame the president for not getting a deal with the Republicans on immigration. Hello, people! Did you not notice that George Bush couldn’t get a deal with the Republicans on immigration? Doesn’t that tell you something? Like that the Republican base is not going to give anyone a deal on immigration, because the Republican base fucking hates foreigners? Just askin’.
Yeah, it’s kind of fun bitching at someone besides the president these days. I can definitely use the break. But I’ll be back.
-
Forty years ago, Richard Cohen was not a clueless old fart who can’t help wondering why a guy can’t give a cute gal a hug if he thinks she needs one. Back then, he probably was giving cute gals hugs that they neither needed nor appreciated, but he also got off an occasional funny: “Richard Nixon was afraid his friends would talk behind his back. And they did.” ↩︎
