Moral Convictions And Intellectual Superiority Poem by gershon hepner

Moral convictions, George W’s strong card,
intellectual superiority Obama’s,
can’t win against opponents who fight hard,
not jokers in a pack, but military hammers.

Our problem, Houston, is called leadership.
Superior intellect will never trump bad morals
of those opponents who know how to flip
you like a card they play, by cheating in their quarrels.

Inspired by an Op-Ed article by liot A. Cohen in the WSJ, January 10,2010 (“Taking the Measure of Obama's Foreign Policy
Saying that the U.S. will 'bear witness' to brutality around the world is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals) :

If the first year of President Barack Obama's foreign policy were a law firm in Charles Dickens's London, it would have a name like Bumble, Stumble and Skid. It began with apologies to the Muslim world that went nowhere, a doomed attempt to beat Israel into line, utopian pleas to abolish nuclear weapons, unreciprocated concessions to Russia, and a curt note to the British to take back the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office. It continued with principled offers of serious negotiation to an Iranian regime too busy torturing, raping and killing demonstrators, and building new underground nuclear facilities, to take them up. Subsequently Beijing smothered domestic coverage of a presidential visit but did give the world the spectacle of the American commander in chief getting a talking-to about fiscal responsibility from a Communist chieftain…
Some of these follies stemmed from the inevitable glitches of a new administration settling in—the foreign-policy equivalent of the White House social secretary failing to keep party crashers out. Some of them resulted from sheer naivete, much from the puerile vendetta Mr. Obama waged against the previous administration's record, a bad rhetorical habit that fogged the brains of people who should know better. One hopes that his advisers, and the president himself, recognize the weight of the query reportedly posed last April by the most formidable contemporary leader of a free country, Nicolas Sarkozy: 'Est-il faible? ' (Is he weak?) . If a year from now world leaders think the answer is 'yes, ' the U.S. will be in deep trouble. In at least one way, Mr. Obama resembles his predecessor: He has enormous self-confidence. But where George W. Bush's certainty stemmed from moral conviction, Mr. Obama's arises from a sense of intellectual superiority. Given the centrality of his intelligence to his own self-perception, how might he use it to redeem a record of, at the moment, fairly unrelieved failure? Much of foreign policy consists of a rough and ready game of adaptation to unforeseen, occasionally awful events. Indeed, Mr. Obama has been fortunate that his first year in office did not witness a real foreign-policy crisis. We have yet to see how he will meet that test. But there are large questions that require some high intellectual effort that he might consider tackling.


1/10/10