Mirror Mirror on the Wall

 

While Biden-Harris sees itself as “back” in charge, recent Great Power challenges treat them as a fading, decadent relic. At a top-level diplomatic meeting in Alaska, the Chinese envoy said: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength” according to the New York Times.

The disparity is more than one of mere perception that can be fixed by good coverage in the press and social media. Great Power attitudes are not driven by articles in the NYT and the Wapo but by cold-eyed projections of their rival’s capability. America’s foes have extrapolated the Biden-Harris trend of open borders, high taxes, patronage giveaways and unlimited government spending and concluded they can take the ruin that remains. They may be mistaken but that is apparently their judgment.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s wrong with America after all? Is it the lack of virtue as defined by academic departments in progressive universities? Or is it some crippling dysfunction striking at the very root of the political system?

Acquitted

 

“A conviction would have also set the stage for a vote to bar him from serving in public office again.” The outcome leaves the populist forces in the field and the old GOP party in the dust.

Up next: the battle to define conservative politics as Biden faces a new world.

Donald Trump acquitted of incitement of insurrection in second Senate impeachment trial

The US Senate votes to acquit former president Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, with less than two thirds of senators finding him guilty of incitement of insurrection.

Republicans senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania all voted guilty.

The ancien regime needed a Blue Tsunami to effect a restoration. But they achieved a mild and perhaps doubtful electoral surf despite a maximum effort. The impeachment was a second chance at pursuit. Its failure means the populists will be back.

Trump and the Democratic leader’s age means a new cast of characters will be coming on for Season 2. The Blue failure to smash the populists means people are now refiguring the odds. Expect new political startups.

The reason why threats to go after Trump in court are pointless is because the Biden administration, like every incumbent, will soon be on the political defensive. New challenges are going to put Biden between the hard rock of the left and even more obdurate reality.

When Political Fire Means Failure

 Richard Fernandez (Wretchard) pens an interesting essay about the price the Left has paid to take over the country.

The costs of keeping the unwilling onside are even bigger. The American scene is also illuminated by fire of another kind: the incandescent efforts of those who want to return Washington to the 2016 normal over those determined to continue a revolution in the capital. But a political scene lit with the flames of burning personal bridges is less a sign of imminent triumph than with stalemate and retreat....

... the prospects of the liberal project to remake America have declined because an agenda that was once “inevitably” advancing must now be actively imposed on a conscious opposition. The burning of bridges in 2020 means it must now spend enormous amounts of energy for every inch it wants to gain.

The only chance to suppress the populist rebellion cheaply was through something like Crossfire Hurricane. But it failed and now the progressive project is facing what is at best a protracted campaign, a long slow slog that may prove too expensive for even them to mount.

If that enterprise seemed formerly viable it was because it could command enough assent through the application of nudges and prestige to make way. But those powers to persuade have been expended in the bitter acrimony. The prestige well is dry and friction has gone way up. 

The Left owns the press and social media, a combination that lulled a soothed the American public to accept the inevitability of the transformation of America to socialism.  That's where Obama's inevitable "arc of history" was supposed to lead.  

 But the excesses of the last 4 years have so damaged their power to define a reality that today roughly half of the American people don't believe anything they read.  They now know they have been lied to and have their opinions suppressed by power brokers and technology oligarchs who were grasping for total power.  

The Antifa/BLM  riots in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and dozens of places throughout the country were naked attempts to intimidate.  People stocking up on guns and ammunition in record numbers are but one reaction to this physical threat.  

It is possible for a minority to rule a passive majority.  It remains to be seen whether the majority has a core of rebels who will make it prohibitively expensive for the Left to cow the country to its will.  

The experiment in freedom for the individual continues.  

Press Oracles Hope to Resurrect the Cronkite Age, When They Controlled the News

 Richard Fernandez (wretchard)

From this perspective, McCarthy's Ball of Collusion can also serve as the story of an attempt to restore the oracular nature of journalistic information to a level comparable to the Cronkite era. By creating a story dependent on leaked intelligence reports, hearings inside secure rooms, or sealed documents, the press appeared to have found a formula that could once again let them say "and that's the way it was." They would once again have an information monopoly and the world would revert back from the information firehose to the proper classified straw. And their inside knowledge, which they were confident would be borne out by the Mueller report, would show that Russia conspired with Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.

