Say, How's that Nobel Peace Prize Working Out?

“White House Down: Obama Version,” from Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker today:

In the week that preceded the Egyptian upheaval, our always foolish Secretary of State John Kerry was playing shuttle diplomacy with himself, Israel, and a negotiating partner to be named, in the nonsensical belief that if only Israel would concede a bit more the entire Middle East would be at peace. As the marchers massed in Tahriri Square (crowd estimates were in the double digit millions) many carrying signs attacking Obama and our Ambassador Patterson as tools of Morsi and the Moslem Brotherhood, Kerry was yachting off Nantucket, or as one wag online tweeted “leading from Be-Heinz”. U.S. law precludes our giving foreign aid to administrations which rule by virtue of a coup d’état, and as the administration scolded the Egyptian military it struggled to avoid an accurate description of  events, just in case it occurred to them that they might want to put that check in the mail after all.

Foreign Policy says Obama’s achieved the impossible, getting all factions angry with the U.S.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has achieved the hat trick of alienating all factions in Egypt. It neither defended nor pushed out Hosni Mubarak, thereby earning the embitterment of both the “deep state” that had been America’s ally for 30 years and liberals who agitated against it; gave the military a pass during the 18 months of its “caretaking” when policy choices and governance rules might have been established; waived congressional concerns limiting U.S. foreign aid; gave the elected government too little support to have influence; was largely silent during a crackdown on nongovernmental groups; and now condescendingly suggests Egyptians would do better to politically organize than protest.

Unlike Benghazi, where Obama disappeared when the fighting began and didn’t show up till our ambassador and his defenders were murdered, this time Obama called in his crack security team to hear him announce his “concern”.

Well, that’s the White House version. Maybe he just had travel pictures from his expensive European and African trip to show them before he heads out for his summer vacation.

In some further bad news for the administration, Obama’s good friend Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan had troubles of his own in Istanbul and elsewhere where only a very heavy hand has kept him from being a “guest” of his opposition. And the bloody slaughters in Syria where once again we find ourselves and Obama’s “smart diplomacy” on the side of the Islamists, continue without resolution or even a brief visit from Assad’s old friends Pelosi, Rockefeller, and Kerry.

How bad was the administration performance this past week? So bad that even a Reuters journalist complained today on CBS’s Face the Nation that regarding Egypt, “the President has a tough statement and then, you know, I don’t know how this happened, but it was terrible optics, the next day the President goes golfing and Secretary Kerry is out on his yacht. What does that say to young people in Egypt across the Middle East..?

I don’t know — I think the “young people” in Egypt are getting the message loud and clear from the White House, don’t you?

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, George Will notes today on ABC that “What ObamaCare requires for it to work [is] mass irrationality.”

But that’s something America has in abundance these days: how else could ObamaCare’s namesake have been elected — and reelected — in the first place?

Update: “It’s sadly funny to remember how several Republican presidential candidates in 2012, notably Rick Perry and Herman Cain, were castigated for their supposed lack of foreign policy acumen.  How would either of their foreign policies have been any worse than this?  The king of the foreign policy fumble remains firmly ensconced in the White House, and he’s not just giving undercooked answers to a few debate questions from hostile media moderators.”