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Hitherto the country’s worst president and one of the most contemptible politicians, now Jimmy Carter has decided to pile on the hapless clueless president. Power Line has the story. Will somebody please put Jimmah in a home where he can’t be interviewed?
When Jimmy Carter starts criticizing your foreign policy as weak and indecisive, you are getting to the bottom of the barrel. Jimmy unloaded on Barack Obama yesterday:
Former President Jimmy Carter is criticizing President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, saying he has shifting policies and waited too long to take action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
In an interview published Tuesday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 39th president said the Obama administration, by not acting sooner, allowed ISIL to build up its strength.
Carter said Obama’s air campaign against ISIL in Iraq has “a possibility of success,” provided that some troops are available on the ground. He did not specify whether he meant U.S. or other ground forces.
The former Democratic president and Georgia governor also said the president has shifted his Middle East policy on several occasions.
When you’ve lost Jimmy “Boots on the Ground” Carter, whom haven’t you lost? That’s got to be a short list. …
Peter Wehner has presidential sized worries.
… What is worth paying increasing attention to, I think, is the emotional state of the president. It’s in front of his donors that his most authentic feelings seem to surface, and it’s clear he’s becoming increasingly isolated, embittered, and thin skinned. His excuse making is now chronic and habitual. He’s even displaying some signs of paranoia. Everyone is against him.
Obama is becoming Nixonian.
The man who by a wide margin has received the most worshipful press coverage in at least the last half-century is complaining that the press is mistreating him. A president who routinely misleads the public on matters large and small, who first ran for president on the promise of unifying America but governs based on dividing it, and who allows the most important national-security matters to be decided by crass political considerations is blaming others for feeding cynicism. …
Ron Fournier writes on Panetta and his book.
It’s uncanny how the former CIA/Pentagon chief’s memoir and book-tour interviews channel the frustrations of Democrats who want the president to succeed but consider him a near-failure, who raised their concerns directly with the president or with his team, and were told to stop their worrying.
Actually, the White House calls it “bed-wetting.” Team Obama is dismissive of anybody who dares to say the emperor may need some clothes. Mocked and/or ignored by the White House, these Democrats send messages through journalists.
Not Panetta. He wrote a book. …
… In a column called, “Will the president listen to Leon Panetta?” Balz also urged the president and his team to “take to heart the critique from someone who has served both this president and the country loyally for many years.” I can’t imagine they will. Nor do most Democrats in this town have much hope for an outbreak of humility at the White House.
It starts with the president—this inability to accept criticism and learn from it—and so Obama seems destined to leave office no more comfortable or competent with the vague arts of leadership than he was six years ago.
Peggy Noonan gives the whip to Panetta.
… this book is smugly, grubbily partisan. Republicans aren’t bright and never good, though some— Bob Dole comes up—are reasonable. Republicans presidents tend to be weak or care only for the rich. He really, really hates Newt Gingrich . His headline on the entire Reagan era: “Poverty spread and deepened during the Reagan years.” Under Bill Clinton “the economy boomed,” “poverty shrunk,” and “leadership matters.” Reagan, in fairness, was less terrible than Mr. Panetta expected, “less ideological and partisan.” Mr. Clinton is “ravenously intelligent.” Mr. Panetta lauds Mr. Clinton’s “astonishing ability to sift through facts” and his “empathy for average people.” The compliments are at once lackeyish and patronizing.
In the epilogue Mr. Panetta seems to catch himself and writes, dictates or edits in the thought that he does not mean “to suggest that Democrats are good and Republicans are bad.” But that is what he repeatedly suggests.
Here’s what is disturbing: to think this is one of Washington’s wise men.
Here’s what’s true. At 76, at the end of a half-century-long, richly rewarded career, with perspective having presumably been gained and smallness washed away, in a book of history and reflection written at a time of high national peril, a lack of political graciousness, and the continued presence of a dumb and grinding partisanship, is unattractive to the point of unseemly. …
… Some say he wrote the book to help detach Hillary Clinton ’s fortunes from those of Mr. Obama. Maybe, but Mr. Panetta is savvy, shrewd and quick to see where things are going. I suspect he’s trying to detach his entire party’s fortunes from Mr. Obama. Reading this book and considering its timing, you get the impression that’s the real worthy battle on his mind.
