A Snapshot of Amateur Hour in the White House

Bob Woodward has written another of those snoozerific, fly-on-the-wall tomes in which he paints a picture of events by piling on endless and completely irrevelent detail. I may actually read this one, however,  because it shows how out to lunch, how out of his depth, how totally unsuited to highest office is the Hopeychanger who rose to the top on a smile and a shoeshine. Here, for instance, is the WaPo's account of Obama's wrangle with aides re an Afghanistan exit strategy:

"This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."

Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."

Woodward's book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said: "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."

Dear Americans: is this really the guy you want at the helm--a lightweight who views the war against jihadis in ecological terms; a man who claims to be reluctant to spend a trillion dollars, and then goes ahead and spends that, and then some, on outrageously profligate domestic programs that will beggar the land for the forseeable future; someone who's prepared to "absorb" terrorist attacks based on the inapplicable self-help principle that "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger?"
 
I think Oprah Winfrey would have made a better first black president. She's got a lot more heft all round.

In a sane world (which ours, alas, is not) Obama's callous indifference to the loss of untold numbers of American lives on American soil would occasion a immense outcry--bigger, even, than the one sparked by a shifty president fibbing about a break-in at a Washington hotel.