By Paul Greenberg
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
There are times when all a president of the United States
must want to do is to get away from it all. Far away. An ocean away. Not just
for a weekend at Camp David or a fundraiser in San Francisco. But off to some
place where it really doesn't matter what he's talking about so long as it
isn't anything relevant, at least not to his troubles or the country's. Yes,
some place where people aren't concerned with American domestic politics and
its presidential scandals. And if there isn't such a place any more in this
internetted and globalized 24/7 blogosphere, it needs to be a place where POTUS
can at least pretend nobody knows or cares about the trouble he's in at home.
. .
Even a president of the United States, especially a
president of the United States, needs a trip to some fantasy island of his
choice when things at home get hard to take, and what he really wants to do is
change the subject. Maybe someplace he associates with better times, when his
administration was just a-borning and everything was bright and promising and
bustin' out all over with prospects of Hope and Change -- someplace like
Berlin, where they loved him at the start of his presidency. Heck, they loved
him in Washington back then.
. .
Yes, a little visit to Berlin would be perfect just now,
travel-poster perfect. It would offset that bust of a G8 summit somewhere
unpronounceable in Northern Ireland that our president had to attend the other
day. Which produced all those dreary communiqués that communicated so little.
Yes, he needed to go to Berlin, absolutely, and Jawohl(Yes sir)! It must have
been great fun being liked again.
. .
Who could blame our president for taking a little side
trip to see the Brandenburg Gate again and take a break from sordid reality?
Except maybe the kind of spoilsports who wish he would tackle his problems at
home head-on -- instead of pretending they don't exist, and that he really had
nothing to with them, being only president of the United States. And, as such,
only an innocent bystander. And not responsible for every misadventure his
administration, silly thing, has gotten itself into. After all, he only heads
it.
A president's most pressing need at such a time is to
talk about something else, anything else, other than his administration's
scandals. Like the weather, maybe.
. .
This is scarcely the first time it has dawned on the
country's chief executive that now would be the perfect time to get out of
Dodge.
It was back in 1974, the year when Watergate finally
boiled over, having gone from minor irritant to a full-blown crisis, that
Richard Nixon decided to see the pyramids at last. So off he went to Cairo and
points east to talk about ... well, I can't remember just what he talked about
except that it had nothing to do with what he'd once dismissed as an overblown,
second-rate burglary at some office complex in Washington called Watergate.
Think back to June of 1974. That would have been after
President Nixon had declined to release those famous or rather infamous
Watergate Tapes except in edited form, and even that turned out to be a
bombshell. For even those limited, selected, and sanitized notes on his White
House conversations with intimates revealed something of what Richard M. Nixon,
aka Tricky Dick, was thinking in private -- never a pretty picture. Let's just
say that those selected excerpts, strewn with expletive-deleted phrases and a
general coating of vulgarity, were less than elevating.
Everyone knew by then that more was to come, as layer
after layer of this cover-up would be peeled back. All wanted to see what was
underneath, and at the same time didn't want to see it. For back then there was
still an aura of awe, even reverence, about the presidency of the United
States, an aura it would never regain after that Watergate summer. The House
Judiciary Committee had already begun impeachment hearings in May of that year
and now....
Yes, now was the perfect time for that president to leave
the country. Just what he said in Cairo is hard to remember now, but Americans
still haven't forgotten Watergate. It was a watershed not just for Richard
Nixon, but for the American presidency.
Fast forward to June of 2013. This time an American
president goes to Berlin, but it's scarcely John F. Kennedy speaking in June of
1963 ("Ich bin ein Berliner!") or Ronald Reagan in June of 1987.
("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!")
Instead it's Barack Obama talking about, sure enough, the
weather. Specifically, about Climate Change, the reigning secular theology of
the age, complete with its own vision of the Apocalypse: famines, floods,
vanishing coastlines, refugees from natural disasters ... the whole
"Soylent Green" scenario. ("This is the future we must avert.
This is the global threat of our time!")
At a time when the whole Middle East is threatened by a
real calamity, by widening war and chaos, and a real refugee crisis is already
upon us there, our president chose to spoke about, yes, the weather. Which must
have been a nice change from not speaking of the succession of scandals on his
watch back home.
No matter. All those congressional committees will be
talking about those scandals all summer long -- the IRS' own enemies list, the
administration's going after the press for doing its job, the bloody debacle
that was Benghazi, and who knows what more to come. There'll be time enough to
discuss all that. It's going to be a long, hot summer.
This stopover in Berlin has been just an intermission in
the continuing drama he's trying to escape from back home. Working title:
"Obama Agonistes."
Welcome home, Mr. President. You've been missed.
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