Click on WORD or PDF for full content
In The Daily Telegraph, UK, Gerald Warner calls him ”president pantywaist” and says his actions have far-reaching consequences.
Barack Obama’s chances of re-election in three and a half years’ time may be evaporating at unprecedented speed, but his presidential ambitions could still be realised in another direction. He would be a shoo-in to win the next Russian presidential election, so high is his popularity now running in the land of the bear and the knout. Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin.
His latest achievement has been to restore the former satellite states to dependency on Moscow, by wimping out of the missile defence shield plan. This follows on his surrender last July when he voluntarily sacrificed around a third of America’s nuclear capability for no perceptible benefit beyond a grim smile from Putin. If there is one thing that fans the fires of aggression it is appeasement.
Despite propaganda to the contrary, 58 per cent of Poles were in favour of the missile shield. But small nations must assess the political will of larger powers. Thanks to President Pantywaist’s supine policies, the former satellite states can see that they are fast returning to their former status. The American umbrella cannot be relied upon on a rainy day. They have been here before. Poles remember how a leftist US president sold them out to Russia at Tehran and Yalta. The former Czechoslovakia was betrayed twice: in 1938 and 1945. …
…Barack Obama is selling out America and, by extension, the entire West. This is a catastrophe for America and the wider world.
Amir Taheri, in The New York Post, says Obama has no strategy for the “good war” in Afghanistan.
…In March, in one of those solemn-looking occasions in which he excels, Obama said that the new strategy, which he did not elaborate, was already in place. He speeded up the troop buildup ordered by the Bush administration, and a few weeks later named a new commander for Afghanistan.
That commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, lost no time in revealing that the Obama administration had no specific strategy and that his first task was to work one out. By the end of August, he’d drafted a “new strategy” and submitted it to the Pentagon in the form of a 66-page report that included specific steps for moving ahead, as well as a request for still more troops.
Then, nothing happened — until someone leaked the report.
One can only imagine the general’s surprise when President Obama, asked to comment on the leaked report, said he wouldn’t allow himself to be rushed into sending more troops, as requested by McChrystal, pending the development of a “new strategy.”
One might say, Wait a minute! We thought you had a strategy before you were elected, when you castigated Bush’s performance in Afghanistan — or at least in March, when you announced “the new, smarter strategy,” or in June, when you appointed a commander to “carry out the new strategy.”
What of McChrystal’s proposed “new strategy” spelled out in his report? No, the president says he’s still looking for a strategy.
Obama has reportedly set up a special “situation room” to look for a strategy. One meeting has been held, with three or four more planned for the next few months.
As on so many other issues with Obama, we have “on-the-job training” on grand scale. …
Mark McKinnon at The Daily Beast reports on Obama’s tire tariff levied against China. He lists industries, including tire manufacturers, who are against this.
…The idea is that tariffs will lead American manufacturers to invest in their American plants. But tire manufacturers have already moved production of low-cost tires out of the country. They lose money at the low end of the market and have conceded it to the Chinese. Domestic tire makers did not even support the tariff application. So now, consumers with wallets already pinched will forego buying new tires because they can’t buy cheap Chinese products, which means they will drive on unsafe tires, leading to accidents, injuries, and deaths. …
…Opponents from within the American tire industry argue that Chinese tires do not even directly compete with the mostly premium tires produced in the U.S.
In addition to the U.S. tire-production industry, the American Coalition for Free Trade in Tires (Dunlap & Kyle Co., Del-Nat Tire Corp, American Omni Trading Co., Hercules Tire & Rubber Co., Orteck Global Supply & Distribution Co., GITI Tire (USA) Ltd. and Foreign Tire Sales Inc.), a pro-business organization also criticized Obama’s decision.
On Sept. 3, Tyson, Austin, Hormel, and the National Pork Producers Council were among the food and agricultural organizations to write a letter to the administration requesting that it refrain from tariffs on Chinese tire imports. They are also concerned that China’s response to these measures could end in negative action against U.S. food and agricultural products and could also affect U.S. farmers, food companies, and ranchers. …
Karl Rove offers suggestions for health care change we can believe in.
…To turn things in his favor, Mr. Obama needs to start thinking about making substantive concessions that will really improve health care. He could adopt Republican proposals to allow people to buy insurance across state lines, permit small businesses to pool risk to get the same discounts large employers receive, and crack down on junk lawsuits through medical liability reform. By doing so, he’d actually be lowering costs and expanding access instead of just pretending to—and at an infinitesimal fraction of his proposal’s cost.