While Elites Gnaw on Stale Agendas, the Future Is Full of Things We've Yet to Imagine

Today the political elites are in a crisis resulting from an expected future that didn't happen. The End of History didn't pan out; Russia and China failed to join the liberal democratic club; the EU fell apart. The global world failed to last. But Brexit and the defeat of Hillary did not spur them to listen; instead, it inspired frantic efforts to reimpose absolute control via Chinese 5G, facial recognition, Google surveillance, G7 pacts against hate speech, and the NYT witch hunt against white supremacy.

Is it any wonder they are failing? That depression is rising among youngsters and social tensions are increasing? Not only are they jamming themselves, they are suppressing the small still voice that whispers in the heart of undiscovered genius. As the political elites gnaw at the ends of their stale agendas it is hard to remember that the future is still full of hope, danger, love, opportunity and things yet undreamed of. Will we send ourselves an interocitor? Maybe. But if we're not free to listen for the signal then the world will most certainly be stuck with a politically correct and strictly rationed turboencabulator.

Richard Fernandez; read the whole thing.

Without a Stable Moral Currency, There Is Terror Without Trust

Richard Fernandez

The crisis of confidence in Western institutions can be described as a crisis of morality. The public has discovered that many public figures are shams. The #MeToo sex scandals, the accusations of collaborating with foreign powers, and most recently the Epstein case have undermined the reputation of our social betters. They are perceived are no better than the common clay and probably a good deal worse. This has undermined the trust that formerly allowed them to exercise authority over the public.

Once the realization hits that the Ruling Class is not only worse than the Country Class - but incredibly incompetent - you have a truly revolutionary situation.

What changed was the realization that without morality there is no trust and without trust, nothing works. Unchecked, this will result in a low-trust society where nobody can rely on the formal rules and reliance is placed on nepotism, tribalism, personal loyalty, and threats to transact business at all...

The instability of moral currency [outside of Christianity] combined with the immutable record-keeping of blockchain systems creates the worst of all possible environments: one in which people are irrefutably responsible for acts that may become retroactively reprehensible. Today's hero can easily be tomorrow's racist. You live in fear. Just as money is the measuring stick of economic values a stable morality is the necessary metric of political and social action. Without it, you can have terror but not trust.

A MUST READ.

If Globalization Meant China Could Turn off Your Fridge, Would You Still Like It?

Is it really a good idea to be dependent on people that dislike you and wish you ill?

The Chinese state could cut off cars and household appliances from Britain's 5G network if the country's telecoms giant is allowed to help build the system, according to a former government security adviser.

Peter Varnish, who was a senior Ministry of Defence official, suggested a decision by Theresa May to allow Huawei to help build even limited parts of the network such as antennas and other “non-core” infrastructure, could allow Beijing to "shut down" signals to vehicles and everyday objects.

In a report due to be published this week, Dr Varnish warns that a manufacturer could "interfere" with antenna designs and even block or divert signals away from individual devices.

Read the whole thing.

Washington Is Crawling with Foreign Influencers

Washington has become the capital of the world and the world is buying influence there.

Foreign entities seek entry at all levels. A 2016 New York Times article described how "as chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti ... despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. ... During Ms. Mills’s tenure at the department, Mr. Kim’s company, Sae-A, became a donor to the Clinton Foundation."

The real takeaway of the Mueller investigation is that Washington is honeycombed with foreign influencers not just in the Trump campaign or Hillary's, but pretty much everywhere. The Free Beacon points out, "China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management" with the end in view of subverting them.


This is conceivably the biggest headline that never was; quite a feat in a period when intelligence disasters included Snowden, WikiLeaks-Manning, the roll-up of the CIA network in China, missing the rise of ISIS and the burning of the U.S. diplomatic stations in Benghazi. When you combine the litany of disasters with what we now know about lobbying for foreign governments in Washington, it’s probable that collusion has been out of control for some time. It’s a design defect. D.C. was meant to be a national capital not the 'capital of the world' which it has now become. The federal bureaucracy, the press corps and its defensive agencies were designed for more homogenous national age. They seem unable to cope with the corrosion of the global world.

