'You Can't Blame it on Rio'

OK, but can I at least blame it on the Bossa Nova?

Perhaps not. As Michael Walsh writes in the New York Post, “The comic-opera presidency of Barack Obama continues apace. Alas, it’s no laughing matter:”

The double standard for assessing presidents may be old news, but this is a new low. Had this been George Bush — just finishing his 61st round of golf; enmeshed in not one, not two, but three wars in Muslim countries, and clearly more comfortable being the nation’s toastmaster general than the commander in chief — the media would be howling for his head.

Yet Obama continues to receive the kind of fawning press coverage that only kings and potentates enjoy.

“President Barack Obama played grand tourist to Rio de Janeiro’s vivid extremes on Sunday, traveling from brilliant beaches to a notorious slum even as he monitored US military strikes in faraway Libya,” read an AP dispatch, which went on to describe how Obama played soccer with some slum kids before getting down to the real purpose of his visit — encouraging the Brazilian oil industry, so we can buy oil from them.

Not drill for our own oil, in the Gulf or in Alaska. Not extract it, via a method called “fracking” from the Bakken shale fields in the upper Midwest, which hold an estimated 3.65 billion barrels of oil — one of the reasons the economy of North Dakota is booming while the rest of the country continues to suffer.

Obama’s partisans often praise what they call his “restraint” and “caution,” especially when dealing with foreign affairs. But one man’s caution is another man’s passivity and inaction, especially when the political calculus of making the wrong decision is factored in.

Having stamped his foot weeks ago and demanded that Khadafy step down, Obama did absolutely nothing to back up his ultimatum, instead waiting for a UN resolution authorizing air strikes and then piggybacking on the British and the French.

But hey, on the plus-side, unlike say, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Operation Desert Storm, Kosovo and our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least Libya allows to finally prove that international coalitions can work.