Americans have taken the measure of Mr. Obama’s health-care plan and, as his falling poll numbers attest, increasingly don’t like it. His health-care initiative is not only losing public support on its own merits; it is diminishing Mr. Obama’s credibility. Most amazing of all, the president’s constant chattering runs the risk of making him boring and stale. His magic dissipates as he becomes less interesting.
Mr. Obama doesn’t need more TV time. He needs a new health-care plan that comes from actual bipartisan negotiation and compromise—one that most Americans see as something that will actually improve their health care. He needs his facts to align with reality. …
Victor Davis Hanson writes how Obama operates from a university mindset.
…Note how baffled the administration is by sinking polls, tea parties, town halls, and, in general, “them” — the vast middle class, which, as we learned during the campaign, clings to guns and Bibles, and which has now been written off as blinkered, racist, and xenophobic. The earlier characterization of rural Pennsylvania has been expanded to include all of Middle America.
For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored. Professor Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, summed up the sense of academic disdain that permeates this administration with his recent sniffing about the childish polloi: “The American people . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.” …
…It is the role of the university, from a proper distance, to help them, by making sophisticated, selfless decisions on health care and the environment that the unwashed cannot grasp are really in their own interest — deluded as they are by Wal-Mart consumerism, Elmer Gantry evangelicalism, and Sarah Palin momism. The tragic burden of an academic is to help the oppressed, but blind, majority. …
Christopher Hitchens has an interesting review of Taylor Branch’s book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.
…”Yeltsin did not always cope with the pressure. President Clinton said Yeltsin’s chronic escapes into alcohol were far more serious than the cultivated pose of a jolly Russian. They were worrisome for political stability, as only luck had prevented scandal or worse on both nights of this visit. Clinton had received notice of a major predawn security alarm when Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi. Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza. I asked what became of the standoff. ‘Well,’ the president said, shrugging, ‘he got his pizza.’ ”
One has to respect a reporter who can (a) bring off a deadpan description of such a hair-raising event, and (b) keep such a sensational scoop to himself for 15 years. Taylor Branch’s latest book has made me whistle more than any comparable piece of work for a very long time, and not just because of its many remarkable disclosures. …
…As one who did not at all admire this president when he was in office, I feel bound to say that his opinions and actions as recorded here are far better than I would ever have supposed. In conversation, Clinton demonstrates an innate sense of the irreversible nature of globalization, and of the necessary interdependence of nations that it brings in its train. Yet he and Branch devote an astonishing amount of time to two islands at the periphery of the world’s economy: Ireland and Haiti. And in each instance, questions of right and wrong occupy more of the discussion than you might guess. Yeah, right, an elected Democrat is hardly going to lose votes by advocating Irish unity. But Clinton (and his best adviser on the Irish question, Nancy Soderberg) made a critical wager that Gerry Adams was serious about abandoning “armed struggle,” and they were prepared to risk the outraged amour-propre of a historic British ally. Returning from a later trip to Belfast and Dublin, when it’s become clear that the policy has exceeded expectation, Clinton compels one’s sympathy by glowingly telling his old friend that just “a few days like that” can make a whole political life seem worthwhile. …
…But the temper tantrums, about which we did already know, are much less interesting in retrospect than Clinton’s love of the sheer game—of Washington this time—for its own sake. Many are the moments when Branch is aghast at apparent right-wing partisanship, and his old pal tells him, in effect, that if the roles were reversed he’d be employing the same tactics himself. “I told them they’ve got to submit their budget … They’ve got to come to work. They’ve got to quit just talking. All they’ve gotten right is the politics.” There must be a few Republicans who regret not grasping this point as far back as 1993. Another noteworthy moment is the equanimity of Clinton about the possibility that he could face a second-term electoral challenge from the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Had this ever happened since Gen. George McClellan took on Abraham Lincoln? Was it possible that civilian control of the military was once again an issue?) On the differences between Bill Clinton and Colin Powell, from allowing gays in the military to authorizing the use of force against Serbian militias in Bosnia, Branch shows that the president was at all times completely pragmatic and yet in some odd way also aware of the larger matters involved. Winston Churchill’s famous observation that Americans always do the right thing, but not until they have exhausted every possible alternative, could have been coined with Clinton in mind. …