Come Home, President Obama.

Now I understand that, even though you're president of the United States, you get locked into schedules that you can't simply call off.

That said,
it was rather jarring to see the U.S. president overseas quaffing a pint of Guinness with a smiling face, and playing to the crowds as though campaigning again, after viewing pictures of the destruction in Joplin, Mo. as more and more bodies are retrieved from the rubble.

Yes, I know it was a pre-planned trip. And he just can't call it off every time a disaster -- natural or manmade -- strikes. Still, I liked it better when the U.S. president was content to stay home more during his term, acting as though the American people and their interests were paramount to the job.

The economy, the unemployed, the gas prices ... personally, if I were on President Obama's inner team, I'd cancel all the not-strictly-necessary overseas jaunts (vital business trips are fine, if he needs to actually be present to accomplish something) until he leaves office.

That's just common sense, right? First, he was sightseeing while we began the Libyan War. (how's that going, btw? Was I right, have more people been killed indiscriminately than had we not intervened? Do you really care about those lives lost anyway?)

Now, we've got those silly pub pics, which greeted this news reader right after hearing about the destruction here at home. Again, I get it -- the world doesn't stop because of somebody else's personal tragedy. Still, for p.r. reasons and because the American president is supposed to feign caring and leading his people, I sure wish he'd concentrate more on America, and less on Israel, Ireland, Libya, and yep, even Pakistan and Afghanistan too.

Shore up our own country's defenses, and our economy too which is quite related, and don't leave home to greet the crowds and gladhand until our own wars are ended and our own borders secured. Sure it's a big job -- someday, I pray we'll actually have a leader who understands his role. President of the United States is not President of the World. The sooner we understand and accept that, the better off the whole world will be.

IMHO, of coure.

RELATED: Jeffrey Goldberg apparently is in his element this past week ... and just can't resist playing the victim himself. Good Lord, will we never learn?

Myself, I agree with Krugman not only that America is experiencing a Lost Generation because we have learned zilch from the financial regulatory failures of the past, but that historically, the world economy and current international failures make this time now very similar to the period between the last two world wars.

I suspect, with Israel gambling big by not conceding any reparations to the displaced poor and continuing to land grab, and America's seeming promise to support her no matter what comes, the only way out is another Big War. To stoke the economy, protect the Jews in Israel from the consequences of their collective actions, and kill off thousands more innocent people worldwide.

Is this where we're heading? Hope I'm wrong, but you really can learn a lot from the past. And the past is telling.

ADDED: And so it begins...
Stanley Fish joins Jeffrey Goldberg in examining the Jewish perspective on recent news events, and drawing overblown conclusions:

It’s been an interesting week or two for Jews. Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Beaver,” opens nationwide in theaters and Jews must decide whether to pay good money to see a movie starring someone whose father is a Holocaust denier, and who has himself vilified Jews in public.
...
Then there is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French economist and politician who was poised to become France’s first Jewish president, imprisoned at Rikers Island after being accused of forcing sex on a chambermaid at a New York hotel. (Strauss-Kahn has now moved to a very constrained “house arrest” while awaiting arraignment, if he can find a house.) Meanwhile, on May 11 this newspaper publishes the results of a Pew Forum study that shows 67 percent of Reform Jewish households in the United States making more than $75,000 a year; only 31 percent of all households hit the same mark.

Then there are a few older stories that linger on and add to the mix. Designer John Galliano is facing trial in France and has been fired by Dior because, in the course of a drunken rant in a bar, he said to someone (who was not in fact Jewish) “I love Hitler and people like you would be dead.” Bad-boy Charlie Sheen abused various substances, cavorted with assorted women and trashed hotel-rooms for years and nothing much was done about it until he spewed anti-Semitic remarks in the direction of the Jewish producer of his hit TV show “Two and a Half Men.” In a short time he was fired and his role has been given to Ashton Kutcher, raised Catholic, but now heavily into Judaism and Kabala.

And of course there is the story that will live forever, even after its protagonist dies, the story of Bernie Madoff (a Strauss-Kahn lookalike, or is it the other way around?) who perpetrated the biggest scam in history (will he replace Meyer Lansky as the chief exhibit in the bad-guy Jewish Hall of Fame?) and ruined thousands of people, many of them fellow Jews.

The thing about these stories is that they all point in (at least) two directions.

psst. fellas? It's a very big world out there. I think perhaps some run in closed circles. Seeing teh Jew connection everywhere.

But the majority of the people -- Americans -- I know, didn't view any of these stories through a "Dude is Jewish" lens.

(Strauss-Kahn is Jewish? Betcha most Americans only knew he was French, name sounds more German actually, and were content to leave it at that. These men are being judged individually, based on the consequences of their personal choices and alleged actions, not any background trivia... As to Ashton Kucher's chosen religion? Who even knew? Really, the whole article reads like Adam Sandler's Hannukah "outing" song.)

But thanks to Fish and others for needing to point out these miniscule commonalities, and identify each by ethnically lumping. Better to assume, not so subtly one might add, the mantle of perpetual victimhood: ie, "They're* picking on a people as a whole, not flawed individuals who just happen to share this background trait or that."

Thus, the confident conclusion:

Those who offer the criticism can never quite be sure that their distaste for Israel’s actions with respect to the Palestinians is entirely innocent of the influence of centuries of vilification. And that seems to be where we are.

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* "They" being the unnamed, non-Jewish others who apparently are incapable of independent thought without falling back on age-old stereotypes, according to Mr. Fish's line of thinking. Thank goodness most people think outside such circles.

Really, it's the only hope we have.