The Obama Dilemma
Generic Tour of Friendly Western European Capitals to Look Presidential While Whooping it Up With Foreign Dignitaries:
Oops.
Peggy Noonan last year opined that “the president is starting to look snakebit.” If he is, it’s because Obama spent the first half of his first term ignoring Americans’ number one concern — jobs — while squandering America’s prestige overseas so thoroughly it begins to appear to be an almost dedicated effort.
His one big win — nailing bin Laden — certainly made us all feel very good, and helps to put the squeeze on al Qaeda. But bin Laden is yesterday’s enemy, as semi-affiliated terror groups spread to places like Somalia, Yemen, and maybe eventually Egypt.
Obama’s endless personal gaffes overseas — the bowing and scraping and toasts to the orchestras — might not make the news much here, but you can bet they’re laughing mighty hard in Paris and Moscow and Beijing and… everywhere else.
Foreign policy might be the last refuge of the scoundrel president, but he won’t find much comfort there.
The problem with hippie-hopey-changey policies (foreign and domestic), is that they sounded so damn profound during the bong-a-thon which birthed them …but nobody in the room can remember how to piece it together the next day.
The good news with the bong theory domestic policies path from rose colored bong goggles to full blown boondoggles…is that you are only ruining one country at a time.
The bad news is, that country is ours and pretty much the entire world economy collapses.
The good news with the bong theory foreign policies” path is that every leader in the world wants to sit you down and talk to you like you are a brain addled child and nobody in the world takes you seriously anyway.
The bad news is, the weight of the office (built by everyone that came before this current bong theory administration), allows enemies to pretend that they take your pronouncements seriously….when convenient.
I don’t know who is in the front or back seat, whether we are in a ditch drinking a Slurpee…but, I do know that every day of this four year nightmare is like being forced to watch Dude, Where’s My Car? until 2012.
“The problem…is they sounded so damn profound during the bong-a-thon which birthed them …but nobody in the room can remember how to piece it together the next day.”
Good thing I had set down the can of soda pop before reading your post, I would have spit it all over the screen…thank you!
I look forward to seeing the Obama/Hope image on t-shirts with “I inhaled” later this year.
on behalf of stoners everywhere, I resent this. we could have come up with far better policies than Obama has!
the good news is that foreign policy is Spike’s strong suit.
As he famously declared during his endless campaign, he doesn’t even need advisors. International affairs was his major at Columbia, or something. If he felt like disclosing his transcript, we would know just how awesome his tenure there was, when he was sober.
Sober? I do not get the sense that Obama is a boozer. A stoner, yes. He freely admitted he did coke, and has never averred that he has stopped doing so. When he came up with his campaign slogan, I think he originally said, “Dope and Change”.
cfbleachers – awesome comment!
Obama’s behavior overseas is remeniscent of what university types used to i-part call ‘ugly American’. Y’know? The misstating another country’s position on an important issue, being unfimiliar with another nations customs and fumbling publicly looking uncultured & boorish, and/or using the nations armed forces within the borders of another country in a covert manner that fails to stay covert.
And yet, as “God Save the Queen” started playing and he kept talking, I wondered if he was thinking, “Oh, they are playing my song!” I could not have laughed any harder than if he had handed her a second ipod filled with “just words, volume 2″ from TheOne. Obama has been the funniest president, perhaps not intentionally funny. He’s gotten a little slicker about the looking side to side to show he can read two, two teleprompter screens from the same podium. That head motion thing was downright hilarious because the words weren’t the point, were they? Funny guy. Not funny ha ha…just funny.
When I think of all the professionals, professors and other “intellectuals” I know who voted for this addle-brained little twerp….
There are people hired specifically to help the POTUS with protocol and I don’t doubt in the least that lazy, vain Barry usually just ignores it and yawns and then gets caught with his pants down as per usual. Such a dipsh*t.
The perfect example of one who is “too smart by half”.
