RUTHFULLY YOURS

Clint Eastwood’s image of the empty chair in the White House hit home even with the literately conscious magazine The New Yorker whose cover featured Barack Obama’s “empty chair” as the metaphor for the presidential debate.

Movie cowboys are often men of few words and much action. Eastwood knows. Few people are better suited to sum up the essential emptiness and hackneyed hollowness of Barack Obama who cast himself as the sheriff who kills terrorists like Osama Bin Laden when all before him have failed.

The policies of Barack Obama all begin with a lot of words: Recovery Summer, Stimulus, Arab Spring, Re-Start with Russia, Engagement with Iran, ambassador to Syria. But they all end ”not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

That is the phrase of T.S. Eliot whose poem “The Hollow Men” seems to have been written for Obama, although it was composed before Obama was born.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

“Gesture without motion” is President Obama’s trademark in office.

When we think of President Obama’s years in office, we see the big speech in a stadium or a public square to an adoring crowd in Cairo or Prague. Behind the scenes, our dramatic speaker has undercut our friends, Egypt’s Mubarak, and leaders of the Czech Republic and Poland who wanted to help the US anti-missile network.

That is not part of the picture, that is not part of “The View” or “The Late Show with David Letterman,” but it will be part of the historical chronicle.

We will recall the promise of a balanced budget and cut deficits, and the reality of no official budget and incredible deficits. We will remember the pledge of six percent unemployment within two years, and then the delivery of real unemployment to double-digit levels not even being covered by government figures.

We will remember the invitations to the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, support for the Islamist leaders of Turkey, “engaging” Iran and sending an ambassador to Syria that then unleashed one of the greatest slaughters of recent times.

Obama’s idea of policy is to embrace a goal with words, followed by slogans and backed up with clichés, leaving details to others like lawmakers Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid or appointees like Eric Holder, Cass Sunstein, or the powerful but largely unknown Valerie Jarrett.

So it was with the grand health care plan launched in the middle of a recession and financial panic, and so it has been with the grandiloquent ecological ideas which have brought multi-million-dollar boondoggles like Solyndra.

So it was with Obama’s promise to close down Guantanamo Prison and try terrorists in downtown New York City—hollow promises that thankfully could not be fulfilled.

It is the height of hollow hypocrisy for Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretaries Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton to take credit for killing Bin Laden while their administration hounded the CIA agents and army commandos whose actions saved American lives and led to Bin Laden and others.

“Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is Alive,” declares the bumper sticker coined by Vice President Biden. But no bumper sticker can hide the truth.

The fight against Arab-Islamic terror is not over, and the economy is in bad shape. We face greater dangers from terror than at any time since 9-11. There have been more attacks and attempted attacks on the US in the last three years than in the previous eight, though no single attack was a 9-11.

As Eliot wrote:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

As for the economy, the dangers of American insolvency and world economic melt-down are also greater than they were in 2008.

As Eliot wrote:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

So, you can believe Biden, but I will stick with Clint Eastwood and T.S. Eliot.

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