Yesterday, President Obama turned into Chip Diller. Who is Chip Diller? He is the college boy who keeps screaming, “Remain calm! All is well!,” as the town of Faber collapses around him at the end of “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”
With his own administration saying chemical weapons have been used in Syria, a Democratic senator saying ObamaCare has become a “train wreck,” and others worrying that the failure to neutralize the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston massacre indicates a systemic failure in the nation’s homeland defense, Obama spent an hour in a press conference yesterday morning Chip-Dillering America.
He didn’t yell or jump up and down, as Chip Diller did. And our president is unlikely to be trampled by a fleeing mob, as was poor Chip. But the impulse is the same as anyone in a position of authority who tells others to remain calm when maybe calming down isn’t the appropriate response to reality.
Don’t look at everything that’s going wrong everywhere, Obama was saying. Just listen to me and chill.
In his efforts to turn down the heat on him, Obama never fell to the rhetorical low point of George W. Bush praising the “heckuva job” done by federal disaster coordinator Michael Brown as New Orleans was drowning in 2005.
But he came close: “What I can say is, is that based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties; Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”
That was a peculiar thing to say. It may be that the task of stopping the Tsarnaevs beforehand would have required too many leaps of judgment. But even that acknowledgment doesn’t justify saying the FBI and DHS did their jobs properly.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in our anti-terror sights, and was allowed to slip away. At the very least, the system didn’t work in the way the colossal overhaul of our federal government in 2002 — specifically to prevent homeland terror attacks — was supposed to ensure it would work.
In any case, Obama tried to do something very sneaky as he answered the question. He began by praising the “exemplary” performance of law enforcement after the bombing in Boston — a clear intimation that the post-bombing heroics of law enforcement should somehow cast a positive light on the performance of federal agencies beforehand.
Chip Diller may not have been smart enough to figure that one out, but our president is.
On Syria as well, the president blew soothing smoke after his own secretaries of defense and state said chemical weapons have been used there — in violation of the “red line” Obama established long ago.
No, no, that’s not the red line he was talking about for a year. The red line he was talking about will come later, after he studies the issue more.
Why does he need to study the issue more? He doesn’t want to make a mistake: “If we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we can find ourselves in the position where we can’t mobilize the international community to support what we do.”
Some would say that the use of chemical weapons against civilians in a civil war that had already killed 70,000 suggests a degree of, I don’t know, urgency? We’re not talking about stockpiles of chemical weapons that might be used; we’re talking about chemical weapons that have already been used.
“It’s important for us to do this in a prudent way,” the president said. Prudence is indeed a virtue. So if the Obama administration doesn’t actually know what’s going on, why did he allow members of his Cabinet to declare the weapons had been used last week? Why did his White House legislative-affairs director write a letter to Congress stating that chemical weapons had been used?
Why, Chip?
Remain calm! All is well!
On ObamaCare, the president simply asserted that 85 percent of Americans are already seeing the benefits of the legislation — most of which doesn’t even begin to kick in until next year and the year after that.
“This thing’s already happened,” the president said, “and their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. Now they don’t have to worry about anything else.”
Rarely in the annals of the American presidency has anyone ever said anything quite so absurd as this. ObamaCare is an enormously complex and far-reaching piece of legislation; even if it were to end up working well, the transition from to the new system will certainly provoke necessary concerns for everyone.
But you’re not allowed to worry. Full stop. Listen to President Chip Diller! All is well! All is well! All is well!