What happens on a playground can often be more important that what happens in the class room.
Boys and girls learn how to act around others.
How to share.
How to play fair.
And rarely but often necessarily when to fight.
We thought that applied to everyone until Barack Obama became president.
Either he never threw a punch on the playground or has forgotten that sometimes you have to take a swing even if you know you are going to get creamed.
For the past five year his response to a confrontation has been to speech-a-fy, then threaten and then just walk away and pretend the whole thing didn’t matter.
Well at first the speech-a-fying and the threatening did work a bit. But real early on people figured out that the line in the sand he drew with his toe would never be followed by a punch. Just more lines and more lines and more lines.
Not following through with threats may be a bit embarrassing for an every day Joe but for the leader of the most powerful country in the world it can be real dangerous.
Not personally for that leader mind, but for the people who are on that line in the sand.
Think Benghazi.
In fact think about every place in the world where Americans are in harm’s way and if one has a loved one there, they have our sympathy.
Time and time again it is apparent to our friends and our enemies that harming an American is a pretty safe thing to do now a days, the killing of Osama bin Laden not withstanding.
Just imagine what would have happened if that operation had gone belly up.
While we have many objections to our president’s foreign and domestic policies we have more of an objection to our president.
He is a Hamlet and what we need is a Macbeth.
And that brings us to Bunkerville.
Like Syria, Like the Crimea the administration made a big show of force in the first couple of days with armed ninja rangers out to bring a recalcitrant rancher to justice.
But then just like everywhere else in the world where people have challenged American words with actions of their own America retreated.
The justice of the cause is quite besides the point.
It is the retreat that will be remembered.
The President of the United States is not to be taken seriously.
Hard pill to swallow.