Washington's networks of trust are too weak to guarantee adequate integrity or competence by themselves. Katherine Archuleta, the director of OPM, may never have been up to the job. She "previously served as National Political Director for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration as chief of staff to the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Peña." None of this prepared her for Chinese hacking. Obama spokesman Josh Earnest noted she did not have the "particular expertise" for the position to which she had been appointed.

Before Washington became the political capital of the world, the political parties and the newspapers provided adequate levels of safety, issuance, and correctness. Now it needs an upgrade. The upheaval of 2016 and the inquiries into the origins of the failed collusion investigation show that while the political system can still resolve conflicts it can only do so at the cost of a crisis. Washington has to find ways of transparently logging foreign influence, securing data, and using better methods of verifying that political promises are kept. The politicians and media men can't do it any more without some system help.

New Zealand Attack Shows Us That Tribal Score-Settling Has Infected the West

The attack on the mosques, like Anders Breivik's murderous rampage in idyllic Norway, happened in New Zealand, ironically rated in 2017 the safest country in the world after Iceland. It's a sad reminder that no place is exempt from ethnic conflict. Et in Arcadia ego sum, whether Arcadia is Africa, Burma, or Western China. Wherever populations mix under pressure there's the potential for volatility. As a New York Times article reminded its readers in 2014, the Rwandan massacre had its roots in the population cultpolicies of European governments....

But ethnic conflict in the Third World is a dog-bites-man story. What is new about the New Zealand attack is that the terrible plague of tribal score-settling and grievance mongering is now in the West. Not that the West is a stranger to ethnic conflict: the Holocaust, Generalplan Ost, Holodomor, and Polish and Armenian genocides are bywords in themselves. But it was widely assumed that WW2 had seen these off (until Bosnia) and the risks of multiculturalism and mass immigration could be mitigated by immunosuppressive strategies like political correctness and demographic replacement, of which the EU project is a textbook example.

Yet events since 2016 indicate that this strategy is failing despite the suppressants. Pressure from the root causes — whether European colonialism, Islamic slave trading, 9/11, the War on Terror, multiculturalism, populism — are burning through the medication. The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now. One option is to deliver even higher doses of political correctness and demographic replacement. But perhaps the absolute worst thing politicians can do is respond by collecting guns, imposing hate speech restrictions, and announcing open borders. In the current atmosphere of distrust toward authority, such actions can destroy the only asset a state faced with ethnic conflict has: the public belief that it is above the fray and won't sell anyone out. That quantity can itself run out and therein lies the danger.

What Would a Hybrid Civil War Look Like?

It would look a lot like today.  And we may not even realize it.

If a civil war were actually underway it would take the form of hybrid warfare and look much like what can already be observed today. It would explain why, in an era obsessed with safe spaces and tolerance, there is little of either left;...

Is America already in a state of civil hybrid war from which only one winner can emerge? The problem with Trojan horses and the reason they're so effective is that they remain ambiguous until it's almost too late.

The Border Crisis

On both sides of the Atlantic borders have become a big issue in the guise of the equivalent question of whether a country can restrict the entry of migrants to numbers the electorate regards as sustainable....

So great was elite prestige that fiction was sustained until suddenly it couldn't any longer. The realization, when it came, was brutal. The rapidity with which the status quo of "open borders" has been overtaken by the "populist crisis" suggests that, like the financial crisis of 2008, a bubble has burst. It went broke gradually then all of a sudden. The globalization and multiculturalism that were supposed to have delivered prosperity and security have not paid off. This failure has started a run on political capital of elites which has yet to stop.

Trump and the European populists are picking up political assets at a bargain. Glenn Reynolds observed that "the press has three main kinds of power. One is to motivate the left. Another is to swing the middle. And the third is to demoralize the right. It’s pretty much lost the last of these, and I suspect the second one is fading too." That's tragic for the press.

A status quo that used to be able to buy on the margin has lets its account fall below the minimum level and perhaps for the first time has nothing more it can deposit. The media is shrill in the way a customer whose credit is bad out must shout at the waiter to get service. But it was grand while it lasted, the idea we could live without borders, without defense or even without civilization. Money for nothing and your checks for free. The music played for so long that even now no one can even imagine it could stop. How many will really prefer reality to illusion?

