Still the indispensable nation

Obama on CNN

That’s the Communist News Network, for those of you not in long-term communication with the right wing noise machine.

Anyway, President O is about as clear as can be that he’s not a Little America guy.

He’s a liberal interventionist kind of guy, the kind who quibble with the equally quibbling conservatives about a few tens or hundreds of billions in the intervention budget over a ten year spread, routinely, just for show.

De Gaulle famously said, having been told he was indispensable, that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men.

And history’s dustbin is full of indispensable nations, friends.

The world can and will get along without us, eventually.

It can and would, now, if we walked away.

And wants to.

Only a little less disappointing to the further left – and I must admit I, too, am a bit concerned – the president said the NSA is doing a swell job.

So there will not, evidently, be a lot of reining in of the Bush/Cheney policies that were excessive and absurd everywhere else, and so very likely excessive and absurd in this, too, did we but know.

And he warned of a “definitive” American response to events in Syria and in Egypt, where Islamist democratic forces are currently losing to relatively secularist, pluralist, and anyway anti-Islamist, anti-democratic forces, those of President for Life Assad in Syria and those of the generals in Egypt.

The better outcome for the US and for Israel would be for the anti-democrats to win decisively.

Not to mention for the peoples of Syria and Egypt, whose express political preferences in the matter are divided and, on the Islamist side, stupid, cruel, or both.

The president, perhaps, will join the loonier neocons and the sweet-talking liberal interventionists in agreeing that an anti-Islamist victory would be best in the short run while insisting on taking a longer view, in which, according to them, experience and the cares of actually governing will naturally moderate the democratic Islamists and take the blood-curdling edge off their internal and external views and policies.

Pretty much what fellow traveling liberals used to say about the red regimes they favored.

Heck, people used to say it about Castro, for example; and about Soviet Russia.

As to the chemical weapons thing, the president is playing along with the idiotic liberal morality for which some weapons causing horrific death are verboten while others are, morally, perfectly fine.

And who knows?

Just as he really is a race man, despite his carefully cultivated appearance, he seems really to be a pretty lefty guy, in his heart of hearts.

So maybe his subscription to those taboos is sincere.

But he talked out of the other side of his mouth, too, affirming the primacy, for him, of American interests in the region – What are they? Are we not only spinning our wheels, at best, using power to preserve power? – and the security of our bases there.

On the issue of student debt he deftly pretends to stand in the middle, between spendthrift liberals and niggardly conservatives.

The King above the fray, always looking to what's really best for the country.

But, of course, intervening in education, or in the education market, at all is a liberal thing.

Particularly given the point is to diminish inequality.