Obama to McCain: Would you have done better?

What would John McCain have done? A few finely honed words from rating agency Standard & Poor’s must surely have condemned President Barack Obama to be a one-term president.

Most commentators on the debt ceiling debate have backed S&P’s stand that the US does not have a credible plan to restore federal fiscal sustainability and the absence of any austerity measures this side of the 2012 election underscores that lack of credibility.

Is President Obama to blame and will he therefore lose the election as a result? Wall Street certainly thinks so.

Citigroup’s analysis says the downgrade should have occurred in 2009 but the ratings agencies were too gun-shy after taking the cop for the global financial crisis.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens is more acerbic, posing the question: Is Obama smart?

In one of the hardest criticisms I’ve read yet from a normally fair-minded critic, Stephen likens Obama to Forrest Gump’s quip, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Stephens goes on to tally Obama’s shortage of political skills:

He makes predictions that prove false. He makes promises he cannot honour. He raises expectations he cannot meet. He reneges on commitments made in private. He surrenders positions staked in public. He is absent from issues in which he has a duty to be involved. He is overbearing when he ought to be absent.

This is a sad conclusion about a man on whom so many pinned their hopes for change. It still leaves the question, What would McCain have done?

Mid-summer mayhem
Yobbos, rioters, looters or whatever you call them (the BBC prefers protesters), aren’t they all just alienated youth looking for a share of their country’s pie – only held back by a lack of opportunities to meet their cultural and social needs?

That these seem to comprise mainly iPads, Adidas hoodies (why not rugby ones?) and Pioneer home cinema kits is surely just a simple case of deprivational dysfunction?

Yeah, right!

At the least this outbreak of mid-summer mayhem in the UK has provided a diversion from seesawing world sharemarkets at a time when most traders in the northern hemisphere should be on holiday and this side of the world has more pressing problems to tackle, such as the Rugby World Cup.

The commentators were out in force, pointing out what was terrifying,

…where the police were absent, was the seemingly limitless nature of what the rioters would do. It had gone far beyond a barney with the coppers and the looting, in particular, it went past all previous bounds; the rioters would loot everything, everywhere; they would attack and rob anyone they came across; they began to break into private houses.
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That was Michael McCarthy lamenting in The Independent the breakdown of a “culture-bound society…governed largely by informal constraints on our behaviour.”

The planet of the beasts
Historian and Daily Mail columnist Max Hastings was much more specific in his description of this new sub-species.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Hastings also knows where to place the blame for the creation of a “grotesquely self-indulgent, non-judgmental culture:”

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.

Hastings’ column will resonate with many in New Zealand where a similar “victim” ethos has created of

a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young people who lack education because they have no will to learn and skills which might make them employable.

They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants. They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

Remembering the Wall
In the world of significant anniversaries, the Berlin Wall ranks among my favourites. As I previously noted in marking the 20th anniversary of its collapse in late 2009,

It was one of those random events in history that in retrospect was a defining moment for a generation brought up only knowing the Cold War.

Before then, I saw the Wall at first hand on several occasions from both sides. I even drove up no exit roads in the German countryside to see how the border barrier worked between the BRD and DDR.

Saturday, August 13, is the 50th anniversary of the start of construction of the Wall and Spiegel Online has a great collection of fascinating before-and-after photographs marking the occasion.

Spiegel also reprints a scathing article published 10 days later, on August 23, 1961, that places the blame on the lukewarm response of the then three Allied commanders in the western sectors of Berlin to previous outrages by the DDR authorities.

Protests by West Berliners ensued and, as Spiegel reported,

Some 12,000 West Berlin police were ordered to use water cannons and rubber truncheons to stop demonstrations that cropped up at Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg Gate and even at the American headquarters in the district of Zehlendorf.

Spiegel also has an interview done earlier this year with historian Klaus Schroeder, who says there was nothing the Western forces could have done. Looking back, he says Berlin wasn't worth a war.