Gary Johnson, former
New Mexico governor and Libertarian Party presidential nominee, let slip his astonishing
lack of foreign policy knowledge when, on Thursday, he was asked how he would
address the refugee crisis in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.
“What is Aleppo?” asked
Johnson.
When pressed as to
whether he was serious, Johnson indicated that he really was not aware of the
city, which has been widely covered during the years that Syria has been
engulfed in civil war. After Mike Barnicle explained that Aleppo was the center
of Syria’s refugee crisis, Johnson grappled to recover.
“OK, got it,” he
said, explaining that he thinks that the United States must partner with Russia
to diplomatically improve the situation there. “With regard to Syria, I do
think that it’s a mess.”
As late as June 2016,
Johnson told
USA Today that he was abstaining
from smoking pot while he runs for the White House. During the interview he said it had been
about seven weeks since last sparked a doobie.
“I want to be completely on top of my game, all cylinders,” he said winked.
Fans of "Blazing Saddles" will remember Cleavon Little as the sheriff taking himself hostage. That was the impression that first came to my mind after hearing President Obama's plan to normalize relations with Communist Cuba.
But, did the President take himself hostage? Just his credibility (if there were any left!) Step into the Wayback Machine with me to 2009:
President Obama marked his 100th day in office Wednesday by holding a prime-time news conference from the White House. Obama said the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding was torture...
OBAMA: What I’ve said—and I will repeat—is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices.
At the very beginning of his presidency, Obama made known his erroneous and disparaging views on enhanced interrogation, falsely calling it torture, which has specific meaning and connotation around the planet, casting the "land of the free and the home of the brave" as being morally equivalent with nations that practice genuine torture.
There was much public debate about the subject in 2009. A number of reporters volunteered to be waterboarded, (more reporters were waterboarded than terrorists, it turns out!) The lines were drawn. The Left disparaged everything George W. Bush did, so there was no reasoning with them. The furor eventually died down and people were soon inundated with a barrage of scandals, economic malaise and foreign policy debacles unabated by a White House obsessed with celebrities and golf, with an occasional funeral selfie.
Suddenly, after five years of being a non-issue, the lamest of lame duck partisan Senate committees under Dianne Feinstein, felt compelled to revisit the issue. They had to act with alacrity, since in January, adults would take over in the US Senate and such partisan claptrap would never see the light of day.
And then, mirabile dictu, after bringing the issue back into the limelight and into the nation's consciousness once again, Barack Obama announces that despite all the hand wringing and faux outrage shown towards the US for enhanced interrogation techniques, that he would seek to normalize relations with a brutal dictatorship known for torturing and killing political prisoners.
Desperately in search of a legacy, Barack will not let the lack of a consistent and rational foreign policy on his part, or the utter hypocrisy of his positions, deter him from giving aid and assistance to our enemies and their allies.
When The World’s Most Dangerous
Community Organizer campaigned for re-election two years ago, he repeatedly
reassured us al-Qaeda had been “decimated” and “is on the path to defeat”—even
after the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the US
ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Today, The
Washington Post sounded the alarm that the so-called Islamic State “now
controls resources and territory unmatched in the history of extremist
organizations.”
Today, the
results of a new poll from The Wall
Street Journal and NBC News were
released. Ordinarily, this would be a
non-event.
What made today’s polling so
significant that it prompted a Drudge
siren headline was the fact the NBC/Comcast thronesniffer, Chuck Todd,
breathlessly declared the Obama presidency to be over.
The approval rating for The
World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer has dropped to 41 percent, a
majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of foreign policy issues,
he has lost support from the Hispanic community and Americans actually think
his administration is less competent than the Bush White House post-Hurricane
Katrina.
Here’s a partial transcript from
Wednesday’s Morning Joe show:
TODD: It is. It's cratering. I mean, if you think about it, let's
go back to September, Syria. Then you have the crisis in Ukraine and then you
had the situation with the Bergdahl trade, then we can talk about the Iranian
negotiations, we can talk about the Middle East flaring up, and now the
situation with Iraq. Everything is a negative, and these are now creating a
situation, lowest ever, lowest job rating, lowest approval rating among foreign
policy.
[SNIP]
GUTHRIE: Let's
show the poll number you call the dagger. "Can the President lead and get
the job done?" 54% say no.
TODD: And this is what's amazing here. This is as if the public is
saying, "Hey, buddy, your presidency is over. You may not believe it is,
but your ability to lead and convince us that you have the right policies
anymore, we're not listening." That's what that poll question says. That's
the most dangerous poll question in this—in this survey for the President.
‘Ol Remus from The Woodpile Report
has some sage words for Chuckie that may help him grasp the concept behind the
contempt:
“It comes down to this: we know what we are to them, enemies to be
punished. Their words. They say they don't want to quell anger. They say they're itching for a fight. They say they'll hit back twice as hard. These
are their terms. They believe, actually believe, their insults and libel and threats should go unanswered. If treating the people as enemies is proper
then punishing the people is proper. And
so they do. They believe these things
because resistance is what they fear, so resistance is what they see. But something far tougher than resistance is
emerging. It's everywhere and nowhere,
it's self-assembling, it's committed to restoring a legitimate Constitutional
republic and therefore every bit the enemy they imagine it to be. They're
looking for noise and drama. They're fools. They merely need to look around. It's already upon them.”
For years many have hypothesized
that this president is outlandishly incompetent.