Hello? The Libyan “campaign” has stretched Britain AND France to their limits? Holy crap! So who *could* they take on with any degree of optimism? Haiti? Uruguay? The isle of Corfu? Jesus! Do we have one single ally with can-do assets, or the balls to expend them? (Yes, it is a painfully rhetorical question.) This is no time to have a untenured college lecturer at the helm of our great ship. I just hope that we can hold on until 2012. The liberals have really done it to us this time. Our flank is wide effing open. Our enemies (and, yes, we still have enemies), have never seen us so vulnerable. We are going to be hurt, again. Very badly. And if we had kept on the offensive, it would not have had to be this way.
Doc,
I take issue with your characterization of the Brits as not having the assets or balls to expend them – The British Army has stood side by side with us in Iraq and Afghanistan and their troopers have fought valiantly and well. They’re still quite capable as a very small, supporting force.
It’s not their fault that Her Majesty’s government has seen fit to slash the Royal Navy to ridiculously small levels (about half the strength in major surface combatants as the Indian Navy or the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force – call it 6 destroyers and 16 frigates) and the RAF as well (a squadron of Typhoons and a couple of Tornadoes). It’s true that the entire British military is smaller than the USMC, but they’re still brave and capable within the assets that they have left.
Orion
“Sub-Saharan Africa: Nobody cares.”
Bloody racist!
But, yes, you are correct. Just as nobody cared about Rwanda (or, really, Somalia) in Clinton’s presidential term.
Nice work, Stephen. The sad truth is that America is the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room and everyone other county is like a pissant in a blinding snowstorm. The fact that we don’t use our power against them is to our credit and decency and yet we get no respect exactly because we don’t use our power. (e.g. We tied both hands behind our back in Iraq and still won.) How did we elect this Moron who has no comprehension of who we are and what we could do for the world if we wanted? He just wants to apologize and apologize some more. When will the adults take the stage? Soon I hope.
Things are looking better on the domestic front.
Wildgoose caught!
A few thousand more and maybe he can explain away a dollar or so.
The problem seems to be that President Obama and his administration (I could be snotty and call them synchophants, whatever) tried (and still trying) to run things according to how they think things should be run irregardless of how things really run (or the results they achieved… they got results, sure but not often good ones) because they have all the good intentions of bringing peace and prosperity to everyone whether everyone agrees or not (shades of the unconstrained visions of man).
The worse part is that they won’t stop trying until it all falls apart because they (generally) truly believe that if they try hard enough, spend enough money, make enough apologies, etc., that the good stuff will happen and they will be vindicated. The idea that the economy (and/or country) might crash and burn or worse is dismissed because it can’t possible happen with them at the helm.
The scary thing, though, is that as things start falling apart, increasingly extreme government violence is necessary to keep everybody in line. This is why communism always leads, sooner or later, to mass murder.
So, we’re all anticipating an “All Racism, All the Time” campaign in 2012 with quite a bit of “Republican candidate ???? will throw your grandmother under the bus” for flavor?
Once upon a time, I bought lottery tickets. I quit when I realized that in my daydreams had become centred upon extremely expensive items, as I ‘planned’ what I would do ‘when I won the million.’
And now, watching Barack and Michelle at Buckingham Palace and other foreign climes, I find myself becoming a VERY old school snob. My lip curls. I sneer. This is not good for my soul.
Please, America, replace him in 2012!
Despised by new Europe, laughed at by old Europe. Exactly the change some Americans were hoping for.
Well, after three years I can safely say I’ve no regrets that I didn’t vote for the second black president of the United States. Likewise, nothing during his eight years in office gave me pause to regret not voting for the first black president of the United States either. Maybe my luck will change in 2012?
He’s the Celebrity-in-Chief, so it is only natural for him to be met by fawning crowds in Europe and get photo ops with important people–they would treat Lady Gaga the same way. Unfortunately for him, they appear to be giving him about the same political credibility as they would to Lady Gaga. Not that this attitude is unjustified in the least.
