The Long, Long Labor Day Weekend

By Alan Caruba

It’s going to be a long weekend and I am not referring to Labor Day. Depending on how events unfold, the President may order an attack on Syria in the wake of the use of poison gas. Not one military expert interviewed on Fox News Channel has said that the use of Tomahawk missiles will achieve anything likely to deter the Syrians from using poison gas again and—worse—possibly using it against Israel as an act of defiance.

Or he may not. There has been considerable pushback from Congress, specifically a letter to the President signed by both Republican and Democratic members warning that he must consult with Congress, as the Constitution requires (as well as the War Powers Act) before taking any action. Internationally, Germany’s Angela Markel and Russia’s Vladimir Putin joined together to advise against a U.S. attack. As this is being written, the British are having a debate in Parliament. They and the French may likely conclude an attack is a bad idea.

If Obama decides not to proceed he will confirm what everyone in diplomatic and military circles worldwide already knows. He is a moron. Because only a moron would do nothing for two years while 100,000 Syrians are killed and then have a snit when a few hundred more die by another means.

The secrecy surrounding U.S. policy regarding the Syrian civil war produced the Benghazi scandal in which our ambassador to Libya and three others were killed. Not just killed, but dying for lack of any effort whatever to dispatch any assets to defend or extract them. This week the President awarded a Medal of Honor to Staff Sergeant Ty Carter who displayed the kind of courage no one expects from Obama, the Commander-in-Chief.

The President has participated in a very cautious PBS interview that leaves everyone wondering what he will do. Welcome to the last Labor Day weekend before World War Three breaks out. That could happen because history is filled with such monumental miscalculations. The First World War broke out over the assassination of an Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand.

Other than the moral outrage regarding Assad’s use of poison gas, there is no compelling reason for the U.S. or any other nation to get involved in actual combat in or against Syria. That civil war could drag on for years and, assuming that Assad eventually gets assassinated or retreats to an Alawite stronghold, those who replace him might be just as bad.

What worries me as the Labor Day weekend beckons is that Barack Obama has demonstrated (excuse the mixed metaphor) a genius for bad judgment and bad policies.

Obamacare looms for most Americans, requiring them to purchase health insurance whether they want or need it; fining them if they do not. The Supreme Court deemed it a tax. It is much more than that. It marks an era in which Americans can be compelled to buy anything the government tells them to. It marks an era in which the world’s best health system will be destroyed.

As children return to school, it is worth keeping in mind that the liberal establishment that Obama leads has ruined the nation’s educational system and recently imposed a “common core” program that essentially is one-size-fits-all when any teacher will tell you that children learn at different rates and teaching-to-the-test is an educational straight jacket.

Labor Day will also be a good time to contemplate that Americans are still in the midst of the slowest recovery from a recession in our history, one that is replete with millions out of work, who have given up looking for work, or are barely earning enough to meet their family’s needs. One in five families is signed up for food stamps. Recent college grads are moving back in with the parents and many are burdened with thousands in federal loans to repay. Obama just proposed higher education reforms tied to federal rules for receiving funding. It is a version of Obamacare for the nation’s diverse 4,495 degree-granting institutions.

Rasmussen reports that “Voters think America’s a better place since Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I have a dream” speech 50 years ago this week, but nearly nine-out-of-10 say race relations have gotten worse or remained about the same since the election of the nation’s first black president.” And those suffering the most over the past five years have been African-Americans. They voted twice (96%) for Obama.

After five years in the White House, the national debt is over $17 trillion! The Treasury Department has run out of accounting tricks to keep the national deficit at its current level. When Congress returns, it will plead to raise the borrowing limits so the nation can pay what it owes, plus interest, and borrow more. Under Obama, the nation had its credit rating lowered for the first time in its history.

And this is the President who was given a Nobel Peace Prize before he had demonstrated anything to earn it. Since then he has yielded to Iraq’s demand that our military be removed, plunging that nation into a chaos of daily bombings. In 2011 Obama announced he was putting additional military into Afghanistan and in the next breath he announced we would be leaving in 2014.

So, this Labor Day weekend, we wait to hear what he will do in Syria. You can be pretty sure that whatever he does will make the situation worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2013