If they hated us under Bush. . .

... they scorn us under Obama.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. ...

It’s no mystery as to why. President Obama’s approach to international relations is simplistic and misguided. It is premised on the belief that American concessions to our adversaries will beget goodwill and concessions in return; that American self-abasement is justified; that the American decline is inevitable (and in some respects welcome); and that diplomacy and multilateralism are ends rather than means to an end.

So why the freefall of foreign policy, so uncoordinated and directionless that to append the word "policy" to it is seriously to overestimate it? Charles Krauthammer said,

I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

Why is this so? I discussed it back on Oct. 3 with my post, "The Mae West Presidency," in the context of Obama's trip to Copenhagen to pump Chicago as an Olympic venue. Overall, the trip was a perfect storm of the Mae West principle ("It's better to be looked over than overlooked") and the Peter Principle (that, "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.").

At one's level of incompetence, the manager or leader occupies his time with tasks below the level necessary for the office and hopes that staffs can pull success's rabbit out of the hat. (This helps explains why Obama has so many czars.)

There is nothing in Obama's resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is "above my pay grade.") He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and gratifyingly feed the ego.

I have the sinking feeling that we are suffering through a "three envelope" presidency. There's a hackneyed story of a new chief executive who found in his desk three envelopes, marked "Crisis No. 1" and No. 2 and No. 3. When the first crisis hits, the sheet inside the envelope says, "Blame your predecessor." Then the second crisis comes and the envelope's sheet says, "Blame the staff." For the third crisis the envelope's paper says, "Prepare three envelopes."

Obama's predilection for blaming Bush for everything is practically a cliche now - Krauthammer wrote elsewhere that he had 50 envelopes to use to blame Bush, and has opened 49 already. And now, with only 10 months gone in his administration, Obama has opened the second one, blaming the staff.

Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter.

It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. One has to ask, why? The only real answer has to be that Obama is setting up some plausible deniability by firing or forcing the resignation of officials involved with GITMO policy. Once enough of these people are gone, Obama can look wide-eyed to the public and claim that he was badly served by his GITMO advisers and, therefore, it isn’t his fault. ...

[I]t seems pretty obvious that Obama is getting rid of as many people on his GITMO policy team as possible so that he can claim that his failures are not his fault but are the failures of the departing team members.

Candidate Obama claimed that under Bush, America was disliked, feared and not respected. Well, maybe two out of three ain't so bad, for under Obama we're not liked, not respected and not feared, either.

Last word goes to Chris Muir: