By
Thomas Sowell
People are arguing about what the United States got out of the deal that swapped five top level terrorist leaders for one American soldier who was, at best, absent from his post in a war zone. Soldiers who served in the same unit with him call him a deserter. The key to this deal, however, is less likely to be what the United States got out of the deal than it is about what Barack Obama got out of the deal. If nothing else, it instantly got the veterans' hospitals scandals off the front pages of newspapers and pushed these scandals aside on television news programs.
It was a clear winner for Barack Obama. And that may be all that matters to Barack Obama.
People who are questioning the president's
competence seem not to want to believe that any President of the United
States would knowingly damage this country's interests.
One of the problems of many fundamentally decent
people is that they find it hard to understand people who are not
fundamentally decent, or whose moral compass points in a different
direction from theirs.
Many people who are painfully disappointed with
President Obama have no real reason to be. The man's whole previous
history, from childhood on, was shaped by a whole series of people,
beginning with his mother, whose vision of America was very much like
that of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose church Barack Obama belonged
to for 20 long years.
Obama is not a stupid man. There is no way that he
could have sat in that church all that time without knowing how Jeremiah
Wright hated America, and how his vision of the world was one in which
"white folks' greed runs a world in need."
Even if the Reverend Wright had been the only such
person in Barack Obama's life — and he was not — it should have been
enough to keep him out of the White House.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a good rule in a
court of law, which has the power to deprive a defendant of liberty or
life. But it is mindless and dangerous nonsense to apply that standard
outside that context — especially when choosing a President of the
United States, who holds in his hands the liberty and lives of millions
of Americans.
People who are disappointed with Barack Obama have
no right to be. It is they whom others have a right to be disappointed
with. Instead of taking their role as citizens seriously, they chose to
vote on the basis of racial symbolism, glib rhetoric and wishful
thinking.
Moreover, many are already talking about choosing
the next President of the United States on the basis of demographic
symbolism — to have "the first woman president." And if she is elected
on that basis, will any criticism of what she does in the White House be
denounced as based on anti-woman bias, as criticisms of President Obama
have been repeatedly denounced as racism?
And what if we have the first Hispanic president or
the first Jewish president? Will any criticism of their actions in the
White House be silenced by accusations of prejudice?
We may yet become the first nation to die from a terminal case of
frivolity. Other great nations in history have been threatened by
barbarians at the gates. We may be the first to be threatened by
self-indulgent silliness inside the gates.
As for Barack Obama, you cannot judge any
President's competence by the results of his policies, without first
knowing what he was trying to achieve.
Many wise and decent people assume automatically
that President Obama was trying to serve the interests of America. From
that standpoint, he has failed abysmally, both at home and abroad. And
that should legitimately call his competence into question.
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