This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor’s practices. The defense is illuminating, not least for its implicit recognition that George W. Bush has more credibility on fighting terrorists than does the sitting president.
Mr. Obama’s explanation came in an interview with Katie Couric just before the Super Bowl. Ms. Couric asked about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. After listing some of the difficulties, the president offered a startling defense for civilian trials:
“I think that the most important thing for the public to understand,” he told Ms. Couric, “is we’re not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11.” Mr. Obama went on to add that “190 folks”—folks presumably just like the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks—had been tried and convicted in civilian court during Mr. Bush’s tenure.
Leave aside, for just a moment, the substance. Far more arresting is that Mr. Obama now defends himself by invoking a man he has spent the past year blaming for al Qaeda’s growth. You know—all those Niebuhrian speeches about how America had gone “off course,” “shown arrogance and been dismissive,” and “made decisions based on fear rather than foresight,” thus handing al Qaeda a valuable recruiting tool.
And the First Lady has gotten into the act as well, as William A. Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog notes:
Michelle Obama’s interview in which she complains about the treatment of her husband certainly is not a first in political history, but this statement really baffled me (emphasis mine):
“I think my husband has done a phenomenal job staying on course, looking his critics in the eye, coming up with clear solutions against staying the course,” Michelle Obama told Robin Roberts in an exclusive morning television interview on “Good Morning America.” “That’s what leadership is. But people have the right to criticize the president of the United States.”
Maybe the nuance is staying “on” course versus staying “the” course.
Last week, when President Obama made his most recent verbal jab at Las Vegas, I joked on Twitter that Obama needs to decide if he wants to be the president of the entire United States, or simply the mayor of Chicago, who could get away with such an intercity rivalry. And speaking of the Second City, the other day, the Financial Times noted that it is indeed the Chicago-based wing of his administration that’s dragging him down (in addition to the antiquated worldview of “progressivism” itself, of course, and ignoring that ultimately, the buck stops with The Won):
Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?
Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.
In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.
Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.
With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.
“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”
John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.
Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.
“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”
In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.
In those days, I recall my uncle, President Kennedy, standing erect as he rode a toboggan in his top coat, never faltering until he slid into the boxwood at the bottom of the hill. Once, my father, Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, brought a delegation of visiting Eskimos home from the Justice Department for lunch at our house. They spent the afternoon building a great igloo in the deep snow in our backyard. My brothers and sisters played in the structure for several weeks before it began to melt. On weekend afternoons, we commonly joined hundreds of Georgetown residents for ice skating on Washington’s C&O Canal, which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate.
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil and its carbon cronies continue to pour money into think tanks whose purpose is to deceive the American public into believing that global warming is a fantasy.
“Here’s the problem – these ‘snowpocalypses’ that have been going through D.C. and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming,” Ratigan said.
In fact, Ratigan told viewers during the “Busted” segment of his program, that the heavy snowfall totals were evidence of global warming.
“Why is that? The thinking that warmer air temperatures on the earth, a higher air temperature, has a greater capacity to hold moisture at any temperature,” Ratigan said. “And then as winter comes in, that warm air cools full of water, and you get heavier precipitation on a more regular basis. In fact, you could argue these storms are not evidence of a lack of global warming, but are evidence of global warming – thus the 26 inches of snowfall in the DC area and the second giant storm this year.” [Emphasis added]
So let’s recap: not enough snow? Evidence of global warming. Snowpocalypse Now? Evidence of global warming. And remember, we only have have five years, or 50 feet of snow — whichever comes first — to save the planet from it!
If you follow a movie critic on Twitter, chances are you follow him because you admire his ability to critique the many offerings of Hollywood. Unfortunately, if you follow Roger Ebert, you also get endless tirades on greedy corporate fatcats, ”nutjob Teabaggers,” and how dumb Sarah Palin is.
Ebert is, like many liberals, showing his true colors – and they ain’t pretty. His obsession with Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers provides the perfect example. He spent ample time Tweeting about the recent Tea Party Convention, where Sarah Palin was a featured speaker and – gasp – was paid $100,000 for her appearance (which he must now know that she pledged to donate to other candidates and causes).
Ebert makes a number of references to how much Palin was being paid by both the Tea Party Convention and Fox News - a curious fixation considering he built his long and storied career by discussing the work of screenwriters, directors, actors and actresses – many of whom get paid millions of dollars a pop, as do the ”corporate fatcats” at the studios who back these films.
