The Age of Incompetence: Part II

A few words from the Bear to the president

Being situated in the heart of Europe I catch the sounds of crashes in the U.S. as a man does at sea when he sees the flash and smoke of an enemy’s cannon and then some seconds later the sound catches up to the missile, which had either already killed him or fallen harmlessly into the sea. Like the AIG crash.

So I depend upon the internet to tell me what both the smart guys at the big city newspapers are saying, and, what I find far more important as well as informative, what the American people are saying and thinking, once again thanks to the internet where Americans can write in their letters to the smart guys in the big cities and inside the beltways.

Long before Mr. Obama defeated John McCain in the election I voiced the opinion that what the country needed at that precise point in history was another Harry Truman. Because the way I saw it the country had been under attack both from outside and inside and that war had taken a toll on the human spirit. It wasn’t the attack from terrorists on the outside that was the most deadly. It was the attack from the inside that over time leached and corroded and rotted away at the American spirit until there was virtually no reservoir of hope or faith in the country as a whole.

The attack I speak of was the Bush Gang on our constitution. You want a war? No problem, just invent some lies about an enemy with nuclear weapons who wants to attack you. If the intelligence isn’t there, then invent some intelligence and get the intelligence chief to go along with it and then give him a medal. If anyone contradicts the intelligence, even if their wife is an undercover CIA agent whose job it is to track down and uncover real terrorists trying to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, then attack her and blow her cover. Don’t worry about the cost of the war, any figure will do and if your own economic adviser

Bear Bryant: “Be good or be gone.”

contradicts you, fire him. And if a general says it will take twice as many men to do the war, fire him. You want to secretly wiretap someone without a court order, just do it because you’re the chief. You want to kidnap someone, just do it under another name. You want to torture someone after you kidnap them, just call it another name too. And then deny it all. No lie was too big, no denial too small. Goebbels redux.

The American people watched all this, mostly quietly. Americans, it seems, of all the “democracies” are the slowest to anger. Most supposed the opposition party would stand up to this attack on the constitution, but they didn’t. They rolled over like sleepy Quislings. A quiet despair settled into the hearts of Americans when they realized they had been abandoned.

Obama should have understood all this; we were a nation at war. He seemed to understand if one listened to his campaign rhetoric. He promised there would be openness and transparency and the word change became the key word from the first day on the campaign trail to the last day. But it quickly became apparent Obama had a Waldheim moment. There were too many of the same tired old faces. The first stimulus package was larded up with billions of dollars of ear marks from his friends in Congress. It was the same with the first budget, but his spin doctors passed it off as the old budget created in the last session of Congress, as if during a time of war one can take a break from keeping campaign promises. Then came the appointment of Summers and Geithner, topped off by Greg Judd that should have sent alarm bells off.

Obama never seemed to fully understand that when a nation has been at war for eight years and under attack you have to hit the deck running. It all lead up to the AIG bonus scandal and then that pent up American anger spilled over. Millions have lost their jobs, millions more have lost their homes, millions more have lost their health insurance and nobody really knows how many millions never had any health insurance and have had their lives damaged beyond repair from it.

Harry Truman took office during a time of war too and never took a time out. Perhaps it was in his roots and where he came from that made him so earthy and solid. Like a man named Paul (Bear) Bryant who was born and raised not so far from Truman’s Missouri in Arkansas. Bryant wasn’t a politician, but as he once said, “Mama wanted me to be a preacher. I told her coachin’ and preachin’ were a lot alike.” He could as well have said, coachin’ and politics are a lot a like. Bear Bryant could have been a legendary politician, if he’d wanted to, as well as the legendary football coach he was.

He was successful, as he put it, because “if there is one thing that helped me as a coach, it’s my ability to recognize winners.” I also imagine if he had met Obama he would have, put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and said in a soft drawl, as he often told others, “Son, you start at the top, if you don’t have a good one at the top, you don’t have a dog’s chance. If you do, all the rest falls into place. You have to have good assistants, but first you have to have the chairman of the board.”

Then he would have continued and told the president, as he had told so many others, “People who are in it for their own good are individualists. They don’t share the same heartbeat that makes a team so great. A

great unit, whether it be football or any organization, shares the same heartbeat.”

The AIG scam exposed the reality there are a lot of players on team Obama that don’t have the same heartbeat as team America. They come from another culture, Wall Street culture. Truman would have fired them and then Americans would have known how angry he truly was. Obama just made another speech saying how angry he was. But it sounded tinny and insincere.

Paul (Bear) Bryant was one of those legendary Americans who came from a small town and he spoke in a language that made people believe in him because they knew he lived his language.

Obama has wasted precious time trying to convert his opponents in Congress, the very same ones who brought about this economic disaster. The Bear would have quietly slipped Obama an old Arkansas homily, “Never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.”

Obama could have learned a lot from the Bear, but not about football, but about how to be a man and succeed in war. Obama obviously needs it, but more importantly, the American people need it because the war is still being lost. The AIG scam revealed how the attack on America from within continues.

“Be good or be gone.” was one of Bear Bryant’s most famous mottos. This is what I would like to tell Obama, and the whole political class in Washington. But I would not whisper it softly with a friendly hand on their shoulder. I would say it the way Harry Truman said it to Gen. Douglas McArthur. Then maybe team America could win this war. If we don’t, quite simply, America will cease to be America. That’s what this war is all about.

All rights reserved Roger Burke 2009