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We haven’t visited with President Dilettante for a few weeks. We’ll start with Kate Banlon’s post on how he screwed up Egypt policy. Featured here is an interview with Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense, who claims the president went against the advice of the “entire national security team” during the Egyptian coup that ousted Hosni Mubarak. Once this administration is out of power we can expect more of this in a coming ”year of the long knives” as we will learn much more about this administration’s foreign policy mistakes.
In a preview clip of a Fox News special called “Rising Threats — Shrinking Military,” former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Bret Baier that the president went against the advice of the “entire national security team” during the Egyptian coup that ousted the country’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in 2013.
According to Gates, Obama called for Mubarak’s immediate removal despite his national security team urging him to be cautious.
“Literally, the entire national security team recommended unanimously handling Mubarak differently than we did,” Gates said. “And the president took the advice of three junior backbenchers in terms of how to treat Mubarak. …
Along this line, we have a USA Today article about a Bill Clinton speech knocking obama’s “awful legacy.”
Former President Bill Clinton, stumping on behalf of his wife in Washington state on Monday, urged people to vote for Hillary Clinton “if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us.”
It was not initially clear if it was an unintended gaffe or something he meant to say, but it didn’t take long for Republicans to seize on it and post the clip to YouTube. Here’s the full quote: …
How does he always manage to get it wrong? Matthew Continetti has an answer.
Russia announces the withdrawal of its forces from Syria. The decision is a surprise—President Obama is shocked. This is a feeling he experiences often.
He was astonished when Vladimir Putin intervened in the Syrian conflict in 2015. He was startled when ISIS conquered a fair portion of Mesopotamia in 2014. He was jarred when Putin invaded Crimea, and launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine that same year. Rogue states pursue policies contrary to what Obama the Wise sees as their self-interest, and the presidential response never varies. He is stunned. He is saddened. He is sanguine.
Bewilderment happens when reality dispels illusions. I used to think President Obama’s illusions were simply the product of his ideology, of his faith in the universality of human reason, in the idea of historical progress, of his ambivalence toward American power. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s epic, absorbing, revealing interview with the president in The Atlantic, I have come to a different conclusion. It’s not just ideology that drives Obama’s cluelessness. It’s narcissism. …
… His international background, son of a Kenyan and a Kansan, who spent time in Indonesia and Pakistan, is why Obama declared himself a “citizen of the world” in his 2008 Berlin speech. And his personal familiarity with Islam inspired him to deliver the Cairo speech in 2009, when as Goldberg puts it, “he spoke about Muslims in his own family, and his childhood years in Indonesia, and confessed America’s sins even as he criticized those in the Muslim world who demonized the U.S.”
Seven years later, the Greater Middle East that Obama sought to reshape by his mere appearance and oratory is a dumpster fire. State collapse, sectarian war, slavery, crucifixion, beheadings, chemical warfare, genocide characterize the region. The foreign leader who has most consistently outwitted him, Vladimir Putin, enjoys free rein in Eastern Europe and Syria. And the region of the world to which Obama hoped to “pivot”—here too for partly biographical reasons—is engulfed in a deepening territorial dispute between China and the nations it bullies.
Confidence is one thing. But Obama is more than confident. He’s narcissistic. He looks at the world and sees nothing but his reflection: rational, cool, unmoved, and always right. When reality surprises him, it’s not because he’s in error. It’s because Putin or Assad or the mullahs have failed to live up to the standards he’s set for them. Forget about them being true to themselves. They’re not being true to Barack Obama. And Barack Obama, lest we forget, is all that matters.
More like that from Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post as she reviews all his disasters.
… As an intelligent man, as the consequences of these four policy lines began smacking him in the face, Obama could have been expected to change course. George W. Bush for instance changed his foreign policy stance from one of sparing internationalism before September 11 to democratic interventionism in its aftermath. And when his democratic interventionism failed in Iraq, he abandoned it in favor of a more traditional realist approach.
Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were also quick to change their policies when they were faced with evidence they had failed. Ronald Reagan changed his policy for bringing down the Soviet Union from one of confrontation to one based on cooperation when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
In other words, unlike his recent predecessors Obama has never shifted gears. He has never found fault with his judgment. He has never revisited a decision.
It is easy to chalk this up to arrogance. Obama is certainly one of the most arrogant leaders the US has ever had – if not the most arrogant president in US history. But given his intelligence, it is hard to escape the impression that Obama’s epic arrogance, which makes it impossible for him to admit failure, is just as much of a style preference as a character trait. That is, arrogance, like coolness and “Spockian” rationalism, is an attitude that he has adopted on purpose.
What that purpose may be is indicated by the consistent strands of his foreign policy. Obama’s belief in America’s moral turpitude, his eagerness to trample US credibility, reject traditional US policy goals; his refusal to see the dangers inherent in his radical policies or acknowledge their failures let alone accept responsibility for their failures, and his trampling of US allies while appeasing its enemies all point to Obama’s true doctrine.
Disasters cling to him everywhere. Babalu Blog reports on 200 Cuban dissidents rounded up the day before his visit.
Cuba’s apartheid Castro dictatorship continues to enjoy the empowerment and impunity that Obama’s Hope and Change Cuba policy has so generously bestowed upon them. Lacking any concern or fear of reprisals from the White House, Cuban State Security hunted down and arrested more than 200 peaceful dissidents on the day before Obama’s arrival to the island.
