Recipe for cataclysm

I'm only so keen on "if this were a Republican administration"-type comparisons.  Yes, they can be useful for demonstrating the sycophantic nature of the media with regard to the Most Equal Comrade and his regime, but they can come across like whining unless the matter in question is really substantive.

I think Walter Russell Mead has employed it in a substantive manner in his latest American Interest column:

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be sayingad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

Why, the ever-admirable tribunes of a free and unbiased press would be asking non-stop, didn’t this poor excuse for a President learn from what happened in Iraq?  When you upend an insane and murderous dictator who has crushed his people for decades under an incompetent and quirky regime, you’d better realize that there is no effective state or civil society under the hard shell of dictatorial rule. Remove the dictator and you get chaos and anarchy. Wasn’t this President paying attention during the last ten years?

Some of the criticism would be exaggerated and unfair; the Monday morning quarterbacks never really understand just how complicated and tragic this poor world really is, not to mention how hard it is to make life and death decisions in real time in the center of the non-stop political firestorm that is Washington today. And the MSM attracts more than its share of deeply inexperienced but entitled, self-regarding blowhards who love to pontificate about how stupid all those poor fools who have actual jobs and responsibilities actually are.

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP. So instead, as Libya writhes in agony, reputations and careers move on. The news is so bad, and the President’s foreign policy is collapsing on so many fronts, that it is impossible to keep the story off the front pages. “Smart diplomacy” has become a punch line, and the dream Team Obama had of making Democrats the go-to national security party is as dead as the passenger pigeon.

At this late date, the entropy level on the world stage is still being presented with such banality that people are generally shrugging and getting on with their own daily affairs.  This in itself ought to be alarming.  The world we've all known, particularly on this continent, is changing structurally, definitionally.

From the outset, per its name, this blog has been about pointing out the consequences of letting the Progressive vision gain ascendancy in this country and the West generally.  I title posts "They Smell Weakness" frequently enough that I generally qualify each one as "today's edition."

There's now a real sense among those interested in really observing what's going on that the damage being done to our national identity is deep and getting deeper.  Most people reading this blog are baby-boomers or younger.  What I'm talking about is a degree of damage non of us has ever seen.  This time, it's not as simple as replacing an incompetent Carter with a charismatic and principled Reagan.  For one thing, while conservatism is providing us with charismatic, principled figures, and while the MEC is certainly as incompetent as Carter and then some, none of the conservative figures show the ability to rally the citizenry that widely, and the MEC adds to Carteresque incompetence a radical ideology that has already borne too much rotten fruit.

Brace yourself.  It gets wilder for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: What Mead does for foreign policy, Tom Blumer at PJ Media does for economic policy.