The Mitchell Report

Bibi Netanyahu, Politicaster

 May 29, 2011

 

“People may be honest, though they are doing wrong: that is between their Maker and them. But we, who are suffering by their pernicious conduct, are to destroy them. We are sure that [Burke] acts from interest. We know what his genuine principles were. They who allow their passions to confound the distinctions between right and wrong, are criminal. They may be convinced; but they have not come honestly by their conviction.”

Life of Johnson

James Boswell

 

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

I’ve been searching for a word or term to describe Israel’s 27^th and 32^nd Prime Minister, after observing his Trumpian-stentorian-triumphal tour of Washington DC.

 

Having considered many options, and finding bully, coward, and poseur fitting, although insufficient to the task, yesterday’s e-mail provided a moment of discovery, drawn from the weekly edition of “World Wide Words,” and its “Weird Word” entry for the week -- criticaster.

 

“You may gather it [criticaster] is uncomplimentary. It refers to those who set themselves up as arbiters of taste and literary discernment but whose sensibilities are inadequate to the task.

 

“It was coined in the late seventeenth century by adding the ending -aster to critic. The suffix came directly into English from Latin, where it meant an incomplete resemblance. English adapted it to refer to a person of inferior or inadequate qualities. It turns up in a small number of words, of which poetaster, a person who writes bad poetry, and philosophaster, a shallow or pretentious philosopher, are the least rare.”

 

Aha! Just like Pygmalion’s Professor Henry Higgins, I said: “By Jove, I think we’ve go it.”

 

Binyamin Netanyahu, aka, Bibi, is a politicaster, i. e., a person who practices bad politics, is shallow and pretentious, and has sensibilities that are inadequate to the task.

 

It’s about that simple.

 

But because he is also a poseur of considerable skill, he achieved two important goals for his efforts during this visit:

 

First, popularity at home.

 

According to a poll by Haaretz, Israel’s leading English language newspaper:

 

“It emerged that Netanyahu's trip not only put a brake on the drop in his popularity ratings, but actually reversed the trend.

 

“While in a Haaretz poll five weeks ago Netanyahu seemed to be in hot water with the public, with 38 percent expressing satisfaction with his performance and 53 percent disappointed with it, in yesterday's poll the results were essentially reversed: 51 percent were satisfied, while 36 percent were not.”

 

Second, popular acclaim in Washington.

 

Haaretz columnist, Yoel Marcus:

 

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have read the phone book at the Congress podium and received the same standing ovation. His speech used the advice Moshe Sneh gave to himself . . . on the draft of one of his speeches: ‘weak argument, raise voice.’”

 

That’s the good news for Bibi, the short-term results of his impolitic and injudicious orating, but as columnist Marcus further suggests:

 

“One more victory like that and Israel is done for: A failure of the peace process is not an option. The status quo cannot be maintained. True friends tell each other the truth.”

 

Another commentator, renowned Israeli clinical psychologist Carlo Strenger, who is a blogger at Haaretz, The Guardian, and elsewhere, made this observation:

 

“The clear losers in Netanyahu’s short-sightedness wrapped into grandiose verbal pyrotechnics are the citizens of Israel. Once the dust of the media storm settles down, we will be faced with the stark truth: The specter of Israel’s ever-growing isolation and of increasing international pressure looms large. Once the Palestinians succeed in their bid for statehood, the Netanyahu government will be facing international criticism of its settlement policies unprecedented in force and intensity.”

 

The protagonist in this drama of uncertain length is President Barack Obama, whose reviews for speeches delivered at the State Department and at the AIPAC convention last week range from rabid to supportive – from the scathing criticism of Charles Krauthammer to the tepid rebuke from Congressional Democrats and to the unqualified endorsement of the folks at J Street and elsewhere who heard those speeches via distinctly different antennae.

 

As one insightful TMR reader, a prominent civic leader and respected member of the Jewish community far from the Beltway, put it:

 

“There was an article in the NY Times a few weeks ago describing the responses of Mormons to the new hit Broadway musical, Book of Mormon.  It basically said that conservative Mormons think the play is abominable and liberal Mormons think it’s hilarious.  From what I’ve heard in the last week, this is analogous to Jews’ reactions to the speeches of Obama and Netanyahu.”

 

He went on to say, “After hearing about Obama’s speech, my sister, who is extremely conservative on these issues, said, ‘Obama threw Israel under the bus.  He’s the worst U.S. President in history when it comes to Israel.’”

 

And for those who may have missed the speech, here’s exactly what the President said:

 

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

 

To some that was ‘throwing Israel under the bus,’ and to others it was stating the obvious, the truth as it has been known for years.

 

But to Bibi, the politicaster, these were fighting words.

 

So fight he did – getting them out of their seats up on Capitol Hill 49 times during his speech, and warming up his numbers back home. Right before our eyes, Israel’s most talented orator rose up in righteous indignation rivaling the response to William Jennings Bryan’s stirring “Cross of Gold” speech to the Democratic Party convention 115 years ago.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/

 

And with much the same result – thunderous applause, the audience on its feet and cheering wildly, proud men basking in the warm glow of political adulation, and little of substance to show for it all, save for the recordings that retrieve their ‘fifteen minutes of fame.’

