Can you imagine what the world would be like if the editors
of the Wall Street Journal qualified to become the sorcerer's apprentices? In
the original story, the apprentice was so ill prepared, he messed up everything
he touched and made them worse than when he started working on them. Likewise,
if left in charge of the world, our editors will make the current situation
look like the period when Genghis Khan was in charge of the world.
The editors tell all about it in a piece they wrote under
the title: “Obama's Power Lament” and the subtitle: “The President frets about
the consequences of doing nothing in Syria
and Nigeria .”
They published it on May 12, 2014. When you have looked at it closely, you will
have only one thing to say: Thank God, these characters will not even qualify
to become apprentices to a sorcerer.
If you can imagine a bunch of babies left without
supervision to play in a pool of mud, you can picture the editors of the
Journal as they sat around a table to discuss and then to write this editorial.
Here is the solemn occasion they describe: “Mr. Obama was addressing the USC
Shoah Foundation created to tell the stories of Holocaust survivors.” Here is
Obama's mood as it was: “The President devoted most of his remarks to the duty
to educate so such horrors never happen again.” And here is how the mud
slinging babies interpret the scene, and so describe it: “President Obama … his
most candid moments come when he is talking to his most ardent liberal
supporters. Perhaps he seeks their approval … during a speech to his Hollywood admirers.” No matter what these characters
touch, they see it as political mud, and they sling it in every direction.
The President's remark on which stands the editor's edifice
of mud is this: “I have this remarkable title right now – President of the
United States – and yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls
in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria – when there are
times in which I want to reach out and save those kids – and having to think
through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, 'drop
by drop by drop,' that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so
destructive, that we can tell a different story.” Instead of hearing these
words as being a cry from the heart, they see their delivery as a perfect
occasion to advance their own blood agenda.
To this end, they spin the event to fashion the following
construct: “Mr. Obama referred to two events that are different from the
Holocaust, which ended when U.S.
troops … intervened with military force against the Nazis.” And they milk it
for all they can: “Yet Mr. Obama has spent his Presidency telling that the U.S. needs to
withdraw from military obligations because it often does more harm than good.”
Ignoring this last part of the speech, the editors take up and discuss the
subjects of Syria and Nigeria as if
they were living in a parallel universe.
About Syria ,
they say this: “Mr. Obama has expressly rejected U.S. involvement … that abdication
has had its own moral consequences, including millions of refugees and some
150,000 deaths so far.” The first thing they do here is establish a false
cause-and-effect relationship. The truth is that staying out of the conflict
did not create those refugees or cause those deaths. The second thing they do
is ignore the real possibility that an involvement by the big powers would have
created what has come to be called: “megadeaths.” That is deaths by the
millions, which is a number higher than 150,000.
As to Nigeria ,
they praise what the President's wife has done so far, but go on to say it
won't rescue the girls. This is true but what they do next is ignore all
indications to the effect that Obama is preparing to use what means he has at
his disposal to rescue those girls without causing their deaths in an operation
that can easily be botched. Instead, the too-useless to be apprentices suggest:
“Only the threat of military force will be able to do that.” They want Obama to
telegraph to a bunch of sick young men, he'll be sending a team to play hide
and seek with them … which is what they crave. Are the editors as sick as those
young men out there?
And they close with their version of the Right Wing
Internationale also known as the Neocon Marseillaise: More than anyone on the
planet, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed forces could do something …
Moral sentiments are nice, but they are no substitute for U.S. military
power.