A major debate is under way. Is President O more like James Earl
Carter or William Jefferson Clinton? Matt Labash’s favorite
subject, Roger Stone, makes a picture-perfect case for the former.
Greta V.S.’s most valuable guest, Byron York, captures
O’s resemblance to the latter. Where do the Solomons of Enemy
Central come down? Naturally, on both sides, though in so doing
tipping the advantage to Clinton, our founding father of
triangulation, forever adopting two ways in order to get away
with a third.
So what’s O’s angle? He was for the Mosque before he was
against it by being for it. For once there is more hope here than
chump change. Until recently, the concern was that should our
ruling president’s confreres lose control of the Congress come
November, he won’t have the smarts and dexterity of his nineties
predecessor to triangulate himself out of the electoral disaster
his first two years have wrought. It’s good to know might.
Of course, his idea of triangulation could rely on a model
closer to his heart. Wasn’t it Dr. Marx who made Hegel’s thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis a staple of community organizing?
Nonetheless, triangulation will represent political progress in
O’s case, a great improvement on the strangulation model that has
heretofore monopolized his and our attentions.
It will require him to mend his ways, we can assume. His
revival of busing, for instance, has to end. No, not the outdated
practice of transferring students across district and county
lines in the name of diversity outreach and gun- and drug-free
school zones. In O’s case we mean his alleged practice of
throwing people under buses, causing not only alignment damage,
irregular tire wear, and other problems for the equipment, but
skyrocketing health care and insurance costs for those who’ve
been rolled upon.
So for starters he will have to be much nicer to dear Joe
Biden. No more talk of replacing Joe on the ticket with Hillary.
Who will bail him out next Memorial Day at Arlington cemetery? Or
travel clandestinely on July 4 to Baghdad? Who will emerge as the
voice of relative competence next time everyone else is hiding in
the hills? Who will serve the suds at the next Beer
Summit?
Next, O will have to promise that on his next birthday he
won’t play happy bachelor, hangin’ with LeBron & Co. at the
gym while his first lady is checking out the rain in Spain. The
NBA has supposedly been cleaning up its act. Maybe it’s high five
time he did too.
Finally, he’ll have to take his deep commitment to
principle that the Mosque debate has revealed and spread the
wealth around. Here’s where it’ll really get interesting. Let’s
cut to the chase, as we observe his supple mind at work, albeit
in the third person, but understandably so, given triangulation’s
three-corner offense:
“Obamacare? Who cares? Can’t afford it. If there’s appeal
in repeal, O can be for that too. Obamacare, after all, has
broader connotations. It means O cares for the state of the
economy, for public concerns, for quality and accessibility, for
finding genuine, market-friendly, job-creating, private-option
solutions to problems only worsened by government’s cold and
heavy hand.”
Now that was easy, wasn’t it? As he said at the White House
the other day to those applauding his every word, and maybe to
his all-time favorite NBA player as well, Ramadan
Kareem.
