This president has sold out Poland once before, to the Russians, on the subject of missile defense. Today’s hot mic comment therefore comes in that context, and is having ripple effects:
Obama’s Republican rivals aren’t the only ones alarmed by his hot mic suggestion that missile defense — implicitly, defending Eastern Europe from Russia — could be softened after his re-election. The headline in the largest Polish tabloid, Fakt: “Were they trading Poland? Puzzling Obama talk with Medvedev about the missile shield.”
Photo of the headline at the link. Poland has no reason to trust this president. Most of our longstanding allies have in fact been treated shabbily by the same man who was caught conspiring with the head of Russians’ corrupt regime.
There are several stories to unpack from the president’s comment. This president was caught recently, in another hot mic comment, denigrating Israel PM Benjamin Netanuahu with French President Sarkozy. That comment reinforced the strong pre-existing impression that Obama doesn’t much care for Bibi or for Israel. President Obama is known to have a longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons and missile defense. One of the few issues he is known to have weighed in on was the 1980s “nuclear freeze” movement, which opposed President Reagan’s successful drive to bolster Europe’s defenses against the Soviet Union. Nuclear freeze was in fact bankrolled in the US and across the West by the Kremlin, that fact isn’t in dispute. Whether Obama knew that at the time or since has never been established. Obama did create this video in which he promised to essentially disarm the United States, and he didn’t create that video in his college days — it came at the beginning of his run for the presidency. Today’s open mic comment falls right in line with that promise, showing again his ideological consistency from his radical college days to the present.
And then, there is the anti-democratic aspect to the president’s comments. What plans are he formulating, that make his “last election” relevant? What is he planning to do that, if the American people were aware of it, would make him unelectable? That is what he is suggesting to the Russian leader — that this final election for him creates “flexibility” on policy that he does not have now. The American people deserve some answers here.
One thing is certain: That hot mic clip will return in the fall, as a serious issue and in campaign ads. And it should.
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