First, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer said it, and
then Winston Churchill copycatted it. That was the smart quote: “I reserve the
right to be smarter today than I was yesterday.” In both cases, the utterer of
the sentence was responding to criticism that he had changed his mind.
In fact, people change their mind all the time, even great
leaders do. And they admit it because there is nothing wrong in doing so unless
you're brainless and a big mouth, working for the Fox television network, being
paid to spend your time looking for the instances when President Obama changed
his mind. When you find it, you make a big deal about it and call that
“Breaking News.”
But membership in the fraternity and the sorority of the
brainless and the big mouths is not restricted to the people at Fox, its doors
being open to everyone who feels brainless and mouthy simultaneously. And they
come from all over the places because you can see their work in all these
places. One of the members is Jeff Jacoby who writes a column for the Boston
Globe. He wrote one under the title: “Your strategy was wrong, Mr. President”
and had it published on August 27, 2014 in the Globe.
Basically, what Jacoby is doing in the column is hound the
President with the cry: You changed your mind – admit, admit it. You were wrong
– admit it, admit it. Well, the reader might think that only dogs can hound but
in reality even rats do it. They do it in groups, and they would do it to scare
a wise owl because they know that owls love to feast on rats. They swallow them
whole, head first.
To make himself look fit and agile, Jacoby uses a trampoline
to launch himself up in the air where he lets out his anti-Obama cries. Here is
his trampoline: “In a TV interview, John McCain offered President Obama some
sound, if difficult, advice.” And here is the McCain advice: “don't be ashamed
of re-evaluating your view of the role of the United States in the world.”
Look, my dear reader, this is the same John McCain who
spewed a never ending stream of venom because he said that President Obama
changed his mind about bombing Syria .
And this is the same Jeff Jacoby who spilled a never ending stream of ink
writing that Obama should be ashamed because he changed his mind. He made the episode
sound as if McCain had the right to be furious about the whole thing. But given
that new realities are surfacing, will these two gentlemen change their minds
and apologize to Mr. Obama? I bet they will not.
Knowing how forcefully he made his point, Jacoby sums it up
like this: “Obama's foreign policy is in a shambles.” He then follows the
correct literary procedure which says that when you're this forceful at the
start, you must use the rest of the piece to explain your point of view. He
does that in fact, but he does it incorrectly. His problem is that he keeps
falling back on one trampoline or another as if to say: I don't really know
what Obama did wrong, but I know he was wrong because the work he did has
failed to realize my fantasies.
He explains this part of his argument in the following way:
“It is clear now that America 's
disengagement from Iraq
created a vacuum that the vicious jihadists readily filled.” But the jihadists
were created in the first place because there was an American engagement. So
how is it that a re-engagement of America will solve the problem, and
not reinforce it … maybe even create a second jihadist group that will operate
in parallel with the first?
And if the first could not have been predicted, what makes
Jacoby and all those like him believe they can predict with certainty that the
second will not happen?
Also, how can they, in good conscience, ask America and the
rest of the world, to take a chance of this gravity in the hope of realizing a
fantasy that does not seem to be in the cards?
No, these guys do not make sense. Therefore, it is more
logical to stick with the wise owl that is Obama, than to go with the brainless
rats who should be feasted on and swallowed whole by someone – head first.