Ed Morrissey says the president’s problems are all of his own creation.
… When the improvements don’t materialize, Presidents tend to start looking for new talent. Bush’s surge strategy was preceded by the resignation of the unpopular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and crafted by his replacement Robert Gates. Cabinet members and White House staffers are almost always expendable when the boss needs a boost, a way to signal a change of direction that implies a shift in blame to those departing.
Barack Obama is in trouble now, but in part because the opposite has happened. Gates and his successor Leon Panetta, both widely respected across the political spectrum, have published memoirs of their years in the Obama administration, and they have spared no feelings with their former commander in chief.
Combined with a somewhat milder rebuke from Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, we have the unusual specter of having three members of the president’s national-security team blaming Obama for not listening to their advice on national security while the President is still in office. …
John Steele Gordon spots hypocrisy.
“If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for,” President Obama said on Tuesday. “Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”
Where did he say it? According to the New York Post, in the hyper-exclusive Conyers Farm area of very upscale Greenwich, Connecticut. Conyers Farm has ten-acre zoning. He was speaking at a fundraiser at the $26-million estate of a man named, believe it or not, Rich Richman. His audience consisted of people who had paid up to $32,400 a head to have dinner with him. He had flown up from New York City, where he had earlier attended a fundraiser hosted by George Soros (net worth $24 billion) and Paul Tudor Jones (net worth $4.3 billion). The flight was in a convoy of four helicopters and they landed at the Greenwich Polo Club. Polo, of course, is the most expensive sport you can play on land. (A polo field measures 300 by 160 yards, bigger than nine football fields.)
So the president was telling a bunch of millionaires and billionaires to pony up in order to prevent the country from being run for the benefit of millionaires and billionaires, the one segment of the American socioeconomic spectrum that has prospered exceedingly during the Obama administration.
And politicians wonder why people don’t like them or trust them.
Jonah Goldberg on the Columbian hooker kerfuffle and why the white house lied.
In news that must have left my friends at the New York Post — never mind the gang at The Daily Show – with a renewed confidence that ours is a just and beneficent God, the White House has been caught covering up a scandal involving a Cartagena hooker.
The phrase “Cartagena hooker” alone is a mellifluous gift to ink-stained wretches everywhere, but the revelation that the White House reassigned the alleged client of the aforementioned Andean call girl to the State Department’s office of “Global Women’s Issues” is the sort of flourish Tom Wolfe or Chris Buckley wouldn’t dare attempt as satire. …
… The underlying scandal is fairly minor. But if the White House would falsify records and lie to the public about this, is it really so hard to imagine that it would deceive the public – and Congress – about larger issues like, say, Benghazi? (Just this week, former Obama secretary of defense Leon Panetta told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that the infamous White House talking points on the attack were essentially bogus.)
But it also speaks to the seedy way Obama talks about politics generally. The president loves to denounce a cynical system where politics comes before the public good. He rails about a system where fat cats live by a different set of rules than the little guy, and money buys special treatment and access. But the way he operates runs completely counter to all that. Which is why the only person to come out of this scandal in an honorable light is the Cartagena hooker.
Ron Fournier too.
I don’t have a strong opinion on Colombian hookers. The after-hours wonts of a 25-year-old White House volunteer make no difference to me. There are bigger stories better suited for the word “scandal” than the 2012 drinking-and-carousing embarrassment that cost 10 Secret Service agents their jobs.
But I don’t like government cover-ups, favoritism, and nepotism—all of which are exposed in the latest Washington Post investigation of the U.S. Secret Service. The story by Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura (“White House Knew of Possible Tie to Cartagena”) also hints at a rift between the president’s political and security teams that makes me worry about the safety of Barack Obama and future presidents.
“As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved.
But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member—yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.” …
The cartoonists are good today.