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We’re so busy looking at the administration’s domestic train wreck, their train wreck in the Middle East is overlooked. We’ll correct that today. Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor is first.
It gets better and better. And by better and better I mean worse and worse. And by “it”, I mean the rubbing of the American nose in the manure pile in the Middle East. The Saudis flip out on us. Then Bibi flips out on us. (Quite an accomplishment to get the Saudis and Israelis on the same page.)
And now the Egyptians host a Russian naval vessel for the first time since 1992. Moreover, the Egyptians, who can’t even afford a pot to pee in (as my grandfather used to say), are looking to buy $4 billion in arms from Putin. Obviously the Egyptians are sending a message to Obama. …
Spengler says Putin gets it and we don’t.
Middle East politics amounts to managing the decline of a failed culture. Nothing expresses Arab failure more vividly than Egypt, a banana republic without the bananas, now living on a $14 billion or so annual subsidy from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. With 70% of its population living in agricultural areas, it imports half its food, and would starve if not for the Saudi check. ‘
Egypt is beyond the point of no return economically, and American foreign policy is beyond the point of no return intellectually. Americans of both parties–Obama and Kerry on one side, and Sens. McCain and Graham along with the Weekly Standard on the other–believed that by waving the magic wand of democracy over this cataclysmically failed state, all would be well. I characterized this consensus as “Dumb and Dumber” earlier this year.
The outcome, of course, is that Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov turned up in Cairo this week to hear his Egyptian counterpart declare that America’s erstwhile Arab ally wants to restore Russian-Egyptian relations to their level during the Soviet era–when Egypt was an enemy. As the Jerusalem Post summed up the mess:
“The more persistent the denials, the clearer it is that a marked shift is taking place in international ties that until recently bound the world’s single superpower with the most populous Arab state. The Russian ministerial visits were preceded by a visit by the chief of Russian intelligence and by Russian naval vessels.
More important, the visits by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu involve a major sale to Egypt of sophisticated Russian military hardware – clearly a counter move to the American halting of weapons supplies.” …
Caroline Glick takes no prisoners.
What happened in Geneva last week was the most significant international event since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the rise of the United States as the sole global superpower. The developments in the six-party nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva last week signaled the end of American world leadership.
Global leadership is based on two things – power and credibility. The United States remains the most powerful actor in the world. But last week, American credibility was shattered.
Secretary of State John Kerry spent the first part of last week lying to Israeli and Gulf Arab leaders and threatening the Israeli people. He lied to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Saudis about the content of the deal US and European negotiators had achieved with the Iranians.
Kerry told them that in exchange for Iran temporarily freezing its nuclear weapons development program, the US and its allies would free up no more than $5 billion in Iranian funds seized and frozen in foreign banks.
Kerry threatened the Israeli people with terrorism and murder – and so invited both – if Israel fails to accept his demands for territorial surrender to PLO terrorists that reject Israel’s right to exist.
Kerry’s threats were laced with bigoted innuendo.
He claimed that Israelis are too wealthy to understand their own interests. If you don’t wise up and do what I say, he intoned, the Europeans will take away your money while the Palestinians kill you. Oh, and aside from that, your presence in the historic heartland of Jewish civilization from Jerusalem to Alon Moreh is illegitimate. …
Paul Mirengoff of Power Line demonstrates how Israel is being kept in the dark.
… the evidence supports Israel’s complaint that the U.S. kept Israel in the dark about the deal it was negotiating. Kerry gave the game away when he rejected Israeli criticism of the deal he was negotiating on the grounds that Israel did not know the details. He thus contradicted his assurances that Israel was being fully and continuously apprised of the negotiations.
Not a clever man, that John Kerry.
Friends don’t treat friends this way. But Obama is not now, and has never been, a friend of Israel.
This is the state of play as Obama and Kerry prepare to press ahead with a deal on a matter of existential importance to Israel and mainly PR importance to a foundering administration.
A Civil War historian shares his appreciation for the power of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
The surprisingly short story of the Gettysburg Address is that it was a surprisingly short speech — 270 words or so — delivered by Abraham Lincoln as part of the dedication ceremonies for the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, on Nov. 19, 1863, four and a half months after the climactic battle of the American Civil War.
But the long story is that no single American utterance has had the staying power, or commanded the respect and reverence, accorded the Gettysburg Address. It has been engraved (on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial), translated (in a book devoted to nothing but translations of the address), and analyzed in at least nine book-length critical studies over the last century.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put down his morning paper’s report of the address and wrote to his publisher that “Lincoln’s brief speech at Gettysburg … seems to me admirable.” Longfellow’s friend Charles Sumner wrote, “Since Simonides wrote the epitaph for those who died at Thermopylae, nothing equal to them has ever been breathed over the fallen dead.” He added: “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”
What is less clear to us today is why it struck so many people as a landmark from the start. Partly, this instant recognition of the address’s power grew out of its language. It obeys the Churchillian dictum: Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all. The address relies on crisp, plain vocabulary, over against the three-decker Latinate lexicon beloved of so many 19th-century school textbooks. Of some 270 words — there’s no recording — about two-thirds are single-syllable, and a half-dozen, four-syllable. Rarely has so much been compressed into such simple and uncomplicated elements.
The Onion says someone is trapped in the healthcare website.
According to an urgent report issued today by the White House, a terrified and frantic President Obama is currently trapped inside the healthcare.gov website.
Early reports indicate the president inadvertently became physically enmeshed in the inner workings of the online health insurance exchange at approximately 11:48 a.m. this morning, and is at this very moment attempting to find any possible means of escape from the highly unstable and dangerous healthcare.gov internal network.
“Please, if anyone can hear me, I need help!” said Obama, his voice reportedly echoing endlessly in the distance as he carefully stepped along a green grid of individual and family enrollment information. “Is anyone there? Can anyone hear me? I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States of America! I need to get out of here!” …
Late night from Andrew Malcolm.
Leno: A new world record today in the 100 meters. Set by Congressional Democrats running away from ObamaCare.
Fallon: Homeland Security reports dozens of hacking tries on the ObamaCare website. But they didn’t get in. Obama says, “When you do get in, please let us know how you did it.”
Leno: ObamaCare’s failures now reach members of Congress. Harry Reid just got a letter from his mortician canceling his embalming fluid coverage.
Fallon: On an Amtrak ride recently, Joe Biden runs into Whoopi Goldberg, asks here, “What’s it like making millions of Americans laugh every day?” Whoopi says, “I was gonna ask you the same thing.”