Slamming an old axiom into reverse

A proverb has it that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Our current-yet-semi-retired president has turned the saying inside out, claiming that the failure to see the growing threat of ISIS has many fathers – specifically excepting, of course, what we might call the biological father, whose DNA proves conclusively his (Obama’s) direct relationship to the latest Middle Eastern terrorist crisis.

Even some Democrats are now slamming Obama’s attempt to blame the intelligence community for underestimating the ISIS threat (which the president most recently did in a 60 Minutes interview), including, notably, Joe Sestak.

It is faintly amusing when a teenage boy responds to his mother’s discovery of a pack of cigarettes or a package of condoms in his pants pocket while sorting the dirty laundry by blurting out “Hey, those aren’t mine!” One grows weary listening to the president of the United States employing the same knee-jerk juvenile defense when confronted with the expanding list of his administration’s failures.

And speaking of failures, Victor Davis Hanson attempts to get his arms around one of Obama’s worst in this look at the execrable Eric Holder. Doubtless Obama doesn’t see Holder’s appointment as a mistake, and in the context of the Alinskyite-stealth-purposeful-chaos gambit, perhaps he wasn’t, entirely. But Holder’s execution of his activist mission was always clumsy and obvious, not to mention shot through with spectacular hypocrisy, so there’s a chance that his tenure as attorney general will ultimately prove to be a failure in two ways: (1) in the sense of living up to his official job requirements (failing to fairly enforce the laws of the country), and (2)in the sense of consolidating Democratic electoral gains (failing to effectively advance the wider acceptance of certain important progressive myths, particularly in connection with the subject of race). The first item is clearly settled; we’ll have to wait and see about the second.

Can’t wait to see the fellow show up as MSNBC’s in-house legal expert. The colloquies with the Most Reverend Al Sharpton should generate some of the most dishonest (and illiterate) quotes of the next half dozen years.