But here, Ebert goes above and beyond the pale, managing to crassly insult both Palin and the Tea Party attendees by saying:
TeaBagger crowd: polite. The nutjobs who were bussed to Town Halls didn’t get their way paid to Sarah’s $100,000 speech
TeaBagger crowd? Is this what passes for informed commentary? Bashing a group of people with whom you disagree politically by labeling their movement with a degrading pornographic term? Just because the crew at MSNBC thinks it’s a hoot doesn’t mean it’s a great idea. I mean, have you seen MSNBC’s ratings lately?
Did Ebert stop to consider how many of those ”teabaggers” might be Ebert fans who follow him on Twitter? I wonder how many of them read his movie reviews for guidance on their entertainment choices. But like so many of the entertainment world elite, if you disagree with him, you’re a dumbkopf who deserves to be insulted, regardless of whether or not you are a consumer of his product.
Still though, while Ebert is definitely a self-admitted man of the left, he is in the language business. So you can certainly understand him putting down that segment of his potential audience which doesn’t comprehend the nuances and subtleties of the English Language to the same masterful degree that he does:
A year ago, Time and Newsweek waxed nostalgic for the days of the Depression, the Civil War, and World War II, as they compared President Elect Barack Obama to FDR and Lincoln. Having inadvertently raised the bar to the former one-term senator’s presidency to absurdly high standards, today, the MSM is longing simply for the Obama of a year ago, the last moment that he could still plausibly claim to be “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
A year ago, Barack Obama’s true believers were euphoric. [Not the least of where those true believers inside the Post's offices --Ed] The huge and jubilant gathering in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 gave way to almost 2 million people on the Mall for the president’s inauguration.
He took office as the most popular incoming president in a generation. A movement had become a mandate of nearly 70 million votes. People hoped the new president would bring change to Washington, the hallmark claim of his historic candidacy.
Now, the mood through much of the nation seems restive, even sour. It is almost jarring to look at the photographs from Grant Park, to study those upturned beaming faces, many streaked with tears. Was that a movement? Or just a moment?
There were echoes of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, but President Obama uttered no words today that will be quoted in a hundred years. He has never been a real stem-winder or a coiner of unforgettable phrases; what he’s always been is a great explainer, who pays the rest of us the highest compliment—the appeal to reason. Today he explained why Americans need to grow up, and the tone and vision of his speech—sober, realistic, clear-minded, undaunted—were absolutely equal to the occasion and the times, down to his requisite scriptural passage: “The time has come to set aside childish things.”
Of course the expiration date on that pledge would come almost immediately afterward via both Rahm and Obama. But still, it was a nice sentiment for the nascent administration, at least during the moment it was being uttered.
It is as always willing to leave its own Big Tent behind at the decisive moment. The continual calls from the Democrat Left for Obama to “grow a spine” are really coded calls to say that the moment is now; that the President must ‘’seize the day, seize the hour.” It’s not as [Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics] imagines, a call to compromise. It’s a call to say that the time for compromise is over. They can drop the mask; they can hoist the Jolly Roger.
I attended this past weekend’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, and I came away feeling that I had seen something important. The Tea Party movement is part of something bigger: America’s Third Great Awakening.
America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.
This time, it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties. They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.
Most of the attention focused on this weekend’s convention seemed to involve the keynote speaker, Sarah Palin. But though Palin wowed the crowd with red-meat attacks on overspending, weak national defense, and broken promises, the key phrase in her speech was this one: “All power is inherent in the people.”
And the biggest action item that she presented the crowd with wasn’t to support Sarah Palin, as most politicians would have asked, but to challenge incumbents in primary races. Primary battles aren’t “civil war,” she said. They’re the kind of competition that produces strength in the end.
This seemed to resonate with what I heard from conference attendees. Over and over again, I heard from Tea Party Activists that they were planning to take over their local Republican (and, sometimes Democratic) party apparatus starting at the precinct level and shake things up.
The first, and much better remembered half of Wolfe’s title refers to the theme of the 1970s: narcissism intermingled with nihilism. That’s essentially what replaced the New Deal-era liberalism after the latter movement burned itself out in rapid succession with the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK, and the disillusionment on the left for the Great Society and South Vietnam and Democratic party elites turned punitive.
