Obama Foreign Policy- Stuck in the 80's?

Jackson Diehl has a piece in the WaPo noting that Obama’s foreign policy would be a much better fit back in the 80’s.

For help understanding the foreign policy headlines of the past week, let’s return, briefly, to the spring of 1983, when Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University. What were the burning international issues of that time?

He then notes a number of contemporary examples of how this is, and he has an excellent point. But I think there is a better way to describe Obama’s disconnect from the reality-based world, he has never lived in it.

So has nothing changed in the past quarter-century? In fact, almost everything has – especially when it comes to nuclear arms control and Israel’s national objectives. What hasn’t changed, it seems, is Barack Obama – who has led his administration into a foreign policy time warp that is sapping its strength abroad and at home.

Not only has he never lived in the reality-based world, he has never left to welcoming cocoon of University. Barry O is stuck in grad school dude, not just the 80’s. You see he and his buddies used to wear cool-ass hats and stay up all night smoking weed, drinking white wine and solving all of the world’s problems. Their actual problem was they would wake up the next day, hung over like dogs and nobody could remember how their plan to use the hunger pangs of swollen-bellied African kids to create electrical power was supposed to work.

Obama has spent his entire adult life safe in the embrace of an ideology and collection of fellow travelers that is too weak to even bear the name of Socialism. They don’t have the stones to implement anything as harsh and fierce as Socialism, they could call theirs Stonerism. You gather a bunch of know-it-all smarty-pantses, put them in a situation where they are not responsible to actually do anything. And then let them self-reinforce their ridiculously, experience-free musings and treat them as serious. We shouldn’t, and yet Obama runs the country as if it were a meeting of the Big Thinkers on Campus Club to eliminate all forms of harshness on Earth.

You can’t blame these people, they have been led down this garden path by any number of unaccountable official Big Thinkers. Heck Obama himself has never had to actually do anything substantive to ascend to his current state of failing grace. His whole life he has heard that he is the smartest guy in the room and trust me, he believes it. He has been cushioned by the crushing liberal guilt that requires they elevate chosen victim groups above the station they would have naturally earned to atone for past sins. Absent that, Barry O would not be anywhere near the White House. So it should not surprise anyone that naivete and foolishness rule the roost in Obama’s collection of advisers. Their superior intellect and education mean that they can simply pontificate and the Earth will cool and the oceans recede.

Sorry buddy, but in the real world you get graded based on reality and results. There is no E for effort, there is an F for exceptionally foolish effort though.