Our All Consuming, Incomprehensible News Cycle

Richard Fernandez

Nassim Taleb observed that "the opposite of education isn't ignorance but miseducation." With miseducation your head is stuffed, but stuffed with nonsense. That is equally true of current events as it is of pedagogy. The dangerous opposite of information isn't the absence of a signal, but disinformation. The victims of miseducation and disinformation are both brimming with knowledge, only of the wrong kind....

Perhaps never in human history has the average man been bombarded with so many stories. Yet paradoxically, never has the public been in greater danger of strategic surprise. If it is caught at unawares, the reason for its blindness won't be lack of bandwidth but in all the things it imagined were important that weren't.

Richard Fernandez: The End of Prestige

To understand the damage the storm of scandal is creating in Hollywood, the media and Washington one must go back nearly a hundred years to a time when prestige ruled the world. Whenever a small group of people rule over multitudes coercion usually becomes an impractical method of subjugation. The only alternative to physical control, as 19th century Europeans found, was bluff, or prestige as it was then called. Prestige made it possible for a few to govern numerous (and often violent) subjects.

Prestige was almost entirely psychological, based on instilling a genuine respect and admiration among the ruled. The technological advantages of Western civilization gave Europeans a head start among the teeming millions but it was never enough. Much also depended on what the British called "putting up a good show". Since empires relied on maintaining prestige, controlling Europeans who had fallen away from the 'image of the Raj as the Raj wanted to be seen' was of paramount importance. Authorities kept a close watch on vagrants or bums who ruined the brand and removed undesirables from the colonies before they could bring "the side" down.

At its best carrying the "White Man's Burden" meant strict quality control, holding Europeans to an almost impossibly high code of honor. That idea forms a large thematic part of the 1935 movie "Lives of a Bengal Lancer". The protagonists (who have manfully endured bamboo slivers pushed under their fingernails by the odious Mohamamed "we have ways to make you talk" Khan) explain how the Code works to the wavering Lieutenant Stone. It meant never showing weakness and being ready to sacrifice oneself at any time for something immeasurably greater than any individual. Torture is nothing they impress upon the young officer ...

European colonization was in some sense the longest running hit play in history. It was a performance that ended only by a humiliating eviction from the theater by the empire of Japan in 1942. When Yamashita brought the curtain down he ended the suspension of disbelief so critical for the thing to work. Though the British eventually returned victorious to Singapore in 1945 the magic was gone. Prestige had fled away. Ten years after "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" the bugles had ceased to blow.

In the unending exposes of financial, moral and sexual turpitude we are witnessing a similar humiliation of a ruling elite. The critical role played by prestige in upholding the current status quo was no less important for the Western elite than it was for the old District Commissioners. Not so very long ago the elites were accepted as woke, part of the mission civilisatrice; better educated, better looking, better dressed, destined to greater things, the smartest people in the room. They could pronounce on matters of morality, politics and even the climate. What a shock it was to find through the Internet and social media it was all a sham; and these gods of Washington and Hollywood and the media were deeply flawed and despicable people.

Given the lack of quality control and penchant for recruiting rather than expelling the scandalous it's amazing in retrospect the prestige lasted so long. All the same, now their fallibility has been exposed under the spotlight of technological innovation, the spell is broken. The elites may still rule but the sullen masses no longer flock to their door as they did of old. Perhaps the single most destabilizing political development since the WW2 has been the destruction of ruling class prestige by the Internet.

Today the audience has turned away disgusted and the actual property of prestige is under threat. In the post-Twitter world it seems difficult to inhabit the haunted palace of celebrity ever again. Not only is it ludicrous to conceive of the places formerly occupied by fallen idols being reoccupied by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon or imagine Breitbart, Red State or PJMedia usurping the sacred precincts once reserved for the NYT or the Washington Post but brute fact is they can't. With every part of the palace including the toilet now covered by CCTV cameras, Internet and social media, no one can be larger than life again.

"if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us"

Richard Fernandez has an amazing essay PRIMAL SCREAM on the witch hunt now seizing parts of the country. I'm Christian and Calvinist enough to understand that all men are sinners. That none of us would want some other things we have done revealed. Yet, somehow it came to be accepted that purity is the basic requirement for government service.

"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help" was the usual warning. But somewhere along the line conventional wisdom discarded this injunction and media began to create the myth that there were special people to rule over us. Celebrities. A cultural elite. Role models. The only adults in the room. The smartest woman in the world. As social media exposes celebrity after celebrity as flawed we are relearning just how fragile that foundation is.

Thus we have the NeverTrumpers at National Review:

... call for Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama race because "there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on standards"

So what is that standard?

... an uncomfortable statistical fact, once widely accepted and prosaically expressed as 'all men are sinners'. Moore may or may not be guilty of sexual indiscretion, but the possibility is not excluded in principle. An earlier generation could probably quote 1 John 1:8 "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" to remind themselves of this. Alternatively they might cite James Madison.

what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Where does a lot of this come from? In part from a post-Christian culture and Marxism that seeks to create the Perfect Man.

Things are completely different when a political movement bases virtue on a particular class of human beings. The danger is particularly acute in Marxism which boldly declares in the Manifesto that "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis". There being no God only institutions raises the stakes for institutions. If the Party, the Vanguard of humanity and the source of virtue is found to have a sinner, or worse yet found to be chock full of sinners, guilt is not merely individual but collective. The whole basis collapses. Unlike God who remains unsullied "out there", the practical effect of vice is to undermine the Party's actual legitimacy.

So this is a new day:

The scandals rocking Hollywood, the political elite and the media are qualitatively different from any scandal that could embroil a conservative because latter was always just a man while the former were special men who stood as judges of all mankind able to nudge or signal virtue as the arc of history bade them do.

Now, so the joke goes, they are all being spliced out of movies by the octogenarian Christopher Plummer because it turns out they are no better than anyone else. Being 'like everybody else' is the ultimate downer for any aspiring ruler. A ruler may be anything except ordinary and it's just the trouble when they aren't.

Shortage of competence

Richard Fernandez

Though it is common to describe the past two years as a "revolt from the right" they have also been times of a very real uprising on the left. From ideologues who have seen their principles betrayed to apparatchiks who feel robbed of their deserts, the revolutionaries are revolting. The image of Donna Brazile finding the DNC coffers empty of everything but pawn tickets captures the shock operatives must feel upon realizing the big payday they counted on isn't going to happen. The activists can't be happy either. Not only isn't the long overdue socialist paradise never going to come, but they must feel like fools for believing the political, entertainment and media celebrities who promised it now they stand revealed as scoundrels.

The "deplorables" have long sensed something was awry, the difference is the elite institutions are now feeling it too.

Yet with the notable exception of the Navy, which realized it had to up its game to survive against both the perils of the sea and the action of the enemy, much of the response to the growing spate of disasters has been to reach reflexively for the fix. The nostrums are depressingly old whether firing the special prosecutor to stop the indictments, pushing Silicon Valley into censoring everyone or feeling sorry that poor Hillary was hacked by mean old Putin. The urge to make it go away, to be the victim in chief rather than commander in chief still reigns supreme.

If that could stop the rot it would make sense; but it won't. The Narrative is dime a dozen. Sense is the one thing in short supply.

After the smash

Richard Fernandez

After several ominous rumbles outside the tower the individual creaks have finally merged into a continuous roar. Brexit, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the crumbling of the Iran deal, America quitting UNESCO, Trump dismantling Obamacare, consular withdrawal from Cuba, the pullout from the Paris accord -- these have piled on so fast they've acquired the character of a single collective event. Now the fall of Hollywood has followed like the inevitable comedic boulder right on Wile E. Coyote's head at the bottom of the gulch. Are we still in Kansas anymore?

It's becoming increasingly hard to believe the world can return to the status quo ante, even if Trump is impeached. It's too far gone. A whole landscape has vanished seemingly overnight going from the post-Cold War to the post-post Cold War; from a post-Modernist culture to post-everything in the blink of an eye. Even the political scene is unrecognizable. The Republican party is in shambles; the Democrats in disarray....

There will be danger -- perhaps immense perils -- associated with this paradigm shift. Yet the danger may have even been greater had the population not risked adapting. For one thing it might have been trapped in the Tower now fallen to dust. What is manifest is the gods have fallen, leaving many institutions rudderless. The Left spent decades replacing traditional myths and social sanctions with their own structures only to see these fall to ruin.