The second half of the title of Wolfe’s article referenced the religious revival that was occurring in the American heartland in the 1970s, even as liberal America was becoming increasingly secular. Nearly 40 years later, it seems fairly obvious that the Tea Parties and the growth of America’s religious revivalism are very much intermingled. They stand in sharp contrast to radical environmentalism, what Charles Krauthammer dubbed in 2007 traditional religion’s successor.
Which brings us to the other highly talked about ad during the Super Bowl. While some are questioning the satiric tone of Audi’s “Green Police” ad, Michelle Malkin writes that based on the press releases that Audi issued to accompany the ad, the car manufacturer has learned to stop worrying and love Big Green Brother — for many of the same reasons that big business has historically embraced corporatism in general:
As the saying endlessly, if erroneously attributed to Chesterton goes, “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.”
And it seems safe to say that the Third Great Awakenings — both of them — can coexist well as a counterbalance to such assaults on reason.
Update: Literally five minutes after writing this post, I found via Google News that Jonah Goldberg comments on, as he calls it, “Audi’s Gorewellian Super Bowl ad” in the L.A. Times. Though Jonah himself is writing on the other side of the country — the suburbs of Washington DC — buried under an avalanche of newly-fallen global warming, with another foot on the way, and trapped in “the GFISZ (that’s Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra).”
From inside the GFISZ, Jonah writes:
Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism or PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”
Meanwhile, some conservatives didn’t like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe, the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.
What was Audi’s intent? Presumably, to sell cars.
“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, are men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being slowly eroded.
But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”
To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless upscale white men (all of the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”
The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control, unjustly bullying people and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-borg, you might as well get the best car you can.
Yes, paradoxically, despite its out-of-control battalion of eco-cops, the Audi ad is definitely a much softer sell than Mastercard’s otherwise equally Orwellian effort:
If there is a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few years, we could deal with it more confidently, and respond more effectively, if the president were able to rally a spirit of national unity. George W. Bush was given a chance to do this after Sept. 11 and, despite some initial fumbling, rose well to the occasion, at least for a few months.But if the Republican Party’s most popular aspirant declares that the sitting president doesn’t know we’re at war, isn’t even a commander-in-chief (and crowds roar at this charge with approval), then Obama would have a much harder time repairing a wounded nation.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday the Obama administration had dropped “war on terror” from its lexicon, rhetoric former President George W. Bush used to justify many of his actions.”The [Obama] administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously,” Clinton told reporters…
…if Mr. Obama’s own administration claims we are not in a war and Mr. Kaplan thinks that will make it harder for him to respond after the next time we’re attacked, then why is he attacking Ms Palin instead of the President?
And Kaplan’s piece raises another obvious question: why is Kaplan only now calling for national unity during a time of war, in sharp contradistinction to so many of his articles prior to November of 2008?
The idea of an “objective” mass media was originally born in the 1920s, with the first radio, and a couple of decades later, television networks. The wire services and many big city newspapers soon quickly followed suit. But at some point, the media decided that having the right (in other words, left) ideology was more important than selling product.
Newsweek and Time were both relatively centrist news magazines that recently attempted reboots as supermarket versions of the leftwing Nation and the center-left New Republic political opinion magazines, respectively. So how’s that working out?
Related: Lileks on the dino-media: “Every horrid economic contraction brings a die-off, as bad economics combine with shifting tastes to winnow the herd.” Read the whole Bleat.
In a conversation with Mr. Young, Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized.” We now know that Mr. Edwards’s idea of civilization was much the same as Kennedy’s.
(And Mad Men would have you believe that everyone who engaged in these types of extracurricular activities in the early 1960s was a Republican businessman.)
Flash-forward nearly half a century, and it’s obvious that “civilization,” Ted Kennedy-style, rolls on:
A spokesman says Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine Corps officer who became an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 77.
The London Times reports that “the scientist at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide:”
Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.
Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”
But he and the gang behind Climategate had few qualms about causing them. As Mark Steyn wrote back in late 2009:
Yet perhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest “climate research” at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless. Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:
“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.
And it also seems more than a little disingenuous for Jones to say he has no training in PR, given that the folks at the core of the Climategate scandal have been basically using the legacy media as a de factopress release distribution mechanism.
