Mixed Messages

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Dick the Butcher, Henry VI

I was appalled to note that President Obama went out of his way to address the CIA and to assure them they were doing a bang-up job in a hard world, blah, blah, blah. One wonders what sort of change we are dealing with when it is necessary to reassure historically dysfunctional agencies that everything is really OK.

But then it is rather becoming a habit for the Obama administration, despite possessing a considerable mandate for a program of change, however nebulous, to govern as if that mandate did not exist, as if, in fact, the Democrats had lost the election. I don’t want to get into some kind of psychological explanation of all this, but leaving aside the personal experiences of Obama himself, a great many of the men and women who have come to power with him are veterans of the Clinton administration or have had their ideas formed by the experience of the Clinton years. And, of course, that was the case then.

It is good to see that the left and the blogoshere, with the exception of a few lawyers who insist on reducing the debate to the issue of whether Obama is legally compelled to prosecute the torturers or whether he just ought to, has come down, after the obligatory soul-searching, pretty much on the side of virtue. This is a start, a step for us in the right direction.

Speaking of lawyers, it would appear that the President has inched closer to the Shakespearean solution alluded to above by implying he would be amenable to throwing Bush’s lawyers under the bus. It’s a start, and an indication that pressure from the left can have at least a minimal result.

But reading through his remarks both at the CIA and in his later amendatory news conference, one still sees evidence of the kind of delusional thinking that has got us into so many impossible situations as a nation, the idea that we live in a world surrounded by enemies, powerful enemies, and that we are engaged in some sort of dark struggle and that, moreover, the guys who fight it are not thugs but unsung heroes.

Every now and again, as in his discussion of the real threat that Chavez poses to American interests, that is, none, we get a glimmer that somehow this man and his administration have a deeper connection to reality than the average Republican, which, of course, is none, but these flashes of reason need to become a good deal more commonplace before any of us can rest easy.