I started watching Obama's address to the UN yesterday morning and got so turned off by the rhetoric (been there, done that), than I switched it off. I am tired of his political manipulation and doublespeak; you know, what ever happened to leaving a little mystery and picking one's moments, less is more, etc.? We just came off one of the longest Presidential campaigns, and since January, it's like 24 x 7 all-Obama, all-of-the-time. He's giving speeches and issuing remarks on virtually a daily basis. Now if he was actually out there, pitching specific solutions and taking the heat for unpopular ideas as a matter of principle, versus unrealistic goals, vacuous promises, condescending rhetoric, scapegoating his predecessor, and vacillating back and forth (e.g., whether to investigate the CIA, what to do about Afghanistan, etc.), I would respect him more.
[Note when I'm speaking of Obama not "taking the heat" for unpopular ideas, I am not discounting the fact that Obama's approval rating has taken a 20-point hit since the inauguration, in large part due to voter concerns about the unsustainable federal budget deficit, a dragging economic recession/recovery, and Obama's mishandling of health care reform. But to a large extent, Obama has been able to contain the political damage by playing good cop to Pelosi and Reid's bad cop, being misleadingly squishy on specifics (for example, hinting he might accept health care reform legislation without an unpopular public option, knowing that Speaker Pelosi vows that the House won't pass the reform without it), and maintaining a pretense on a gullible public that he is open to bipartisanship and alternative ideas (e.g., medical malpractice reform). This is the same guy whom vowed at a Presidential debate not to sign a bill without earmarks (remember the omnibudget bill?), whom said that he wasn't interested in looking in the past (but whose Attorney General is investigating waterboarding incidents that occurred over 3 years ago), whom talked transparency during the campaign but pushed for quick passage of bills without an adequate review period, and whom has expressed a willingness to use a budget reconciliation process requiring only a simple majority vote to push through health care "reform" which would be an unprecedented abuse of power on major policy matters, rendering the compromise-empowering filibuster meaningless.]
[Take, for instance, the way he approached the so-called stimulus bill. He had really delegated details to the Congressional Democratic leadership, but was pushing the plan even before it was hammered out. His manufactured "crisis" resulted in less than 10% being spent in the first 6 months, and the final bill turned out to be, in large part, not the much-vaunted overhaul of a crumbling infrastructure (never mind the wildly exaggerated Keynesian multiple justification), but Democratic spending priorities, not directly related to the slumping economy, and a bailout out of a number of fiscally irresponsible states, like California, which had expanded spending and gold-plated employee benefits and pensions, with no rainy-day fund and now were looking to Uncle Sam for handouts. How about state Democrats accepting political responsibility for their reckless, unsustainable spending sprees? But getting back to Obama: what he was doing was NOT leadership; it was evading the tough questions, cheerleading (not coaching) from the sidelines and taking full credit for whatever resulted.]
The Obama UN Address
Obama went before the UN Assembly and (of course) started saying the same old, same old. The usual political doublespeak he's repeated time and again, denying exactly what he's saying: he claimed he was not there to apologize for America, a reference to his recognition that his "apology tours" are not playing well with the mainstream center-right nation. But then he pompously takes credit for banning "torture" on his first day of office and for his decision to close Guantanamo Bay. First of all, he's tacitly accusing the Bush Administration of carrying out torture. That's simply not true. Whereas waterboarding by any definition is an unpleasant experience, it does not meet the general criteria for torture under our international obligations.
We know what real torture is; progressives, like Obama, are implicitly trying to equate waterboarding with these examples during the Saddam Hussein regime:
Hussein's regime has also invented unique and horrific methods of torture including electric shocks to a male's genitals, pulling out fingernails, suspending individuals from rotating ceiling fans, dripping acid on a victim's skin, gouging out eyes, and burning victims with a hot iron or blowtorch."
The following, according to the State Department report, were routine in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's rule: medical experimentation; beatings; crucifixion; hammering nails into the fingers and hands; amputating sex organs or breasts with an electric carving knife; spraying insecticides into a victim's eyes; branding with a hot iron; committing rape while the victim's spouse is forced to watch; pouring boiling water into the victim's rectum; mailing the tongue to a wooden board; extracting teeth with pliers; using bees and scorpions to sting naked children in front of their parents.
And let us remember, when it came for the liberation of Iraq, Barack Obama didn't want regime change; he preferred "more of the same" from Saddam Hussein.
But even disregarding this, let us recall that we are talking of a procedure that was applied to just 3 of several hundred prisoners, all highly-placed Al Qaeda operatives--the procedure was targeted just at people in the know, and it was done solely to obtain actionable intelligence, not to punish the prisoners. Other methods of interrogation had been attempted in good faith; some usable information was obtained through this procedure; and the CIA director already had discontinued the procedure YEARS before Obama took office. So what exactly did Obama do that, other than, like the late Senator Ted Kennedy, smear the reputations of intelligence officers by implying a moral equivalence between the nature and extent of what the Hussein regime did to innocent civilians and what happened to select terror suspects under the Bush Administration.
But, moving on, Obama seemed to confuse a UN address with one of his own political rallies, complete with red meat for the Angry Left. There was another Big Lie that America "acted alone" in its foreign policy; other countries, especially Great Britain (which experienced post-9/11 attacks itself), were involved with operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush Administration did attempt to work through the UN before taking action on Iraq; it was involved with other parties in dealing with Iran and North Korea and sought a Middle East peace between Israel and the Palestinians. At least Bush made it clear where he stood on political principle; Obama seems to be obsessed with image and inconsequential issues.
Take, for instance, Guantanamo Bay. That was another one of Obama's proud "accomplishments" (in announcing the intent to close it down; never mind the fact that he was closing a perfectly usable, state-of-the-art secure facility (after, why should you care about cost when you're already running a $1.8T deficit?), simply for symbolic, not substantive purpose, without even checking to see if other countries would take the prisoners and/or our own homeland secure facilities had available capacity of handle them. Of course, many of the prisoners' own home countries don't want them back--or Obama doesn't want to give them back to home countries, like China (is it possible that Obama thinks the Chinese government is cut from the same cloth as the CIA "torturers"?)
Obama makes it clear just what he prioritizes in terms of what, how and when he says it. On what other country's set of high priorities is the criticism of the treatment of 3 high-value terrorists shortly after the worst terrorist attack in the history of this country? What about the worst global recession in almost 20 years? What about trade protectionism, the war on terror, the vulnerability of the global economy to limited supplies of oil and gas exports, growing threats of piracy on the open seas, or rogue regimes threatening to ignite nuclear arms races in the Middle East and eastern Asia? I'm not saying Obama didn't eventually touch on some of these substantive issues, but why is it necessary to first implicitly throw his predecessor under the bus, not to mention essentially apologizing for his nation's economic, military and international leadership and a foreign policy based on its own interests (just like every other nation does)? [He SAYS that he is not apologizing, but that is EXACTLY what he is doing. Lip service for purposes of political cover is little more than a state of denial.] Why is a President of the United States treating diplomacy as merely an extension of interpersonal dynamics on a national scale and condescendingly lecturing the rest of the world on how big nations shouldn't bully smaller nations and other gratuitous "insights"? Enough already of all these apologies for being the leader of the most powerful, influential nation in the free world...
Are we really going to have to endure another 3 years of this meandering, convoluted, unfocused pretense of foreign policy?
