Three days on YouTube — about 797,000 hits.

I’ve suggested elsewhere, and this is my best case for Obama and the west, is that he has managed a surface image for the Middle East and by extension the “Arab World” and Islam while supporting continuing U.S. Department of Defense and Israel Defense Force programs beneath the news (and image) surface.

In this choreagraphy, if it has been that, we have arrived at a sour point somewhere between the allegation of an ambivalent Obama and associated with the President’s persistence in the ambiguous — and for traditional western values, negative — diplomatic signals and policy pronouncements.

Pandering isn’t the only evil here, but it’s the one that’s most destructive short of war.  The targets of the behavior — those pandered to — are its victims, as by accepting unwarranted favor or praise, they may believe themselves praiseworthy in precisely the way set out to manipulate them.

Pandering then becomes a part of a larger narcissistic complex, and until this form in dishonest speech has been faced, the world most susceptible to it will find itself deepening its miseries in conflict and improverishment at its own hands.