 

The most remarkable thing about Binyamin Netanyahu to this observer is that he has achieved fame simply by being elected and ducking when the going gets tough. He has no accomplishments to his name. He has shown no courage on the paramount issue that besets his people and his country. He is rhetorical warrior in an empty suit of armor.

 

There are legitimate questions to raise about Barack Obama’s speech – its timing, its phrasing, and, of course, its impact. He may well have taken the wrong counsel on any of those factors, and there are serious questions to be addressed about whether there is still a beating heart in the process for solutions in this conflict, or whether a third intifada may be just over the horizon.

 

No geopolitical issue of consequence – and particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict – is so simple that there are those who have it right versus those who get it wrong. That’s why diplomacy and politics are central to the life of a democracy and a republic, and to the sustainability of the global order -- tools designed to be used when the issues are seemingly intractable.

 

Bibi’s decision to take the low road, to play to the crowd sensibility, and to engage in artful sophistry and casuistry may be consistent with his “genuine principles,” but as Boswell’s Life of Johnson reminds us:

 

"They who allow their passions to confound the distinctions between right and wrong, are criminal. They may be convinced; but they have not come honestly by their conviction.”

 

 

 

 

 

Tropes for Dopes

May 10, 2011

 

 

“Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as ‘leading from behind.’”

 

“The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy,” by Ryan Lizza

 The New Yorker, May 2, 2011

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

“Leading from behind” is TMR’s early nominee for the 2011 “Tropes for Dopes” prize, a field crowded with entries during the last few months in which “Arab spring” has competed for above-the-fold space with a patchwork of prosaic rhetoric, some artful, some not, some tropes, some not.

 

For example, there is Donald Trump’s solipsistic response to the release of Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate:

 

"Today I'm very proud of myself, because I've accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish. I want to look at it, but I hope it's true, so that we can get on to much more important matters.

"I am really honored, frankly, to have played such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue."

 

Or Michele Bachman’s declaration at a recent New Hampshire political event:

 

“You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”

 

And, of course, another contender for the prize will be Sarah Palin’s rhetorical question about U. S. involvement in Libya during an otherwise vacuous interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News:

 

“Do we use the term ‘intervention?’ Do we use ‘war? Or ‘squirmish?”

Ah well, on publication eve of The New Yorker magazine article, President Obama addressed the nation near midnight with the stunning news that America had successfully concluded its search for Osama bin Laden in an audacious raid inside his Pakistani citadel.

 

Despite the indisputable frontal disposition of this raid, “leading from behind” may well be one of those ‘sticky phrases,’ as Malcolm Gladwell calls them, that pundits and politicians may find advantageous for future use, so it seems an apt time to offer an alternate perspective.

 

Aside from this misnomer having been an on-the-spot response from an adviser of unreported rank, who is presumably more adept at policy analysis than crafting figures of speech – aka, ‘tropes’ – it is both misleading and thin on substance.

 

One might say, for example, that what this President has understood, better than those who have followed the 26^th President, is the real meaning of:

 

“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

 

It’s increasingly apparent that Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum is central to Barack Obama’s persona and leadership profile than most have understood – an idea that emerges from reading David Remnick’s masterful Obama biography, “The Bridge.”

 

In fact, if one examines the actions and accomplishments during Barack Obama’s 28 months in office, for better or for worse, most have been in frontal in nature, as have the polemics of his critics.

 

Much to the dismay of Obamaphobes and Obamaphiles alike, Barack Obama has neither articulated nor espoused anything that might resemble a “doctrine,” including the faux charge the he is redesigning American foreign and national security policy to a ‘leading from behind’ architecture.

 

Doctrines, like ideologies, are straitjackets. They encumber freedom of thought, expression, and action. They are as legally binding as wedding vows, and even less enforceable than ‘prenups.’

 

And despite official Washington’s long-held belief that a President without a doctrine is a like a CEO without a strategic plan or an NFL coach without a game plan, we have a President whose understanding of recent history and the emerging new global order leads him to eschew formulaic thinking and action, and instead to display a deftness with ambiguity, paradox, and the conundrums that are the hallmark of life in the 21^st century.

 

It has been said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose; however, the lessons of recent years suggest that while we campaign by bumper sticker, we must govern by a higher order of thoughtfulness that will always look to some as dithering or doubt.

 

We must not confuse the velocity of the digital age and the instantaneity of the 24/7 news cycle with the heavier lifting requirements of good governance in an era when fundamental change is all about us.

 

To some that may well seem like “leading from behind,” but it is precisely the kind of leadership this nation would have profited from in the 2002 and 2003 when a distinctly American version of kabuki led the country to a war it need not have fought.

 

TMR is willing to put its substantial capital reserves on the notion that no edition of Bartlett’s Quotations will include an observation from an American president that says:

 

“Gee, if only I’d had a doctrine.”