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This, from Ivan Krastev, in the Washington Post:

Obama himself is largely viewed in Russia as the American Mikhail Gorbachev, but Russians are less impressed than other Europeans have been with Obama’s brilliance and rock-star popularity. They remember the Gorbi-mania that conquered the globe at the moment the Soviet Union was about to crumble. Russians are tempted to view Obama’s global reformism and his progressive agenda as an expression of American weakness and not as an expression of America’s regained strength and legitimacy.

They are correct, and some of them (as Krastev’s article also says) also believe that the U.S. is on the verge of disintegration.

If they’re right about that, it will be a lot uglier separation than the Soviet Union’s.

E.J. Dionne, of all people, found that our President’s Thanksgiving message falls flat:

The Gawker Web site called it an “uninspiring first effort from our most literary president” and expressed hope that he would spend “a little more time on it next year.” Politico damned it with faint analysis — it was “basic” and “brief” and “tread lightly” to avoid controversy.

Mostly, the message reiterated familiar Obama themes of diversity, community and service. The opening line referred to Thanksgiving as “a harvest celebration between European settlers and indigenous communities,” and Obama called attention to “the contributions of Native Americans, who helped the early colonists survive their first harsh winter and continue to strengthen our Nation.”

Although Dionne predicts that “a right-wing talk jock near you will soon be declaring the ‘indigenous communities’ reference as “un-American,’” count me out of that. Obama missed an opportunity to note the service of Native Americans in the armed forces a few weeks ago.  Living as I do in the land of the Cherokees (with many of their descendants, including our Congressman Zach Wamp (R)) the Native Americans deserve the salute.

It’s also noteworthy that Native Americans tended to support the Confederacy during the Civil War.  Since the Feds headed up most of the “Indian wars” (to say nothing of the Cherokee Removal,) that’s unsurprising.  But it’s also dreadfully politically incorrect, and for another post…

The basic problem that the Obama White House has with Thanksgiving–and the reason for the mushy response–is that they are uncomfortable with the holiday’s religious nature.

Thanksgiving implies that we are thankful to Someone or something.  That “Someone” is God.  The secularist mindset that is deeply embedded in the current administration (and the Democrat Party as well) recoils at the idea. So he’s forced to dance around the truth, and did such a poor job of it that even a liberal like Dionne–along with others on his side–took note of it.

Dionne noted that Franklin Roosevelt was unapologetically political (and unashamed to quote the Scriptures) in his Thanksgiving message:

Contrast it to a Thanksgiving message Franklin D. Roosevelt offered in 1934 that was unapologetic in declaring his political goals. “Our sense of social justice has deepened,” Roosevelt insisted. “We have been given vision to make new provisions for human welfare and happiness, and in a spirit of mutual helpfulness we have cooperated to translate vision into reality. … We can truly say, ‘What profiteth it a nation if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul.’”

A year later, Roosevelt was at it again. “We can be grateful,” he wrote, “that selfish purpose of personal gain, at our neighbor’s loss, less strongly asserts itself.”

I’ve come to realise that secularists would rather have us be godless failures than theistic successes.  For a group of people who turn around and claim that science is the solution to all our problems, that’s pitiful.

James Delingpole’s otherwise excellent article starts off with a suggestion that needs some challenging:

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

First: people in the scientific community like to think of their process as not subject to fraud or manipulation (as opposed to, say, religious matters.)  But anyone who has actually done the work there and knows the truth knows that this is not the case.  It may take a while for the truth to come out, but in the meanwhile the transitional costs can be enormous.

However, I wouldn’t dump the alternative energy company stocks just yet.  The liberals who have wanted to use climate change to impose their idea of life on the rest of us are simply wimps.  They run from one meeting to another (enlarging their carbon footprint in the process) dreaming up regulations to accomplish their purpose when a couple of well placed shipwrecks in the Straits of Hormuz would do more to advance their fossil-fuel free world–and do it in a hurry–than just about anything else.

But we don’t need liberals turning into commandos to accomplish this.  Our presently weak foreign policy will be encouraging to the power challengers of the Middle East, and that increases the danger of the Straits of Hormuz–along with such choke-points as the Bab al Manadab (the straits between Yemen and Eritrea, both a little flaky these days)–being unable to carry all of this fuel to burn.

There are many good reasons to wean our civilisation off of fossil fuels other than any climate change theory.  Those of us who got through the 1970’s should have learned that.  What we need is a rational, purposeful policy to accomplish that, and for the last forty years that’s what’s been missing.

