“I’d rather be ruled by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty"

In a recent post, Bah! Humbug! for buddhists, I wrote:

This has been a low, dishonest year in American politics. To Nile Gardiner's neat ranking of Obama's 10 worst foreign policy blunders, I'd add this shining turd of appeasement - cancelling his meeting with the Dalai Lama 'to keep China happy'.

Obama appeased China ahead of the Copenhagen Global Warming Jamboree and got America predictably dissed there. Now that the Chinese know for sure that the assistant-law-lecturer-in-chief is weak, they're raising the stakes against the next scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama so when it takes place, there will be a breach with real consequences instead of a merely diplomatic breach if Obama had adopted Bush's practice from the off.

This stuff is so elementary. But not trying the 9/11 mastermind in downturn Manhattan is a no-brainer, you'd think; saying 'corpsman' instead of 'corpseman'; '57 states'; bowing to foreign kings; endless self-reference.....look, can anyone think of one smart thing this guy's initiated? One?

The cod psychology of a weak leader is that after rejection by tyrants they've hugged and purred to, then he over-compensates. That's the danger with Obama. He'll get into a tactical stand-off when it's much harder for an adversary to back down without loss of face. Result, the tactical stand-off ends as strategic defeat for America led by a poseur.