Recently, I was reading a liberal web site and enjoying a huge sense of schadenfreude at their outraged sense of betrayal at President Obama. But one of them linked to a compilation of what they thought of as their grievances against the president, and it was remarkably enlightening.
As I read the list, I found myself nodding along. Yup, he really has done all that. And dang, I’m in favor of almost all of all those. (No, not the child soldiers. And I’m still disgusted over his response to the attempted ouster of the would-be tyrant Zelaya, among other things cited here.)
Of course, Obama doesn’t get full credit for those actions. In each and every case, he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the right action. He didn’t choose the right move, he was forced into most of them. And he expressed regret for each.
He’s still a true believer in many of the wrong-headed policies and principles that he’s espoused for years. So he bears watching, very, very carefully.
But it’s nice to know that he’s not completely immune to reality. In fact, he’s striking me more and more as quintessentially American — in that he seems to embody Winston Churchill’s famous observation that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
Or, for another quote from Great Britain (cementing my reputation as an Anglophile), this one allegedly from a British officer’s fitness evaluation: “Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.”