I find it odd that I’m seeing articles on the left on how Obama’s Asia trip has left many of them disappointed.  For example, this, from Leslie Gelb at the Daily Beast:

President Obama’s nine-day trip to Asia is worth a look back to fix two potent problems, past and future. First, the trip’s limited value per day of presidential effort suggests a disturbing amateurishness in managing America’s power. On top of the inexcusably clumsy review of Afghan policy and the fumbling of Mideast negotiations, the message for Mr. Obama should be clear: He should stare hard at the skills of his foreign-policy team and, more so, at his own dominant role in decision-making. Something is awry somewhere, and he’s got to fix it.

This goes to the whole heart of what diplomacy is all about, and especially diplomacy with the Chinese.

Having done my share of negotiating and business with the Chinese, I can make the following observations:

1. The Chinese are very focused negotiators.  They have their objectives–especially their long-term ones–clearly in mind when they start.
2. In common with most non-Americans, the Chinese put a premium on relationship building.
3. The Chinese are very detail oriented in their approach.  They like to have all of their bases covered and questions answered.  That is, in part, a product of the fact that many of those you sit down across from in China have scientific and technical backgrounds, as opposed to the lawyers who dominate the field here.
4. Much of what looks like stubbornness or obstructionism in the Chinese is in fact their way of finding out what you’re made of.  If you hang tough, they’ll respect you.  That’s why, with every new American president, there’s always an “incident” involving U.S. armed forces near the Chinese mainland.  They’re just trying to find out what the new occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is all about.
5. Identify the Chinese “deal breaker” types of difficulties.  (I had to learn this the hard way.)  If they’re not inconsistent with your own objectives, avoid them.
6. Once all of this is done, and they do have confidence in you, they’ll move to a conclusion.  Not as quickly as we’d always like, but quickly enough.

Having said that, let me make some suggestions, if anyone in the administration is listening (I know I have liberals who are definitely listening):

1. Obama–and any other American president–is at a disadvantage, because the Chinese know they’ll be gone in eight years (unless Obama finds a way around that.)  With their decent continuity of leadership, they can afford to take a longer view.
2. The relationship building–and this is something that Gelb points out, in a way–should start with his lower people doing “advance work” before Obama’s visit.  By the time he visits, he can at least finalise something and perhaps make some progress on other things.  The advance work is also necessary to address the Chinese penchant for detail (#3 above.)
3. Obama needs to get away from this mushy, idealistic concept that diplomacy consists of glad handling and saying nice multicultural nonsense.  People who think in this way have never “done the deal” but they’re the bane of international relations at any level.
4. He needs to use his political capital to shove away Americans’ impatience for quick results irrespective of the quality of these results.
5. Obama needs to make up his mind up front (and may have already done so) to dodge the “deal breaker difficulties.”  In terms of international relations, for the Chinese these days they’re threefold: Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.  Things are sweetening a bit with Taiwan, and our President needs to ignore his left-wing crazies on the subject of Tibet and his Muslim leaning tendencies with Xinjiang.
6. He needs to make up his mind as to what his objectives really are and pursue them.  The thing that bothers me about Barack Obama is that he seems to have bought hook, line and sinker the concept that any exercise of American power is for the bad.  The left has kept this drumbeat up for a half century now and it looks like he’s going to put it into practice.  If that’s the case, then his apparent ineffectiveness in Asia was part of the plan rather than the result of poor planning.  (I don’t see that as much in Hillary Clinton, but she’s not leading this team, either.)

One other personal note: I was blessed with world-class representation in China.  Most of those involved are still with us and, especially in the case of Kissinger Associates’ Paul Speltz, still active in the field of Sino-American relations and commerce (or “cooperation” to use the Chinese term.)  Obama’s team would do well to draw on the experience of those who have really “done the deal” and ignore those who have not.

If Larry Sands is to be believed. From his article in City Journal:

On the last day of the National Education Association’s convention this summer, its outgoing general counsel, Bob Chanin, gave a speech for the ages. After sharing fond recollections of his 41 years as the NEA’s top lawyer, he switched gears and started lobbing grenades at “conservative and right-wing bastards,” including Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. The NEA and its affiliates, by contrast, were “the nation’s leading advocates for public education and the type of liberal social and economic agenda that these groups find objectionable.” Chanin’s glowing portrait of the NEA was wildly wrong, of course, but so was his characterization of the union’s opponents. People of all political stripes—not just right-wing “bastards”—are starting to realize that the single biggest impediment to education reform is the NEA itself.

I wouldn’t have put it quite as baldly as he did in the last sentence, but he’s right: the NEA is holding up progress, and as long as it has the political clout it doesn, public education in the U.S. (esp. re math and science) will never be what it should.