Fecklessness ... No One Is Really in Charge

Damon Linker writes at The Week about the current state of U.S. politics and has plenty bad to say about both major parties. You'll enjoy his concluding assessment of the President.

Finally, there's the distinctive contribution of our well-meaning but frequently ineffective liberal president to our national neuroses. At another historical moment, Obama's cool-cat persona might have fit right in. But his temperamental aloofness and tendency to undersell threats are almost comically ill-suited to this moment of turmoil and angst.

In times of national anxiety, the country needs a leader who will acknowledge and validate those fears. Only then can he hope to moderate and dissipate them, and channel them in more publicly beneficial directions. Instead we're left with an image of presidential fecklessness — and the impression that no one is really in charge of an increasingly chaotic nation in an ever more anarchic world.

Our nation is coasting on pre-Obama momentum, we cannot know if (or when) chaos will finally derail us utterly. Linker says we verge on "a nervous breakdown," such Weimar-like times bring forth demagogues.