Peggy Noonan, in the process of comparing Pope Saint John Paul II to Barack Obama, definitely to the detriment of the latter:
Pollsters always say a politician has to project optimism. I think what they have to project is belief, and when people see it they appreciate it and become more optimistic.
Many people (including myself) do in fact have a bit with trouble with the way Peggy looks at things sometimes, but I think that she’s right, here. And I do not think Barack Obama really believes in anything. Which is depressing: I’d like to believe that somebody as good as Obama is at being a rotten President would at least have an evil plan*. I also wish that he hadn’t picked an absolute buffoon as Vice President; we might have convinced Obama to resign by now if only the alternative wasn’t so soul-cringingly awful.
Via
I nodded throughout this @peggynoonannyc column. She brought her columnist A-game to this one. http://t.co/hYiGHDDQmD
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 3, 2014
Moe Lane
*I know that some of my readers believe that Obama does. I envy them their perversely optimistic worldview.
Oh, I’m fairly sure he has an evil plan. He’s just executed it so far to the limit of his competence.
No, I don’t believe he had a plan it was just the next step up on the ladder for him. Should be funny when he discovers that the next step after the top rung involves along fall. So now we’re just stuck with a clown trying to play a buffoon and failing horribly at the job.
He has no plan. He just has that canonical fantasy leftist world-view he’s been taught since he was a baby, and then people come to him with their own ideas. When those ideas match his world-view (and his ambitions), it becomes his “plan”.
A failure to plan is a plan to fail.
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Choosing to carry out a negligent plan is a moral choice.
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If one is incapable of planning, even if one can’t see any significance in others talking about the act, getting into a position that requires it is still a choice. If one is capable, but got into the position just thinking they can skate along, that is a choice.
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It seems likely in some cases that either he works according to a plan with immoral ends, or fails to have a plan in a way that is immoral.
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I see no signs of foresight good enough to create a single master plan that dictates all of the choices made so far. Not that ‘perfect all encompassing master plans’ are very wise even with better forecasting.
I think, in a twisted way, he does have a plan…but it’s got little to do with the office of the POTUS as it was defined by our founders. It’s more about some small-minded, limited world view. I agree with sicsemperstolidissimum that it’s not a “master plan”. Rather, it’s a limited set of principles that sounded great in college when smoking pot.