The Dialectical Playa

The guiding principle of Barack Obama and Mark Steyn?

Having just arrived home from work, I performed my morning routine of eating a light “dinner” (I work 3rd Shift) and after seeing the wife off for work satiated my inner information voyeur by scouring the news. While scanning through The Daily Beast, I encountered this serendipitous article by Tunku Varadarajan and it was at this point (below in bold) where I almost choked on my pear slice and cheese wedge:

Observing Obama’s foreign policy, one comes away with the impression that he is profoundly embarrassed by American exceptionalism: We are a country like any other, and let no one tell us otherwise. He also views America’s international decline as irreversible: His instinctive response is to accommodate the U.S. to the forces that have led to this decline, since to resist them would not merely be futile, but an affront to the multi-polar sensibilities of all those who, in foreign chanceries and international institutions, watch America closely for any trace of unilateralist recidivism. (Of course, it is OK to be unilateralist in the formal renunciation of strategic options, as happens with any nuclear self-denial; otherwise, multinational solidarity is always to be preferred, even when it leads to the backing of anti-American forces, as has happened in Honduras.)

Holy yodeling Mountie, Batman! Did Tunku just describe Mark Steyn? True, Steyn has never cowered before a hostile foreign government and in fact launched a one-man invasion of the motherland several years ago when he stood trial in his native Canada for “Islamophobia.” But since I’m currently engaged in a Weltschmerz of existential angst regarding my lack of faith in Steyn’s ability to persevere through the next three years of the Obama regime (hell, we almost lost him after ObamaCare Sunday; he still has Cap’n Trade and Obamnesty to get through), I consequently found Varadarajan’s article humorously prescient.

But it is also ironic that – like our President who is aggressively manifesting the last dying breaths of institutionally organized progressivism in his domestic policy is also the same President who is passively appeasing our external enemies in his foreign policy – Mark Steyn has become the conservative intellectual who resolutely combats our foreign enemies while antithetically submitting to our domestic ones. It’s like the song the British Fife and Drums played at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington: The World Turn’d Upside Down.

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