Political shock and awe.

The liberal project wanted the global world. Maybe they didn't understand what came with it.

Richard Fernandez

The liberal project wanted the global world. Maybe they didn't understand what came with it.

The problem may be not with liberal compassion but its eschatology: the Great State at the End of History was their paradise on earth. Progressives built a great state at huge expense and sacrifice, yet now as they approach the Throne in final triumph they are dismayed to see it occupied by Trump! "Tis' witchcraft," said some. "Tis' Russian hacking," said still others. But the words 'any government big enough to give you everything you want [can] take everything you have' never came to mind. Perhaps the real reason for the surprise is our old friend complexity. The liberal project really thought they could control the complex world when it's all you can do to control parts of it.

What globalism forgot is that system complexity doesn't just expand linearly; potential interactions can increase exponentially. As they tore down borders and plugged stuff into whatsis and whosis things not only got more complicated than the Masters anticipated they got more complex than they could imagine.

...

A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and infected computers in dozens of other countries on Friday." Everybody was affected. It didn't matter how you voted.

The incident revealed at least ten NHS trusts still relied on the Windows XP. The instrusion allegedly relied on NSA tools stolen during the Obama administration from a contractor. "According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world's most sophisticated software exploits."

....

They couldn't even manage a park. How could they control the world? Which brings us back to the subject of civilizational collapse and runaway hacking. What makes the pubic think governments which run Windows XP and lose secrets can manage Climate, which is as complex as a human organism? Perhaps we have to relearn humility and restore loose coupling between objects. Otherwise the reactive effects will ripple through "unexpectedly". But of course no one will listen, just as in the Jurassic Park movies. It'll be full speed ahead and 'hold muh beer'.

Passengers don't leave 50,000 ton ocean liners for wooden boats without motivation.

Brexit is a symptom, not the problem.

Within 24 hours of the Brexit victory its disruptive effects made many argue it was a mistake; that it would not be long before a repentant Britain was pushing its face against the cold glass doors of the Euro cafe, wistfully eyeing the delicacies now out of its foolish reach. Yet others have argued in the same breath it would be Europe with its face pressed against the glass, longing the other way round....

Douthat's observation it was a pre-existing crisis in the EU which brought about Brexit must be taken as central. Countries don't usually walk out on a good thing without a reason just as passengers don't leave 50,000 ton ocean liners for wooden boats without motivation.

Cures All Aches and Pains

Richard Fernandez:

The following list was seen on Twitter listing out the most recent terror attacks around the world:

Tuesday - Suicide bomber kills 10 in Instanbul

Wednesday - Suicide bomber kills 15 in Quetta

Thursday - Suicide bombers kill 14 in Jakarta

Missing from this sequence was important context: president Obama's assertion in his State of the Union speech, uttered just before the Jakarta attacks, that the terrorist threat is overblown. He said:

“In today’s world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,” he continued, using the administration’s preferred term for the Islamic State group.

When situated in this context the list of attacks is trivial. If 14 people die in Jakarata -- maybe 7 according to some reports -- so what? These are small potatoes in a planet populated by billions. It's nothing to get excited about.

The defect in the administration's reasoning isn't the assertion that direct terror deaths are still few in absolute number. The problem it is that he hasn't got a clue about how to contain it. Obama's like a doctor who tells you the tumor in your lung is "still small", in fact just a speck. Shouldn't you be reassured? Every patient knows the size of a tumor is not as important as the doctor's admission in the next breath "but I don't know how to cure it."

The reason why the assurances of the president sound hollow despite the comforting "it's still small! it's still tiny!" is because what is important is the delta, the change in the problem over time. You want it to shrink. You want the disease, while small, to stop spreading and and are naturally uncomfortable with a doctor helpless to even slow it. In fact, Dr.Obama can't even name the disease he's looking at beyond remarking that it's "nothing to do with Islam".

His approach is basically to prescribe painkillers and hope the symptoms go away. This approach was one full display when Iran captured 10 US Navy sailors and John Kerry made five calls to the Iranian foreign minister. Agence Press France reports that "US Secretary of State John Kerry told Iran's foreign minister that Tehran's capture and release of 10 US sailors could be turned into a 'good story' for both countries, a US official said Wednesday." It's all about the management of symptoms.

