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Marc Thiessen says the president has a nice partner in Russia.
Remember when Barack Obama came to office and immediately threw our allies Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus — canceling our missile defense agreements with them in an effort to “reset” our relations with Russia?
How’s that reset working out for you, Mr. President?
Ok, maybe it was too much to ask for Russia to stop backing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as he slaughters tens of thousands, or to help put pressure on Iran to stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
But surely our relations with Russia were “reset” enough that Vladimir Putin would not poke Obama in the eye by granting asylum to fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
Apparently not.
So little respect does Putin have for President Obama, that his government did not so much as give the White House advance notice of the decision to give Snowden refugee status.
The White House is so angry that officials are reportedly considering canceling a planned Moscow Summit with Putin later this year. That is probably making virtue out of necessity. In his June speech in Berlin, Obama made reaching a new agreement with Moscow on nuclear weapons reductions the centerpiece of his address. But there has been little or no progress on an agreement since then, and the odds of there being a treaty signing in Moscow were slim to none.
Now Obama can cancel the summit that was already a disaster in the making, and blame it all on Snowden.
Win-win.
The big test: will Snowden continue leaking from his Russian refuge? …
Andrew Malcolm thinks it might be time to reset the reset.
Impressive!
President Obama’s policy reset with Russia is working out as well as his economic stimulus, Guantanamo closing, spending cutbacks, green energy investments, debt discipline, Benghazi investigation, Egyptian fallout, midterm campaigning, Syrian dictator-ousting, Bush-blaming, Libya-calming, Iran-isolating, job approval, budget-passing, Kim Jong-un-taming, ObamaCare implementation and Muslim-outreaching.
American presidents have done naive things in the past. Few if any have been so totally and embarrassingly fruitless as this Democrat’s self-imposed suck-up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And yet this Democrat remains hopeful and stubbornly continues them despite the absolute absence of any encouraging returns. You’d think Obama was a Cubs fan.
In fact, Obama has just endured another diplomatic slap, with Putin’s government granting NSA leaker Edward Snowden a year’s asylum, despite pleas from Obama, John Kerry and none other than the administration’s Where’s Waldo press secretary Jay Carney.
The former head of the KGB may not realize who he’s messing with. On Thursday Carney really let the aspiring dictator have it:
“We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step, despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him.”
Not only those tough words, but Carney also warned that Obama was — are you sitting down? — reevaluating a private meeting with Putin at the upcoming G-Whatever Summit in Russia. They just met in Ireland. They just talked on the phone–about Snowden. That phony Crayola doesn’t even work on Senate Democrats anymore, let alone a divorced Russian spymaster. …
More on this from Streetwise Professor who looks into the future for Eddie Snowden.
… The idea that Snowden could just fly into Moscow without the knowledge, and indeed, the connivance, of the Russian security forces is beyond risible. There is some question of when Russian security forces took control of Snowden. Some (like Catherine Fitzpatrick, I believe) suspect that Snowden was (wittingly or unwittingly) a Russian asset while in Hawaii. I am not of that view, but now I have little doubt that once he boarded that Aeroflot plane bound for Moscow from Hong Kong, he was little more than a fly caught in Putin’s web.
And he will remain in that web for, well, pretty much forever. If he had returned to the US, Snowden’s sentence would have been measured in years. Once he chose Russia, the sentence is life.
Charles Krauthammer doesn’t think the GOP is in bad shape, unless they do something foolish with the budget or the debt limit.
A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it’s tea party insurgents vs. get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: (a) national security and (b) Obamacare.
(a) National security
Gov. Chris Christie recently challengedSen. Rand Paul over his opposition to the National Security Agency (NSA) metadata program. Paul has also tangled with Sen. John McCain and other internationalists over drone warfare, democracy promotion and, more generally, intervention abroad.
So what else is new? The return of the most venerable strain of conservative foreign policy — isolationism — was utterly predictable. Isolationists dominated the party until Pearl Harbor and then acquiesced to an activist internationalism during the Cold War because of a fierce detestation of communism.
With communism gone, the conservative coalition should have fractured long ago. This was delayed by Sept. 11 and the rise of radical Islam. But now, 12 years into that era — after Afghanistan and Iraq, after drone wars and the NSA revelations — the natural tension between isolationist and internationalist tendencies has resurfaced.
In fact, both parties are internally split on domestic surveillance, as reflected in the very close recent House vote on curbing the NSA. This is not civil war. It’s a healthy debate that helps recalibrate the delicate line between safety and security as conditions (threat level and surveillance technology, for example) change. …
Mickey Kaus has an interesting column on obama’s five disconnects.
Pivot or Divot? On one level, President Obama achieved admirable transparency in his recent Knox College address. He succinctly described most of the forces that have helped increase income inequality over the past three decades, primarily trade (many unskilled jobs are now performed overseas) and technology (which arguably increases the value of both education and “star” job performance). That these trends were obvious over a decade ago, when Bill Clinton was running for office–or that Obama himself has talked about them for years–doesn’t make them less real. They provide the context of contemporary politics.
On another level, the speech was stunningly dishonest … OK, maybe that’s harsh. Put it this way–it exposed some big disconnects. At least four of them, actually. Here they are, in order of increasing significance:
Disconnect 1: Between what Obama says he’s doing and what he’s been doing.
“Washington’s taken its eye off the ball. And I’m here to say this needs to stop. … Our focus has to be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you — the people we represent. (Applause.) That’s what we have to spend our time on and our energy on and our focus on.
… [R]educing poverty, reducing inequality, growing opportunity. That’s what we need. (Cheers, applause.) That’s what we need. That’s what we need right now. (Cheers, applause.)
That’s what we need to be focused on.” [E.A.]
You would almost think it was Republicans who had spent the past few months focusing on first, gun control and second, immigration–two topics Obama himself classifies as “other key priorities,” not “basic economic issues.” Shorter Obama: ’Washington must stop being distracted by the off-point initiatives that I and my staff have been pushing.’ .. …
Slate reports on the most dangerous volcano in North America.
When you live in Mexico, you get used to people in other countries thinking you are in a war-zone sort of apocalypse state. If it’s not narcos, it’s earthquakes, kidnappers, or chupacabras. These days, the thing for Americans to fear in Mexico is the volcano Popocatépetl, lovingly called Popo, which is chucking ash all over the place. Notice that many reports find it necessary to give Mexico City’s population alongside reports that it’s active. As if that number might drop significantly, very soon.
Now, for those who live here, it all seems silly. I didn’t even notice the ash—though some of these reports make you think it is piling up on the sidewalks. I have noticed the air quality is a little off for the middle of the rainy season (when afternoon showers clean the skies). But all in all, the rumbling of our hulking neighbor hasn’t affected me. Far more annoying is the whole since-you-live-in-Mexico-you’ll-probably-be-dead-tomorrow attitude from friends and family. …
… I asked White what is the most dangerous volcano in North America. He thought for a minute and then listed Mount Shasta in California and Mount Hood in Oregon, which are unpredictable but too remote to cause much harm.
“But the one that probably keeps me up at night the most is …