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Charles Krauthammer reflects on the foreign policy debacles of this administration.
… It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.
The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.
What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?
Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.
“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”
Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America. …
… At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”
A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”
Noemie Emery has more.
… Most of all, he gave the back of his hand to the Iranian dissidents in 2009 who came so close to deposing their leaders, trusting instead in his mythical powers to coax the fanatics in power to reason. Now that he’s failed — and who could have guessed it? — his refusal to stand with Israel in the face of Iran’s threats to destroy it make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran that much more likely. And when violence broke out on Sept. 11, Obama’s response was to arrest an American citizen who had made a tacky film about Muslims, not much worse than those made about Catholics by many Americans, transgressing the man’s constitutional right to free speech.
Disliked and distrusted by those in his world, he isn’t respected by those in the other, who express their contempt without reservation. A “Barack Obama” with his name and his skin who was in his heart more like Reagan or Kennedy might have won these worlds over.
He wasn’t. He didn’t. He had his chance, and he blew it. And now he should go.
And Mort Zuckerman covers Obama’s domestic debacles.
How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation’s “recovery” has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that’s adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.
At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week’s revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week’s average of 371,750.
These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July’s 8.3 percent. That’s a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That’s roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month. …
John Kass says welcome to stagflation.
… QE3 will not have much of an effect on the real economy, but it will raise inflationary expectations. (It already has, as since June 2012, the implied inflation rate imbedded in TIPS is up by nearly 50 basis points.)
Inflation is taxation without legislation. It is not market-valuation friendly. …
… Economic bellwether FedEx’s (FDX) announced yesterday that the company is reducing its EPS guidance for its May 2013 year from a range between $6.90 and $7.40 to a range between $6.20 and $6.60. …
… demand from Chinese consumers “is not increasing at a significant rate, contrary to everybody’s hopes” and he is “somewhat amused” by observers of China who “completely underestimate” the impact of China’s export slowdown.
Stagflation is at our door.
Obama says he can’t change Washington from inside. David Harsanyi reminds us of 2008 campaign promises.
Today, at a Univision forum President Barack Obama said this: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”
That’s quite the change from what he’s said before, in fact, in many ways it was the core of his argument in 2008.
In 2008, in Bristol, Va., for instance, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.”
In the 2008 Obama campaign guide, Blueprint for Change, feel free to turn to the section titled (page 17): “BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO CHANGE WASHINGTON.”
Here is again in 2008: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”
And, at a rally in April 30, 2008, the president said: ”I do not believe change will happen unless we change our politics in Washington.”
The Right Scoop likes Romney’s rapid response to the latest Obama excuse.
Fantastic Romney response to Obama’s claim that he can’t change Washington from the inside, that it can only be changed from the outside. Romney tells the crowd that Obama has already thrown in the white flag of surrender on changing Washington from the inside so we’ll give him a chance to change it from the outside in November. BAM!
Yale prof David Gelernter writes about the election in PowerLine. He writes along the line of Pickerhead’s thoughts which are that Romney will win, but the really discouraging thing is the election is close. What is wrong with this country? The worst president ever and he has a chance? He should be at just 15 percent in the polls; supported by bigoted blacks and fools from the criminal class that makes up the education industry.
… Remember that Obama has demonstrated the competence of Carter with the integrity of Nixon. He has given us persistent unemployment and a pathetic recovery, Obamacare people don’t want, a pipeline project knifed in the back without explanation while money disappears down the great Green sinkhole, a staggering debt and huge yearly deficits, poisoned relations with Congress, an incompetent Department of Justice, states and cities wrestling with financial collapse across the country, schools that keep getting worse—not to mention calamitous security leaks, the Middle East in flames and Iran’s terrorist government closer to nuclear weapons every day.
Carter for all his sanctimonious incompetence had a certain humility. He announced that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had opened his eyes to the evil of Communism–sad but honest. And Carter was never suspected of personal corruption. Of many contenders, the White House leaks will most likely emerge as the biggest Obama scandal.
Romney will win this election. But the wacko-left Culture Machine won’t fall silent; the schools and colleges won’t suddenly become patriotic, serious, politically neutral. The entertainment industry won’t discover open-mindedness regarding Judeo-Christianity and the Bible. Nor will mainstream churches and liberal synagogues suddenly catch on to the moral and spiritual greatness of America. Unless conservatives start taking education and culture seriously, an election day will arrive in which the outcome is never in doubt, because at least 51 percent of the electorate has been trained which way to vote. At which point the GOP might as well close shop and take the rest of the century off.
Gateway Pundit does a job on the creepy new Obama flag.
… If the image looks familiar it could be because the red stripes resemble the bloody Benghazi hand prints. The bloodstained walls at the US consulate revealed that the US officials were dragged to their death by terrorists. …
James Taranto has more on the flag.
… It seems we have a president who thinks the national symbol is the bald ego. Bier notes that the campaign previously used the “no red states, no blue states” slogan on Twitter, to promote a T-shirt. It shows a colorful map of the 48 contiguous states–well, of some of the 48 contiguous states. Obama’s face blocks Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota; almost all of Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota and North Dakota; about half of New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming; and the southeast corner of Montana. If his head gets much bigger, it will eclipse the entire country.