The Natural

The Syria mess takes us all the way back to questions I — and others — were asking years ago. Back in July 2009, I wrote:

Conservatives are presently in danger of adopting the same schizophrenic view of Obama that lefties had of George W. Bush. In one breath they would denounce his stupidity and in the next decry his fascist cunning. Frequently one could hear both these mutually exclusive characterizations issuing from the same mouth. That’s probably why Cheney ultimately became the favorite villain of the left; he was the way to reconcile the irreconcilable. Cheney manipulated the idiot Bush and led the neocon conspiracy behind the scenes.

Now it’s easy to hear the same kind of paradoxical descriptions of Obama. He’s naive, inept, inexperienced, and fumbling. Also, he’s a brilliant political mind who’s working a strategy far beyond what anyone else can even comprehend, which is why he’s so negligent about facts and details that would obsess lesser men. Which is it? It really can’t be both.

This is where my old concept of Serendicity comes in. I wrote about it years ago as a combination of Jung’s concept of synchronicity (i.e., the universe spontaneously posing/answering questions by means of startling events) and the older term for luck combined with inspiration known as serendipity. Serendicity is therefore the universe trying to tell us something combined with what looks to us like strange luck in terms of timing and a consequent opportunity to see something we otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

So here’s the key moment. On Wednesday, September 11th, the Congress will hear the testimony on behalf of the administration’s desire for war authority in Syria by one Donna Rice, the president’s national security adviser.

Holy shit. Take a long moment to think about this. The day of her testimony is the anniversary of the Benghazi attack — 9-fucking-11! — about which she demonstrably lied her ass off on national television to the American people, on five different Sunday news programs. And the White House has chosen her to carry the ball in the Red Zone of the congressional vote. What are the odds regarding the date, the stakes, the forum?

There are only a few ways to think about this.

1) The Obama administration is every bit as arrogant, tone-deaf, and incompetent as its worst critics have argued. If one were looking for a lower credibility advocate for the White House on a national security issue, where would you go to find it? Nowhere. She is, in this instance, The One.

2) The Obama administration is deviously clever to the Nth degree. The president has no desire or intention to attack Assad’s Syria. Seemingly embarrassed and thrust out on a limb by his own off-prompter remarks about a red line, Obama is cunningly getting off the limb and putting the Congress on it. In fact, according to pessimist pundits like Norman Podhoretz, this whole soap opera is simply a Machiavellian stratagem for continuing the destruction of American hegemony in the world he has pursued systematically since his first inauguation. If he’d cared about the Syrian situation, he wouldn’t have backed down at the last possible moment, he wouldn’t have spent a week overseas, he wouldn’t have assigned White House hacks to approach members of congress they didn’t know and who didn’t know them. He wants a no vote, and he wants the humiliation to American standing that will inevitably result.

3) It’s Serendicity. A way of seeing that both 1) and 2) above are simultaneously correct. Which would be useful information, let’s face it. Obama has never tolerated embarrassment. His Mussolini pictures should be proof of that. He can’t tolerate criticism, democratic opposition, or any skepticism whatever about his earth-shaking, world-saving brilliance. He’s never been able to acknowledge even one of his manifold failures as a leader, policy wonk, commander in chief, or man of his word. But sometimes there’s a peculiar genius in the otherwise mediocre or disabled.

Donna Rice testifying before congress on 9/11 is, in this context, a message from the universe. It’s so utterly doltish — and symbolic — as a political tactic that it begs the question of who and what Obama is. He is what in sports is called a Natural. Why perhaps he loves sports so much. But the Natural he is is Useful Idiot. Like all the victims of his economy killing policies who continue to vote for him, he is an ignorant sacrifice to his own stoutest beliefs.

He is destroying the country and will one day be loudly and inveterately blamed for that crime. But he has no idea about that. He has no idea that he’s the ultimate Alinskyite tool. His notion of the presidency has always been a shallow, narcissistic view of the office as a platform for posing as the demigod his sycophants have constantly assured him he is. Not once in five years has he shown the slightest sign that he understands his constitutional responsibilities, the American people he’s sworn to serve, the military he continually refers to as somehow belonging to him, or the pain experienced by hardworking people in an economy he tinkers with like the Supreme Soviet in its endless Five Year Plans.

He’s little more than an actor hired to play a part. But the genius of it is that he has all the right instincts for the part his mentors and sponsors intended him to play. He is indecisive when it serves the Alinskyite purpose. Eloquent, inarticulate, charming, remote, inaccessible, pandering, insincere, contemptuous, negligent, glib, and unprecedentedly imperious by turns, always at times and in ways that seamlessly serve the mission of destroying the United States of America. And he himself doesn’t have a clue that slowly but surely he is laying himself out on the altar of history as a horrendous exemplar of the worst that can be done by a tiny man in a giant office.

The Alinskyite bet is that the damage will be so total even our belated awareness will be to no avail.

They might well be right. Obama is indeed a Natural.

Don’t tell him about this post. He’d only run off to Sweden again.

Why we should be alert to the blushing cheeks of Serendicity that are our only clue about how much fate and the will of the universe might be in conflict.

PS. Oh. Explaining idiot-savant in case you didn’t infer it from the text: a president of the United States who cares more about NCAA basketball brackets than Marine Corpse-men from all the 57 states, especially the Carolina ports on the Gulf of Mexico.