![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121216120152im_/http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2011/08/20/National-Politics/Images/Obama_Vacation_0301a.jpg?uuid=7r2cpstTEeCeCpSGbSBlkA)
The country's economy is headed towards a crack-up and Egypt is about to topple into a very long period of Islamist rule as Syria disintegrates into bloody civil war with an al Qaeda-influenced-or-even-dominated government as its probable end game, and President Obama is doing...nothing.
The president has refused to put forward a plan around which negotiations over spending cuts and entitlement reforms can begin.
The president has not spoken out against much less stopped President Morsi of Egypt from in essence imposing a coup-by-snap-referendum on the most important Arab state in the world, thus making the loss of Egypt the legacy of his and Secretary Clinton's tenure.
As Mark Steyn said on my show yesterday, the U.S. has assumed "observer" status to the world. (The transcript is here.)
"[T]here have never been changes rocketing through the Arab world on this scale that have had nothing to do with the great powers beyond the region," Steyn noted, "whether one is talking about Turkey, Britain, France, or more recently, America and the Soviet Union."
"The rest of the world is irrelevant to this," Steyn added. "This is basically a hard core shift in which the most backward and militant form of Islam is taking control in one nation after another."
A hard-core shift about which the president is silent. If any other country in the world proposed to change its constitution into a majoritarian, anti-minority document via a snap election, the U.S. could be expected to weigh in, but the president's lassitude on all things Islamic is bound up in the fact that he wagered everything on his ability to deliver a new relationship with the Muslim world and that new relationship is an utter disaster and the Arab spring has become a deep Arab winter, thus leading the president to do everything he can to avoid talking about it. On one level, the gridlock in D.C. is providing cover for the collapse of Egyptian freedom, so the president has a huge incentive to let it continue.
Ditto the cover it provides for the Syrian slaughter where the president has neither been successful in removing Assad nor in helping to create a responsible alternative government. The current chaos and its looming consequences are his, just as Rawanda was Bill Clinton's.
The president was allowed to sleep walk through the election by an adoring media, and now the most basic questions about his plans are directed not at the president, but at the Speaker. No wonder, then, that the public is catching on, but the reality of his falling numbers and the 2014 electoral crack-up will be little consolation to the unemployed here and the anti-Islamists and Copts of Egypt or the people of Syria much less Israel.
A month after his re-election and the president cannot be bothered to do his job but instead wages a political campaign against his enemies on the Hill. Remarkable.
For the barest bit of good news, read my interview with outgoing GOP Senate Whip Jon Kyl. Perhaps Harry Reid isn't going to be allowed to blow up the Senate rules. Watch that space, and watch the president sleepwalk through his second inauguration and a second term, trusting whether this great nation can indeed survive and even thrive with an autopilot presidency.
Oh, and one cheer for the states that didn't fall for the carnival barker trick of a state health insurance exchange. Only 15 states welcomed the nightmare of an exchange. Of course my California is one of them, guaranteeing more state costs and more complexity to a system that is already crumbling before our eyes.