Last night, Hugh Hewitt dubbed Mr. Obama’s mini-speech his “his mini-Munich moment:”
My guest is Victor Davis Hanson, and Victor, tonight, the cadence was so extraordinary. He said he’s going to postpone the vote, he’s sending Kerry to Geneva. I almost thought he was going to declare peace in our time. And on Twitter, I called it his Munich moment, and Bill Kristol rightly corrected me. It’s his mini-Munich moment, because the stakes aren’t that high, yet, except that he embraced the Bush doctrine in a bizarre sense when he said tonight that these WMD could get into the hands of terrorists, and then he proceeded to do nothing to stop that from happening.
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So Victor, we’ve got a minute left. If this continues on a straight line pattern of 40 more months of this President’s injury to America’s standing in the world, where will be we be?
VDH: I can tell you. Kennedy went to Vienna in ’62, and Khrushchev ate him alive. And he said he savaged me. That’s his exact words. And then we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Carter did the same thing – human rights, nobody’s going to die on my watch, no inordinate affair, and they watched it. And suddenly, Soviets in Afghanistan, hostages in Tehran, Communists in Central America, China invading Vietnam. So I would think that what we need to do as a country is brace, get our allies together, get a bipartisan group, and say you know what? We are going to be challenged. As sure as the sun comes up, somebody has looked at this President, and we need to protect the interests of the United States not in an obscure, not in an unessential place like Syria, but somewhere big, big, and I think it’ll be in Korea or Taiwan or with Iran or something. But it’s coming.
Hugh also links to Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, who spotted “Obama’s Strange FDR Quotation” last night:
Near the end of his speech to the nation on Syria, President Obama quoted Franklin Roosevelt: “Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideas and principles that we have cherished are challenged.”
Which of FDR’s stirring wartime speeches does this quotation come from?
None of them. The sentence Obama quoted is from a speech Roosevelt gave on October 2, 1935, in San Diego. It’s part of a section of the speech defending a non-interventionist “good neighbor” policy in Latin America and non-interventionism more broadly. Indeed, FDR mentions our “deep concern” mostly to make clear that our involvement will be limited to such concern, because, as he says, other nations’ policies contrary to our rules of conscience and conduct “are beyond our jurisdiction.”
“As it happens, the day after the San Diego speech, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Italian troops repeatedly and brazenly used poison gas in that conflict.” And we did nothing.
On the other hand, Mr. Obama has more important wars he wishes to wage domestically, than anything going on overseas.
Elsewhere, Matt Drudge spots a “Curveball: Woman Behind Case For Syria Strike Fired For Lying;” in this case for puffing up her college record by claiming she had a Ph.D. “Woman informing Kerry, McCain’s opinions on Syria also an advocate for Syrian rebels,” the Daily Caller recently noted.
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