Lost and still unable to see

As the president of the United States spent the weekend wandering circles of hypocrisy and toting the stuff in book form, the place he momentarily left behind continued going to hell. The recession that he insists has all but ended persists, the health care reform he persists in pushing gasps and heaves and so too national security, which has been dropped by self-inflicted blows. On this, Barack Obama pleads powerlessness, a frightening thing.

Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators in the war on terror, a pair of distasteful activities – interrogations and war – that Obama hopes to end, at least in the sense of his being personally connected to them.

Among the products of interrogations that perturb Holder were Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s “terrorist tutorials.” The mastermind of the 2001 attacks, Mohammed felt a sudden loosening of lips after enduring simulated drowning, or waterboarding, and sleep depravation. Poor guy. Just ask relatives of 9/11 victims how difficult sleepless nights can be.

“[Mohammed], an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete,” reads a section of a newly unclassified 2004 report published by The Washington Post. After what former Vice President Dick Cheney prefers sanguinely to call EITs, enhanced interrogation techniques, Mohammed spilled his abundant guts.

But Holder is discomfited. He was stunned, positively stunned, last week to read allegations of abuse, such as the dunking of Mohammed, in a CIA Inspector General’s report. That document, by the by, is five years old. So why is Holder blowing dust off the subject? Holder’s boss, the omniscient Obama who has professed opposition to reviving the abuse issue, responds with a shoulder shrug. “[U]ltimately, the decisions on who is investigated and who is prosecuted are up to the attorney general,” presidential spokesman Bill Burton said. Like Sgt. Schultz of television’s “Hogan’s Heroes,” Obama knows nothing.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, the former Clintonite who these days wears the plaintive look of a waterboarded basset hound, is flailing back with all the force of a soft puff of wind. He is publicly warning of the dangers of tampering with intelligence operations, combating efforts to declassify more intelligence documents and dashing off memos to underlings praising the work of his maligned forces, whose crimes include preventing another terrorist attack. Panetta also is contemplating something more sensible, resigning rather than continue his part as early Obama fall guy.

As all of this unfolded, Obama spent last week vacationing at a Martha’s Vineyard farm that rents for $35,000 a week. At the top of his summer reading list was Thomas Friedman’s “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” In 438 pages of raw liberal drivel, Friedman opines on the rise of a “Green Revolution,” a remarkable thing for a fellow who lives in an 11,400-square-foot mansion valued at $9.3 million, according to the Washingtonian. Friedman is part of a cadre of elites who refuse to let principles stand in the way of unbridled luxury, who insist from behind palace walls that the faceless masses buy cars that run on corn or cooking grease and are so small they’re worn as much as driven.

So this is America, and these are the people who guide and influence her. For now. Polls indicate that Obama’s act is turning stale, that the everyday folk whose loyalty the president must cultivate are tiring of his extreme makeover. His tacit acquiesence to Holder’s assault on the CIA demonstrates that Obama, who as a campaigner was attuned to the country’s restive spirit, is blind to the new stirring, one of increasing discomfort over America’s leftward list. We can only hope that if the likes of Mohammed look, they similarly fail to see.