Though he’s been caught manipulating the truth, I’m glad that Jones didn’t commit an inconvenient felo-de-se. Of course, there are environmentalists even more radical than Jones who wish the rest of us would touch the face of Gaia — sooner, rather than later.
Great moments in newspaper corrections, courtesy of New Hampshire’sNashua Telegraph:
A story on Page 1 of Tuesday’s Telegraph quoted a White House official explaining that a Q-and-A session with dozens of teenagers in Nashua High School North on Monday was “off the record.” However, the explanation about the talk being “off the record” was, it turns out, also “off the record” and should not have been quoted.
Found via Diana Hsieh, who dubs it “Best newspaper correction ever, and adds, “Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a Kafka novel.”
Tim Graham of Newsbusters is giving McNamara plenty of grief, but she may be onto something about the two media figures:
One’s an extremely talented, photogenic, if slightly distant and haughty actress expert at reading whatever dialogue her producers put in front of her.
The other starred in some wonderful movies with Spencer Tracy.
(And of course, McNamara is far from the first journalist to stumble onto the truth about television newsreaders.)
That’s Ann Althouse’s take on how the legacy media covers the former governor and GOP vice presidential nominee. Of course, the same model was applied to President Bush: blithering idiot that up to a third of the Reality-Based Community believe destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
The model of Republican=idiot dates back at least to the 1950s, when President Eisenhower — the man who helped win World War II — was considered an intellectual lightweight by much of the media. Reagan was thought of in much the same way. We’ve just witnessed eight years of similar coverage of President Bush.
On the other hand, in the Obama era, it’s gotten worse. Or as the Christian Science Monitor quotes Andrew Breitbart’s speech yesterday at the Tea Party convention, “Breitbart said reporters put all news involving conservatives into two basic buckets: ‘racism and Watergate.’”
Just ask General Electric employee Rachel Maddow, who reported on the convention as, literally, racists in “white hoods.”
100 people were working at the time and reports indicate that many were hurt and that fatalities are likely.
Ambulances and fire trucks were rushing to the scene, but no other details are available.
Update:
A CNN report indicates that two people have died and dozens more were injured in a gas explosion that was felt around the state. A later report has pushed the potential death toll to 50.
Two prominent journalists appeared on Friday’s Good Morning America and casually admitted that Barack Obama has received glowing coverage from the press. Former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown announced, “No, [Obama] got the best press known to man. Let’s face it.”
Howard Kurtz, host of Reliable Sources on CNN and a Washington Post columnist, corrected, “In the history of civilization.” The liberal Brown quickly agreed, “In the history of civilization, incredible.”
No it isn’t — he’ll get close to the same sort of fawning coverage in 2012 as well. This is what the media does — remember Evan Thomas saying in the fall of 2004 that media bias was worth 15 points to John Kerry and John Edwards? And dubbed the Winter Soldier and his philandering veep nominee “The Sunshine Boys?” They’ll then, immediately after the election, issue mock-apologies, phony mea culpas and worthless hand-wringing, and then go back and act the same way four years later.
At the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama singled out for praise Navy Corpsman Christian Bouchard. Or, as the president called him, “Corpseman Bouchard.” Twice.
Hey, not a big deal. Throughout his life, the commander in chief has had little contact with the military, and less interest. And, when you give as many speeches as this guy does, there’s no time to rehearse or read through: You just gotta fire up the prompter and wing it. But it’s revealing that nobody around him in the so-called smartest administration of all time thought to spell it out phonetically for him when the speech got typed up and loaded into the machine. Which suggests that either his minders don’t know that he doesn’t know that kinda stuff, or they don’t know it, either. To put it in Rumsfeldian terms, they don’t know what they don’t know.
Which is embarrassingly true. Hence, the awful flop speeches, from the Copenhagen Olympics to the Berlin Wall anniversary video to the Martha Coakley rally. The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they’re the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they’re having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of “The West Wing” they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world – as crowd-scene extras in “The Barack Obama Show.” They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them.
Today, we’re honoring what would have been the birthday of an actor and broadcaster who spent many years preparing himself to be president, but as Steyn writes above, we’re stuck in 2010 with a president who’s served briefly in the Senate, only to wind up trapped in his own reality show. Obama isn’t the second coming of Harry Truman — he’s the reincarnation of Truman Burbank. To build on what Steyn writes above, Obama and his staff are living out the trapped, fishbowl existence of Carrey’s titular character in The Truman Show.
