In political terms, Hurricane
Sandy and the Benghazi-consulate debacle exemplify at home and abroad the
fundamental unseriousness of the United States in the Obama era. In the days
after Sandy hit, Barack Obama was generally agreed to have performed well. He
had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room nodding thoughtfully
to bureaucrats (“John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security
and Counter-terrorism Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice
President; David Agnew, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs”) and tweeted it
to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket
rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get
out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket. He announced that he’d
instructed his officials to answer all calls within 15 minutes because in
America “we leave nobody behind.” By doing all this, the president “shows” he
“cares” — which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave
the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within
seven hours, because presumably he didn't care. So John Brennan, the Counter-terrorism guy, and Tony Blinken, the National Security honcho, briefed
the president on the stiff breeze, but on September 11, 2012, when a little counter-terrorism was called for, nobody bothered calling the Counter-terrorism Security Group, the senior U.S. counter-terrorism bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, FEMA rumbles on,
the “emergency-management agency” that manages emergencies, very expensively,
rather than preventing them. Late on the night Sandy made landfall, I heard on
the local news that my state’s governor had asked the president to declare a
federal emergency in every New Hampshire county so that federal funds could be
“unlocked.” A quarter-million people in the Granite State were out of power. It
was reported that, beyond our borders, 8 million people in a dozen states were
out of power.
But that’s not an “emergency.”
No hurricane hit my county. Indeed, no hurricane hit New Hampshire. No
hurricane hit “17 states,” the number of states supposedly “affected” by Sandy
at its peak. A hurricane hit a few coastal counties of New Jersey, New York and
a couple of other states, and that’s it. Everyone else had slightly
windier-than-usual wind — and yet they were out of power for days. In a county
entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week.
Not because of an “emergency” but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground
electrical-distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any
developed society. A few weeks ago, I chanced to be in Saint Pierre and
Miquelon, a French colony of 6,000 people on a couple of treeless rocks in the
North Atlantic. Every electric line is underground. Indeed, the droll demoiselle who
leads tours of the islands makes a point of amusingly drawing American
visitors’ attention to this local feature.
If you’re saying, “Whoa, that
sounds expensive,” well, our government is more expensive than any government
in history — and we have nothing to show for it. Imagine if Obama’s 2009
stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard.
Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and
no one can point to a single thing it built. “A big storm requires Big
Government,” pronounced the New York Times. But Washington is so
big-hearted with Big Government it spends $188 million an hour that it doesn't have — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Thanksgiving, Christmas,
and Ramadan. And yet, mysteriously, multi-trillion-dollar Big Government
Obama-style can’t do anything except sluice food stamps to the
dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats
that service them, and so-called government “investment” to approved Obama
cronies.
So you can have Big Government
bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government’s ever been, and the
lights still go out in 17 states — because your president spent 6 trillion
bucks and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him
to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned
expression.
Even in those few parts of the
Northeast that can legitimately claim to have been clobbered by Sandy, Big
Government made it worse. Last week, Nanny Bloomberg, Mayor of New York,
rivaled his own personal best for worst mayoral performance since that
snowstorm a couple of years back. This is a man who spends his days micro-managing
the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers
rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their
subway system — just as, in the previous crisis, the municipal titan who can
regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger proved utterly incapable of
regulating any salt onto Sixth Avenue. Imagine if this preening buffoon had
expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid
and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages.
But that’s leadership 21-century-style: When the going gets tough, the tough
ban trans-fats.
Back in Benghazi, the
president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his
beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help — even though he had aircraft and special
forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an
example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy
at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have
the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have
deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of
unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite special forces trained
to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal
bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending
Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany, and every middle-rank military power combined if,
when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of
dozen commandos? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is running training camps in the western
desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the
country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s
biggest “ counter-terrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and
downed trees.
I don’t know whether Mitt
Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe
Biden won’t even try — and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the
certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to
imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no
longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had
a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt,
dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the
response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental
unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is
the choice facing the electorate on Tuesday.
But let him keep the bomber
jacket.
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