According to Rozen, a very plugged-in lefty, says "the meeting did not go well," and she quotes one source saying that "It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion." Obama asked the Saudis to make concessions to match the concessions he had demanded from the Israelis. But the Saudi King balked -- and "launched a tirade" that his underlings later apologized for. The New York Times has also reported that Obama was "frustrated" by his trip to Saudi Arabia and that he "failed to extract any meaningful gestures toward Israel to revive the peace process."
Mr. Goldfarb continues later with:
So Obama gets nowhere with the Saudis and squeezes the Israelis instead, hoping that in doing so he will, at some point, earn enough cred with the Arab street to allow Arab governments the "political space" to make real concessions to the peace process. But in the event, the Israelis are also thumbing their nose at the White House, publicly rejecting White House demands for a freeze on new construction in East Jerusalem. The White House has put both the Israelis and the Palestinians in an impossible position -- and even George Mitchell is "reported to want to leave his negotiator position at the end of 2009." It turns out that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not Northern Ireland.
It is not unusual for young people to think they can change the world. Their heads are full of ideas. Most of their ideas have been tried (and failed) in the past, but they do not know that. Their inexperience leads them to believe that the idea is all their own, and is something new.
There is nothing to do be done about it, really. Beating them into submission is not the solution either, as they also have not learned the humility and grace that comes with age. It is something that is learned gradually, if someone is capable of learning.
One of the many ways that this was dealt with in the past was for younger people to have very little say in important matters. Family fortunes were not passed to the next generation until the elders died, allowing their young and inexperienced heads to catch up and override their young and foolish hearts. Young adults who demonstrated that they were irresponsible could be disinherited (except the French and the Dutch, which explains a lot about their psychotic history), which served as a check of last resort.
Culturally speaking, Western society also ingrained in the young a requirement to respect one's elders/betters (often expressed in requirements to respect mother and father). This was not, despite 1960s era propaganda, a blind and unearned respect, but a deference to people who had more experience than you. Deference is too often thought of as subserviance today, when it is no such thing. Rather, it is patience.
One of the most common characteristics of the modern Left is this 1960s-holdover of lack of respect. If someone old says something, it must be wrong, they believe, just as an adolescent is sure that their parents are idiots. Even if it doesn't go to that extreme, it goes to another: that there are no failed ideas, just good ideas that weren't implemented properly.
It's the only way to explain the Left's incessant desire to babble on about the miracles of communism/socialism and implement it differently, despite all evidence that it is the dumbest idea a society can try (well, besides allowing wooden horses presented by enemies to be wheeled into the center of town).
I'm sure that many are aware of the common definition of insanity, where one repeats the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome. In that sense, the modern Left is insane, but what temporarily excuses them from the definition (at least in their own minds) is that they are incapable of recognizing that they're repeating the same mistakes again and again because they keep insisting that there is no difference between a failed idea and a badly implemented good idea. They believe that if the outcome isn't as desired, it must be that the implementation was bad. What their swollen heads fail to grasp is that a good idea would have yielded some positive results, somewhere, if even by accident. Only a failed idea, a truly dreadful one, can be implemented repeatedly without any measurable good, but they can't see that.
You would think that the deaths of a hundred million people would be enough evidence that socialism and communism are bad things, but the Left is blinded to those realities. The not-as-disastrous-as-death consequences, such as defeatism and misery, are everywhere that socialism and communism has been tried, too.
The truth has to be that they just don't see it, or refuse to see it, still stuck with the puffed heads of their youthful ignorance and vigor to fix the world.
The world cannot be fixed, because, it isn't broken. Individual lives may be lifted. New medicines may be invented to cure some of the sick, clean water can be brought to villages to quench the thirsty, and better agriculture and transportation can sate the hungry, but the big things, war, pestilence, etc., are just as much a part of the human condition as are love and charity. They exist because we humans are a 3-dimensional lot, because we are not all the same and because perfection/peace is boring, when compared to the vane idea that we can make things better, have more, do more, and make a difference in the world. If we truly believed that the world was a wonderful place, then there wouldn't be anything for the youth to do. There would be nothing to fix, nothing to improve upon, no mountains left unclimbed or frontiers to open. Youth with no lofty ambition turn to war, and make it lofty (as the terrorists have done) if for no other reason than to relieve their boredom and their irrelevance. Admitting one's irrelevance is part of the definition of wisdom, and they don't have any.
None of this is terribly remarkable or unusual. Men have been doing all of it for all of recorded history--again and again, ad infinitum.
Most people grow up. They soon set aside childish things and childish thoughts and childishness is left to the youth, of which they are no longer among the membership. They get on with humble and productive lives, caring for their families, and living a decent life so their grandchildren will have a model by which to direct their own lives.
Some people, however, never grow up. They never recognize their own limitations, the limitations of others, or turn inward for peace and satisfaction; rather, they are stuck in a kind of purgatory of youth, akin to a Peter Pan Syndrome, refusing to grow up.
There are certainly other explanations for why Obama would believe that he would be able to make peace in the Middle East, where no one, in 10,000 years of history, was able to do so before.
So Obama requires more of the Jews than he does of anyone else, blames them when things do not go as he wants, or uses them as a scapegoat/pawn for his own failed ideas.... nope, nosiree, that's never happened before.
Obama must have some ideologue-equivalent of a Peter Pan syndrome... or he's just an idiot that another bunch of idiots decided to elect as the leader of the free world. The youth are mainly responsible, as they are for most stupid things society tries and fails to achieve. The only difference throughout history is the degree of stupid and deadly mistakes... and this one is a doozy.
And another thing (while I'm on the subject of repeated mistakes)... will someone (please) put a plaque at the entrance of every Jewish temple that reads:
The Left is Not Your Friend.
They will lie to you,
as they always have and always will.
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