Obama’s legacy: government-induced chaos at home, moral equivalence abroad.

Victor Davis Hanson writes today:

The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.

Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to the old IRS, GSA, VA, Secret Service, NSA, NASA, EPA, or Justice Department? All seem now mere appendages to a larger agenda of fundamentally transforming America.

We are mired in the slowest recovery in modern times, alleviated only by recently falling oil prices, which came despite, not because of, the president’s efforts. Fiscal sobriety is now redefined as a $600 billion annual deficit rather than the usual $1 trillion, again brought about by efforts other than Obama’s own. Yet the president has an unfortunate habit of taking credit for the good that he opposed and fobbing off on others responsibility for the bad that he embraced. There is interest in watching Obama’s press conferences, but mostly in appreciating how ingeniously he serially blames others for his own blunders.

I more or less divide the world into two camps: those who transcend their group identity, and those who cling to it as a redoubt. I do not feel any more intrinsic empathy with a Swedish-American in Minnesota by virtue of a shared ethnic heritage than I do with my Mexican-American neighbors and childhood friends. So why grant any such exemption to others, especially at this late date in the American experiment? This last election was about a cohort of new-generation women and minorities who won office without much reference to their tribe or gender, versus ossified activists who tried to gin up various pseudo-wars on women and minorities to disguise their own absence of an idea. The latter lost badly. When the U.S. is in extremis, the last thing we need is more silly talk about high cheekbones, a “wise Latina,” or “my people” from our elites, who project their own careerist strategies upon a fragile body politic. Racial ecumenism versus racial separatism should not be a hard call. So the next time a public figure starts droning on about “my people” or blaming his own inadequacies on race, gender, or tribe, we need to tune him out and turn the channel. That Al Sharpton went from a buffoon to a presidential adviser is a mirror of the age.

Benjamin Netanyahu may be many things but he is certainly neither a coward nor a chickens**t. Such smears are the final sad epitaphs to this administration’s failed relations with the Jewish state. It takes neither a genius nor a moralist to distinguish a liberal state that phones to warn apartment dwellers about the targeted areas of its attack, and the terrorist clique that shoots its own who try to follow such warnings and save themselves. Only a moral adolescent could fail to distinguish a tiny beleaguered democratic atoll from the surrounding violent seas of tribalism, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, economic Neanderthalism, autocracy, and terrorism. It is not difficult to appreciate that the liberal society in question has led the way to global breakthroughs in everything from neurosurgery to drip irrigation, while the illiberal model surrounding it leads only in discovering ingenious variations on how to blow civilians up. Hating Israel, saying it is morally no better than its enemies, and damning its democracy as demonic proves also a good guide to what is insane in the present age.

These are just excerpts from VDH's latest brilliant piece. Please go here to read every paragraph.