[PJMedia] Brett Stephens in his article, "An Unteachable President [1]" in the Wall Street Journal, makes a serious attempt to construct a rational theory to explain why the president doubles down when he's losing -- and why the public can't get him to change.
...Why does he keep doing that? Stephens thinks it's because Obama is the kind of man who believes the Cold War was won by "peaceful protest", convinced that "a strategy of retreat and accommodation, a bias against intervention, a preference for minimal responses" is enlightened foreign policy, and most of all believes he is unalterably correct -- "on the right side of history" -- therefore could never be wrong.
Based on these assumptions naturally the president never learns for how can one improve upon perfection?
...Stephens fails to take his reasoning to the logical conclusion. The president is unteachable because the political system itself is incapable of learning. The paralysis of Barack Obama but a reflection of the political stroke which has frozen Washington. The Capital itself is in a dream. In that deadly reverie truth is indistinguishable from fiction [10]. Everything in that topsy-turvy world is a storyline.
Behavior that is rewarded is reinforced. |