In a normal world with a normal American president, vile and heinous actions such as these would bring serious consequences to Cuba’s repressive regime. But this is neither a normal world nor do we have a normal president. Obama will continue with his “fun” trip to apartheid Cuba, comply with the demands of his dictatorial hosts, and the best anyone can hope for is a vague reference to human rights conveyed in a few mumbled and incoherent words that no doubt will also be delivered with a qualifier that the U.S. has a human rights problem as well. …
Then we learn from the Weekly Standard he thinks he has the world’s largest carbon footprint. Someone will have to tell President Narcissist it is the American presidency that has the large footprint. He just happens to be the current occupant.
President Obama once “ruefully” admitted to staff that he personally is the planet’s largest source of carbon emissions, according to an anecdote published in The Atlantic.
The brief aside was mentioned by author Jeffrey Goldberg in a passage about the burden of Obama’s worldwide travel arrangements. …
Not to be outdone in imperial trappings, Free Beacon reports one Joe Biden night in Mexico City for him and his staff ran up hotel bills of $538,528.
Vice President Joe Biden’s hotel tab for his recent one-night stay in Mexico City cost taxpayers more than $500,000.
Biden, who attended an annual economic summit with Mexican leaders, stayed at the luxury Intercontinental Presidente Hotel. Biden led a delegation attending the summit that included Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.
The trip called for 260 hotel rooms and meeting spaces, according to a State Department contract. The total hotel tab was $538,528.65. …
Turning our attention to the president’s Mid-East debacles, Glenn Reynolds, law prof, has a powerful prescient perceptive post on the failures of President Che’s Iraq bugout. Prescient because it proceeded by one day ISIS attacks in Belgium. Follow the link to be treated to Joe Biden claiming Iraq to be one of the great successes of this administration and a whole series of Democrats claiming Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.
It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.
And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes. …
When the Tea Party showed up lots of people were critical and dismissive. People like obama cheerleader David Brooks. Glenn Reynolds, in his USA Today column says Brooks is getting the Trump he deserves.
.. In San Francisco, too, tea party protesters met pro-Obama activists and picked up their trash. “John,” author of The City Square blog wrote: “As Obama supporters moved along in the line to get into the fundraiser, they left behind an impressive amount of trash … Tea Partiers shouted ‘pick up your garbage’ and ‘this is San Francisco, what about recycling?’ There was no response. They chanted ‘Obama leaves a mess.’ Still no response. Eventually, a tea partier (wearing the black cowboy hat) crosses over and starts to pick up the trash on his own. Other tea partiers join him. Another manages to find a trash bag. Soon the trash is being collected.”
Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.
So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.
When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 ”For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. …
Charles Krauthammer compares and contrasts Belgium and Cuba in a NewsBusters post.
Fox News contributor, frequent Special Report panelist, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer was given his own segment on Tuesday night’s Fox News Channel (FNC) show in light of the Islamic terror attacks in Brussels and he used his airtime to berate President Obama for his “ideological holiday trip” to communist Cuba “while the world burns.”
Further, he chalked the President’s Cuba trip in light of the Brussels attacks to the latest illustration of the disconnect between “the real world” and Obama’s “fantasy world he inhabits where Cuba is of some geopolitical significance.”
Host Bret Baier brought Krauthammer on just after the 6:14 p.m. Eastern mark and he first mentioned that the President devoted only “51 seconds of his speech today in Havana” to the horrifying events hours later across the Atlantic.
During that speech, Krauthammer opined that “the whole story of his presidency and its foreign policy was seen in the split-screen” with “video footage of the attack in Belgium” that marked “the real world” on one end with “Obama in the fantasy world he inhabits where Cuba is of some geopolitical significance” at the other. …
Rich Lowry writes on the president’s Che moment.
President Barack Obama inadvertently found the perfect photo-op for his Cuba visit at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana.
A news photo at Revolution Square caught Obama standing together with American and Cuban officials, with an enormous mural of the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara looming over his shoulder on the adjacent Ministry of the Interior building.
Che is, of course, ubiquitous on dorm-room walls and T-shirts in the United States, and a hero of the Cuban revolution. He also was a coldblooded killer who set up the Cuban gulag and presided over summary executions of political prisoners (trials were, per Che, “an archaic bourgeois detail”). No doubt, he would have been astonished at the Yanqui president coming to Revolution Square to pay his respects — and exceedingly pleased.
President Obama’s trip is self-consciously historic. As the president’s introducer at an event at the U.S. Embassy put it, Obama often said, “Yes, we can,” and now we can say, “Yes, we did.”
But did what? The trip ensures that the first visit to Cuba by an American president in almost 90 years will be part of Obama’s legacy, and seeks to make his opening to Cuba, announced in December 2014, irreversible. If that means extending credibility and a financial lifeline to a Castro regime that has no intention of reforming, so be it.
The regime made it clear that it wouldn’t bother with maintaining a pretense of relaxing its grip with the arrest of protesters at a march of the dissident group Ladies in White while President Obama was en route to the country. A reporter with a government news outlet told The New York Times that he and colleagues had been warned not even to discuss Obama’s visit with friends. …