How we are going to survive this president?

Andy McCarthy in Politics Is Not a Soap Opera discusses why we can no longer afford to treat politics as entertainment. It was not dangerous to our national well-being to have the scnadals and lies of the Clinton administration treated as the Perils of Pauline.

Clinton’s personal corruption reduced the stature of the presidency and Dick Morris’s miniature populism — the president as champion of, yes, school uniforms for third-graders — reduced its gravity. The president trundled along from scandal to scandal, all unsavory but none consequential enough to threaten American security or prosperity. As he did, the media marveled not at how dissolute Clinton was but at how fabulous he was at lying about it. In previous times, gross fraud was a disqualifier for offices of public trust. Now, fraud and the dexterity to carry it off in the light of day — to look the press itself in the eye and lie with indignation — became admirable political attributes. The story was never the sordid facts of the scandal du jour; the scandal was merely a barometer for measuring Clinton’s survival skills.

 Thanks to Obama's fecklessness, we are living in a more dangerous world.

While our nation appears to atrophy before our eyes, Obama is enabling the nuclearization of Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism. As National Review’s editors detail, China senses Obama’s indifference and moves aggressively, hegemonically, in the Pacific. Putin is reeling in Ukraine and muscling his way into Egypt, having taken Obama’s measure and found no obstacles to his Soviet-reconstruction project. The president’s delirious base may convince themselves, assuming they follow these developments at all, that America must be at fault or that it’s nothing a few “Coexist” bumper stickers can’t address. But our enemies do not wish to coexist, and they are on the march.

In an increasingly perilous world, politics has to be our response, not our entertainment. Today’s events are not episodes. They are threats, foreign and domestic; and they are no longer on the horizon — they are clear and present dangers. Politics is how we perceive our national interests and take effective action, not how the president manages to weather storms of his own making.

 

The media are responsible for the Soap Opera version of politics because they approve of Clinton and Obama.  Should another Republican take office, he'll get the Sarah Palin treatment.