What excuse do intelligent people have for backing Obama?

Richard Fernandez discussing the no-win situation in Syria that Obama is in swerves on the screw-ups by the so-called smart set.

Even the liberal press, which recently discovered it was being spied upon and manipulated, is now beginning to wake up. Glenn Reynold’s discusses Peggy Noonan’s realization that Barack Obama’s presidency has been both a policy disaster and a threat to civil liberties. He is sympathetic, but one of his own commenters believe Reynold’s isn’t being hard enough on Noonan.

People like you knew and told people (repeatedly) what was coming if Obama won. You didn’t know the exact detail of the abuses of power that would come but you knew they were coming. People like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks and Christopher Buckley, on the other hand, assured us that John McCain was too unpredictable for the Presidency and Sarah Palin not worthy of the Vice-Presidency. Barry, on the other hand, had the look of a president and certainly could be trusted with the levers of power. He went to an Ivy League school, after all.

Noonan looked down her nose at us in the flyover country and tut-tutted to her Beltway friends about how us slope-foreheads didn’t know how to judge politicians like those in the political class knew how to judge them.

Look what you gave us, Peggy-O.

There is a ring of truth to this. The blame for Barack Obama’s accession to power can hardly be blamed on Obama himself. He would of course have spun things his way and fought his own corner. He would naturally want the reins of power. The more serious responsibility lay with the Gatekeepers; with those who should have known better and still gave him a pass to the White House.

The low-information types at least have the excuse of being what they are. But what excuse do the intelligent have?

In the dramatic climax of the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” the eminent jurist Dr. Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster, makes the same point. The Janning character rejects the efforts of his own defense counsel to invoke his eminence by pleading guilty as charged. Turning to his co-accused Janning says words to the effect that ‘I am more culpable than these men because they were idiots. But unlike them I clearly knew right from wrong. I could see through things and my reputation would convince others to think, well if Janning goes along then it is alright. But it was not alright and therefore I am not only guilty as charged but more guilty than any of these my co-accused. I made my life an excrement because I walked with them.’

Reasonable people would like to think that after Obama screws up so royally that the system begins to collapse, his syncopants will fall away.  Unfortunately that is unlikely to happen.  After all, people cried when they heard Stalin was dead.

The worst of it is that altogether too many members of the Gatekeeping class are still of the belief that more of this Obama BS will see things through. It won’t. When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Whatever one can say of Noonan it must be said that though she learned late, she learned.