America’s attention-deficit-disorder politics

By Dana Milbank July 11 at 12:42 PM, WashPost

“This is not theater.”

That was President Obama’s answer in Dallas this week to critics who said he should have gone to the border to see firsthand the mass immigration of unaccompanied minors that has suddenly seized Washington’s attention.

But the president is wrong. The terror, abuse and suffering of children shouldn’t be theater, but it is. All the political world today is a stage. Our national dialogue has become a series of one-act plays: Each runs for a week or two, the critics volunteer their reviews of the president’s performance, and then it closes just as quickly — perhaps, like Benghazi, Libya, to be revived for a second run at a later date.

This week, Washington’s thespians are chorusing about the border crisis. Is it Obama’s fault? Has he mishandled it? The border situation will be much the same a couple of weeks from now, but it’s a safe bet that the political world will have moved on to another one-act show. My nomination: whether Obama is to blame for the upsurge of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

(More here.)