Category Archives: Foreign
Bystander President
The NYT has called President Obama the bystander president because he’s deluged by events that seem to have nothing to do with him – unless they’re good. Like the U.S. oil boom which he fought against tooth and nail and now takes credit for.
Here’s a Dana Milbank Washington Post column pondering the problem.
Bystander Protector
Obama is fond of Czars. Could Valerie Jarrett be his protective Rasputin? John Fund thinks so. He quotes her appraisal of the president:
“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
Says Fund, “As a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team”
Pottery Barn Rules for Health Care
Back when George W Bush was putting together his coalition of the willing, to kill people and break stuff in Iraq, Colin Powell warned they were under Pottery Barn rules: you break it you own it.
It appears that Democrats have broken the health care system. They transformed it by cramming through the Affordable Care Act, under special rules, on a Christmas Eve, with a completely partisan vote, featuring Cornhusker Kickbacks and Louisiana Purchases. Now the thing doesn’t work.
Pottery Barn Rules
Rich Lowry says that rather than try to help fix it, Republicans should let them own it.
Unhappy Saudis
I don’t think it’s because he listens to their phone calls (though he probably does), but the dependably ungrateful Saudis have had it with Obama.
They think he abandoned Mubarak, is going wobbly on Iran, and is gutless on Syria. Besides that, despite all his best efforts, Obama has more oil than they do. Basically they don’t trust the guy.
The WSJ’s Daniel Henninger deals with this, and more, in a column “Obama’s Credibility is Melting”.
No Obama / Rouhani Hand Shake
I missed posting this one while on the USO trip. It’s from the big UN confab in New York last month.
Iran has a new president with a nice smile. President Obama put out the word he’d be happy to shake hands with President Rouhani but Rouhani snubbed him. It kind of reminded me of Ted Kennedy’s snub of President Carter at the 1980 Dem convention.
Rouhani Takes Call From Great Satan
The Iranian leader later accepted a phone call from President Obama. Wonder how that went… “Mr. President, please hold for President Obama?” ..or “The President is with a client state right now, please hold.
Exceptional Exceptionalism
Putin wrote an op-ed in the NYT last week mocking Obama and the idea of American Exceptionalism. He scored bonus points because everyone knows Obama himself is not so wild about the idea. He thinks America is exceptional in the same way Britain and Greece are exceptional. Which is to say, not very. But that didn’t stop him last week from asking Americans to support an attack on Syrian president Assad – with something more than a pinprick, yet unbelievably small – because we are exceptional.
The abuse continued this week when a Russian minister claimed the Navy Ship Yard shooting was an example of American Exceptionalism.
Exceptional and Weird
Maureen Dowd had a few thoughts of her own about the president concerning the partisan speech he delivered while the shooting was still going on:
“The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore… Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.”
When the going gets tough the weird get going.
