Hard hitting Bret Stephens has written a piece The Dissing of the President. By itself, the article is not mysterious at all: Stephens lists various (too many, way too many) cases where the world leaders of all kinds demonstrate their disrespect of Obama and/or his administration.
The mysterious part for me was related to the lede: "The world is treating Obama like another failed American leader." The devious Mr Stevens mad me go through the whole article before I stumbled on the identification of that "another failed leader". Here it comes:
All this in just the past four months. And all so reminiscent of the contempt the world showed for Jimmy Carter in the waning days of his failed presidency. The trouble for us is that the current presidency has more than 1,000 days to go.OK, now it is clear. Good.
P.S. My browser played up, apparently, since I didn't see the picture placed by the author (or the editor) somewhere in the middle of the article. It shows the "reference POTUS" in the midst of one of the most infamous moments of his career.
8 comments:
Carter, sure, but it's worth remembering how Bush II was reviled by the Europeans and others. American president haven't gotten much respect for more than a decade.
Seems pretty tame by recent standards, if "standards" is the word.
Still, reviled is not exactly despised or denigrated like... oh well, why do I nitpick?
Absolutely.
Dhimmi the Carter and Millard Fillmore are delighted. They are no longer considered the worst American Presidents. Obama has that title.
I always believed that no first place is granted forever. New champions come, old ones move aside etc...
Hey, hey, hey now. Millard is still #1. People can talk all they want to about how bad a president was, but almost no one even remember that Millard "was" president. That my illustrious friends is an incomparable feat.
That one, you mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millard_Fillmore
I can only rely upon your judgement, myself being a poor student of history.
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