Recipe: Tomasky post-hoc potpouri
Ingredients: time, a large weasel.
Method:
1. Wait for a foreign-policy crisis to arise.
2. See what Obama says.
3. Wait.
4. Keep waiting.
5. See how things turn out.
6. If it turned out well (e.g. Libya), credit Obama's speeches.
7. If it turned out craply (e.g. Bahrain) write something about Tea Party terrorists.
8. Stew a little.
What makes this recipe a fail-safe success is that Obama's foreign policy is a textbook case of Implausible Deniability (ID(TM)). ID(TM) works according to a simple formula:
1. Wait for a crisis to arise.
2. Wait for it to disappear as quickly as it arose.
3. Keep waiting.
4. If the clock runs out, then say/do something ambiguous.
5. Get senior staff to make unambiguous, mutually inconsistent remarks.
6. Wait and see.
7. If the outcome was favourable, interpret your speech/action in 4. to paint you as a causal factor.
8 If the outcome was unfavourable, interpret your speech/action in 4. to paint you as sufficiently removed so as not to be blameworthy.
9. Pick one of the statements in 5. to support the interpretation in 7/8. Since they were mutually inconsistent by design.
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