So incredibly destructive in so many ways, managing to be both incompetent and malevolent to a degree never before seen in the WH. Now we know the Harvard-”educated” suave and debonair community activist Pharoah 0bama cannot even sign the date correctly or give a toast and his speaking ability is limited to utter dependence on 2 TOTUS’s that make him look ridiculous looking left and right and never at the audience. Stammering over cue cards at a state dinner with the Queen. I feel pretty confident I know what she thinks of him. Classless, gauche, achievement-free bumpkin.
I live within a few miles of Harvard; many of my neighbors are graduates.
All illusion; all sham. 99% of them are the most foul-mouthed, superficial, venal, arrogant, self-absorbed jackasses you’d ever (NOT) want to live around.
Quite interesting to me is that whenever they do something screwed up and are called on it, they instantly have some self-justification why it’s not their fault, or that they should get some special exception, or that their error must be YOUR fault somehow.
Sound familiar?
Perhaps.
We’ve been here before just prior to the election of 2008. Obama’s triumphant tour of Western Europe to the drums and bugles of establishment “liberal” Media, AND the Leni Riefenstahl portrayal of this modern Nuremburg Rally. The usual adoration of a modern rock star / group by his/their adoring hysterical fans at the presence of the star/stars. No surprise these same Media spokespersons dubbed him the “New Kennedy” and even Messiah, in lieu of the title Fuehrer. Just good,, clean, innocent fun n’est-ce pas?
But… Despite the ballyhooing there was an unexpected event to his certain election. The appearance on the stage of one Sarah Palin and her impact on “ordinary/commoners” detested by the “elite”. To counter the appeal of this nobody, unacceptable to the new royalty of “Liberals” required a magic trick.
And so the rabbit from the hat: the Banking crisis which nationalised some banks to “save the system”. Very Reichstag Fire don’t you know. And it certainly worked.
It might therefore be judicial to expect Obama’s and the “Liberals” rabbit from the hat for this 2012 election? There are hints, e.g. Israel, Middle East generally and then of course there’s always Korea (Vietman?).
LEADING WITH BEHIND.
Jojo- Reichstag fire indeed.
Somehow everyone forgets the $2.1 Trillion dollar short of the ABMX derivatives index that reset all the global bets and froze interbank lending. No bank knew what other banks reserves were worth- the flow of credit and money stopped.
That’s not the kind of money any individual can muster.
Soros, Strong, and their masters in Moscow and Beijing initiated first strike in an economic war.
Obama’s THIRD term, nee FDR, is the one to watch for.
That’s when the bills start coming due– before 2020.
To think that he will pay as scrupulous attention to the the 22nd Amendment as he has to the rest of the Constitution is laughable.
He and the czars just need time for the setup.
Funny how that matches with the Muslim Brotherhood Project-
‘Caliphate 2020′, and the UN Agenda 21- ‘sustainable growth’.
Not a conspiracy, but the statosphere-class Cold War economy that operates
far above all borders (and laws).
When the soldiers came home from WWII, does one think those global supply chains stopped doing business?
That the Ivy League eugenicists stopped using tax-evading ‘trusts’ to extend their power and influence via multinational boards and ‘calpers-international’ offshoring structures?
That foreign power players don’t indulge in similar schemes? (They have intelligence services, state industries, and central banks too…
and lots of hungry footsoldiers.)
They aren’t planning on paying any of the debt back.
It’s a temporary tool to seize more power.
It will be revalued by killing the people it’s owed to-
Kill the old by attrition. (The Third world will simply starve.)
This is not the end of the world.
Just a realignment of power centers- like the period of 1914-1917.
My ideal cabinet would be headed by Bolton Sec. of State, Netanyahu Sec. of Defense, Cain Sec. of Treasury, Bachmann Attorney General, …
Now, who could we hire to make it so?