The good story, from Iran's point of view were images of American sailors kneeling with their hands up and a junior officer apologizing to the Islamic Republic. The "good story" from the administration's point of view was that the sailors were released at all, even though it comes on the heels of an unbroken string of provocations by the regime in Tehran, including rocketing a passing US aircraft carrier and testing ballistic missiles.

John Kerry's "good story" doesn't mean Iran will stop it's provocations. On the contrary. It will almost certainly be back, more virulent and more aggressive than ever.

Fred Hiatt, writing in the Washington Post notes that the president has never been known to say anything but 'take an aspirin and quit worrying'. “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama said. It's just a phase. The only problem is that the upbeat message is belied by the cadaverous appearance of a patient in one Dr. Obama's backrooms: Syria, who believe it or not is almost cured.

But in an almost surreal moment Tuesday night, he pointed to Syria as an example of his “smarter approach, a patient and disciplined strategy that uses every element of our national power.”

“That’s our approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and leading international efforts to help that broken society pursue a lasting peace,” the president said.

But if that's the cure it's not a dime's worth different from a terminal disease. Syria too once had nothing to worry about. When asked about the threat posed by Islamic State by David Remnick in January, 2014 Obama said that it was only "a jayvee team". In that former middle-income country many are reduced to eating pets and grass soup to survive. The rest have gone in their millions to Europe.

Most patients would feel a whole lot more confident if the doctor could explain the diagnosis more clearly, which is to say articulate a foreign strategy beyond references to 'learning to hope' and 'not fearing the future'. But that is probably beyond the power of incumbent. If he had any more it would have come out in the last SOTU.

But it's no use having regrets. The past is all water under the bridge. In November the world will get a chance to choose a new doctor, though by then the speck will doubtless be bigger. The best one can hope for is that is not too late.

Why Trump is NOT scaring most people

Richard Fernandez points out the obvious.  The Obama Presidency has broken all the old, unwritten rules that allowed the government to work without invoking the nuclear option: impeachment.   In the old days if a President couldn't get congress to pass a law that he wanted the policy wasn't implemented.  No longer.

Barack Obama has done plenty of damage to the country, but perhaps the worst is his determined destruction of Washington’s guardrails. Mr. Obama wants what he wants. If ObamaCare is problematic, he unilaterally alters the law. If Congress won’t change the immigration system, he refuses to enforce it. If the nation won’t support laws to fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If the Senate won’t confirm his nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway.

Official Washington won't utter the words "impeachment" because Republicans fear being called racists and Democrats - as the party of the Left - is OK with dictatorship as long as it's their dictatorship. Nixon would have survived Watergate if Republicans had had the kind of party-above-country position as Democrats.

The simultaneous proclivity for personalistic leadership in Trump, Hillary and Obama is probably a rational poll driven response to a perceived failure of the rules. Strassel argues that the really worrisome trend is that voters are willing to set aside the rules as long as they get results.

The more outrageous Mr. Trump is, the more his numbers soar. The more Mrs. Clinton promises to cram an agenda down the throats of her “enemies,” the more enthusiastic her base. The more unrestrained the idea, the more press coverage; the more ratings soar, the more unrestrained the idea. The humble candidates—those with big ideas, but with respect for order and honor—are lost to the shouting.

Perhaps the "humble candidates—those with big ideas, but with respect for order and honor" are in the wrong saloon. The order and system that used to make "big ideas" work are temporarily inoperative. The world is in a state of transposition. It is waiting for an event, a man, a technology -- a something -- that can make the road from out of this dead end. That requires a skillset that most Western politicians don't have. Because voters sense that politics is in flux past experience as a professional public servant is deprecated. In a situation where past organizational knowledge is regarded as a liability, a businessman can be as good as an ex-First Lady. Trump may not have what it takes; the danger for many of his rivals is the public know they don't have what it takes.

In the old days I would have preferred Ted Cruz rather than Donald Trump.  Cruz is cerebral  and a great debater.  But today we need a brawler to lead the counter-revolution.  But there's a lot of talent in the Republican line-up to fill all the cabinet posts.