August 6th, 2011
James Taranto does terrible, unspeakable things to Jacob Weisberg. Someone should have stopped this fight:
To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are “intellectual primitives” but that you are stupid: Among the “sobering lessons” that “we” have “learned,” he writes, is “that there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.”
The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal’s by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you’re stupid, he isn’t exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people–for dissenting!–is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.
Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. “The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed,” Weisberg sobs. “A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president.” (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you’ll wake up uneaten.)
This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the “handsome, brilliant, and cool” Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted “serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face.”
But Weisberg’s attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today’s pompous pronouncements about “science” all the more hilarious.)
Weisberg’s latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren’t as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren’t up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.
And then he gets around to taking after Obama. Cue the Super Mario Bros. magic star music.
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