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Charles Krauthammer answers the president’s bin Laden bragging by showing his appeasement of Russia and Iran.
… Barack Obama didn’t appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage.
However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one’s foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made.
And here the story is different. Take Obama’s two major foreign policy initiatives — toward Russia and Iran.
The administration came into office determined to warm relations with Russia. It was called “reset,” an antidote to the “dangerous drift” (Vice President Biden’s phrase) in relations during the Bush years.
In fact, Bush’s increasing coolness toward Russia was grounded in certain unpleasant realities: growing Kremlin authoritarianism that was systematically dismantling a fledgling democracy; naked aggression against a small, vulnerable, pro-American state (Georgia); the drive to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in the near-abroad and; support, from Syria to Venezuela, of the world’s more ostentatiously anti-American regimes.
Unmoored from such inconvenient realities, Obama went about his reset. The signature decision was the abrupt cancellation of a Polish- and Czech-based U.S. missile defense system bitterly opposed by Moscow.
The cancellation deeply undercut two very pro-American allies who had aligned themselves with Washington in the face of both Russian threats and popular unease. Obama not only left them twisting in the wind, he showed the world that the Central Europeans’ hard-won independence was only partial and tentative. With American acquiescence, their ostensibly sovereign decisions were subject to a Russian veto. …
In honor of our bug-out we have three posts by Max Boot on events in Iraq. Here’s most of one.
Those were some pretty astonishing statements that President Obama made after his meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq: He said that “what we have now achieved is an Iraq that is self-governing, that is inclusive and that has enormous potential.”
Only the last part of that sentence is true: Iraq does have “enormous potential”–both good and bad. It could become another opulent petrostate–or it could revert to a hellish state of civil war. Either is possible at this point because Iraq is only barely “self-governing” and its government is acting in ways that are less “inclusive” all the time–witness Maliki’s arrest of more than 600 people on vague charges of “Baathism.”
Obama’s happy talk is seriously at odds with reality–and I’m sure Obama knows it. He is only attempting to put his abandonment of Iraq in the best possible light.
In the process he is taking an enormous gamble, not only with the security of Iraq, the United States, and the entire Middle East but also with his own historical reputation. True, the pullout from Iraq is popular today. It won’t be so popular a year or two from now if the result of the U.S. pullout is greater instability or tyranny. Obama will then shoulder the bulk of the blame for messing up the end game of a war that he never supported. …
Bart Hinkle found some hypocrites in Fairfax County.
You can’t get a whole lot more Democratic than Fairfax County, just outside of D.C. Barack Obama carried Fairfax 60-38 against John McCain in 2008. That’s 6 percentage points higher than Obama’s statewide margin, which Fairfax helped inflate because it is the commonwealth’s largest locality: 13.5 percent of Virginians live there. Four years before, George W. Bush carried Virginia with 54 percent of the vote — but not Fairfax, where John Kerry got 53 percent.
The county board of supervisors reflects the split as well. Seven of the 10 members are Democrats. That makes its recent stance on state government rather amusing.
Each year localities around Virginia draw up their wish lists for the General Assembly session that convenes in January. Virginia is a Dillon Rule state, which means that localities are under the thumb of state government and must go hat in hand to the legislature to get permission to do many things. Fairfax recently completed its wish list for the 2012 session.
And what do the supervisors want from Richmond? “I think the simple message is, ‘Please try to leave us alone,’ ” says Supervisor Jeff McKay.
How very tea party of them. Perhaps Fairfax should replace its county seal with the Gadsden flag — that yellow banner, popular at tea party rallies, with the coiled snake and the legend, “Don’t Tread on Me.” …
… In the eyes of contemporary liberalism everyday Americans need the firm guidance of their liberal betters lest they make poor choices or, through their choices, produce results liberals dislike, such as unbridled commerce or economic disparity.
Americans, say liberals, cannot be left to their own devices. So it is entertaining to watch a locality where such an ideology defines the political center – Fairfax is a bedroom community for federal bureaucrats – chafe under the very sort of paternalism it otherwise endorses.
There’s a lesson in that. Even people who benefit from big government love it less when they have to live under it.
Now that we are heading to energy independence, the liberal left is attacking natural gas; the fuel they used to love. Their real goal is for our country to be weak. American.com has the story.
Just a few years ago, the liberal Pew Center of Global Climate Change, among many environmental groups, was heralding natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a more climate friendly energy supply”—an interim step on the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Now, “progressive” environmental groups demonize natural gas, and shale gas in particular, as a “bridge to nowhere.” What’s the real story behind the flip-flop?
An investigative piece in Ethical Corporation magazine, “Who Blew Up the ‘Bridge to the Future,’” examines the troubling truth behind the turnaround. …
… The most intriguing question lying ahead is whether politics—the ideological forces lining up against unconventional sources of natural gas—will trump the science. Anti-shale gas advocacy groups are forging bizarre alliances, including with the Russians and the Iranians who thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades.
That won’t change the facts in the ground. Natural gas is no longer the bridge to the future. It IS the future—unless “progressives” kill it.
Indulging in some over-the-top hyperbole, Richard Salsman points out that “takers” like Gingrich and Obama are attacking the “maker” Romney.
Despite decades of economic experience and personal familiarity with the logic of market exchange, many people today still sympathize with the myth that free markets left to their own devices are prone to periodic “failures,” breakdowns, or crises, while government intervention, money-printing, and wealth redistribution allegedly “stimulate” an economy or “smooth” the business cycle. Few myths are more harmful, since the precise opposite is true: markets left free (while operating under the rule of law) work very well and create vast wealth, while state spending, taxing, regulating, borrowing and inflating only usurp economic vitality.
A simple and memorable way to keep straight the crucial distinction between “economic power” (the power to produce) and “political power” (the power to coerce) is by a terminological duality – “makers” versus takers” – as incorporated in Edmund Contoski’s 1997 book. Despite persistent Marxist claims dating as far back as 1848, these two powers (the economic and political) are in no way synonymous. Indeed, they’re antonymous.
Economic power is creative, productive, and voluntary; it offers incentives, gains, rewards. Political power is destructive and involuntary; you must obey it, for it imposes punishments, losses, and penalties. This is no brief for anarchy, as many libertarians insist; it’s a case for government limited constitutionally to undertaking its only valid purpose – the protection of individual rights (including property rights) against the initiation of force or fraud (whether from home or abroad) – and whose power is limited to penalizing, incarcerating or destroying real criminals (those who rape, rob, pillage, kill, or defraud), not market makers. …