During a Healthy Kids & Safe
Sports Concussion Summit The World’s Most Dangerous Community Organizer supplied
another piece of the puzzle when he noted that, “When I was young and played
football briefly, there were a couple of times where I’m sure that that ringing
sensation in my head and the need to sit down for a while might have been a
mild concussion.”
I guess he’s going to be madder
than hell when he reads in the papers that he told those folks that he might
had a mild concussion.
Don Diamond, writing at Forbes,
seems to believe that “football had a totemic role in his young life.”
In that same Diamond piece,
TWMDCO is purported to have said, “It doesn’t make you weak to admit that
you’ve had a concussion. It means you’re strong.”
So, twice in less than a week he
has feebly attempted to convince anyone who will listen that he is not weak.
Mitt Romney, appearing on Fox
News Channel’s The
Kelly File said, "I think it's a particularly sad day in America
when the president of the United States feels compelled to give an address
saying that America, in effect, isn't weak.
If you have to tell people you’re strong, then you’re not.”
Former US Ambassador to the
United Nations, John Bolton, believes that "[The White House's foreign
policy] initiatives truly reflect Obama's view of America's international
role. His is a world of rhetoric and
talk, not power."
The coming crash of U.S.
diplomacy is not idle speculation about a remote future. Our declining prestige
is already apparent globally; when all three Middle East negotiations fail
conclusively, America's influence will fall further. Friends and adversaries
alike are recalibrating their policies accordingly, particularly because the
underlying causes of the three impending failures will spell trouble and
misfortune elsewhere.
Obama's ongoing failures could
have been avoided. A less ideological, more realistic and clear-eyed leader
would comprehend American power and interests, knowing how to use the former to
protect the latter, rather than making Obama's basic mistakes.
Obama's first error: misreading
your adversary. There was never any chance Iran could be negotiated out of a
nuclear weapons capability it has pursued for nearly 30 years. Efforts during
the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations demonstrated how Iran
deftly uses negotiations to gain political legitimacy, buy time to continue
work on its nuclear program and evade international punishment. Hassan
Rouhani followed precisely this playbook as Iran's chief nuclear
negotiator 10 years ago. He is doing so again today as Iran's president.
The second error: not knowing who
your adversaries are. Obama argued for three years that Russia shared his
objective of a peaceful transition from the Assad regime in Syria to something
else. This was never true. Moscow's support for Assad (as well as Iran's,
directly and through Hezbollah) guaranteed he would only depart feet first. The
U.S. could either have aided Syria's opposition or tackled the problem's root
cause: the mullahs' regime in Tehran. Obama chose to do neither. His
equivocation regarding Syria's chemical weapons program has provoked giggles or
dismay at White House weakness.
The third error: not knowing who
your friends are. The Palestinians lack legitimate governing institutions
capable of hard decisions, including making perilous concessions and
compromises, and overcoming resistance by Hamas and other terrorists.
Without such institutions, no long-term solution is possible. Negotiating with
the Palestinian Authority has less substance than negotiating with a
hologram. Perversely, however, Obama treats Israel as the problem.
At the center of this inept president’s foreign policy is the
misguided belief that the reason America has adversaries is because it has
allies.
With red lines painted here, there and everywhere backed up
only by bluster and no balls whatsoever, it won’t be long before we have only
adversaries and no allies anywhere in the world. With this man sitting behind the Resolute
Desk, our very existence grows ever more perilous.
Millions of
Egyptians massed in Tahrir Square in Cairo to celebrate the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. Kori
Schake of Foreign
Policy noted The Insufferable Airhorn “achieved the impossible, getting all
factions angry with the U.S.”
Schake
continues, “U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has
achieved the hat trick of alienating all factions in Egypt. It neither defended
nor pushed out Hosni Mubarak, thereby earning the embitterment of both the ‘deep
state’ that had been America’s ally for 30 years and liberals who agitated
against it; gave the military a pass during the 18 months of its ‘caretaking’
when policy choices and governance rules might have been established; waived
congressional concerns limiting U.S. foreign aid; gave the elected government
too little support to have influence; was largely silent during a crackdown on
nongovernmental groups; and now condescendingly suggests Egyptians would do
better to politically organize than protest.”
Protesters carrying signs that
were clearly anti-Obama,
anti-Clinton and anti-Ambassador Patterson indicted them all as shills of
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Meanwhile, The Insufferable Airhorn was playing
golf for the 19th time this year. If you’re keeping score, that’s the 130th
golf outing of his administration.
CBS
owned the story regarding “Lurch” being seen riding in a boat to get to
another boat just to be able to board the yacht. So it was little wonder that Sunday’s Face the Nation featured Reuters
journalist David Rohde saying that the young people of Egypt would not be
inspired by U.S leaders.
Rohde said, “The President has a
tough statement and then, you, I don’t know how this happened, but it was
terrible optics, the next day the President goes golfing and Secretary Kerry is
out on his yacht. What does that say to
young people in Egypt and across the Middle East?”
If anything, they’re getting a
taste of what we here in America have to deal with every day. Welcome
to our world kids.
Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney gave his much anticipated
foreign policy speech today at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington,
VA. He began by citing its contributions
to the nation both in war and in peace by the students’ “transformation into
citizens and warriors and leaders.”
Romney continued, “Of all the VMI graduates, none is
more distinguished than George Marshall—the Chief of Staff of the Army who
became Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, who helped to vanquish
fascism and then planned Europe’s rescue from despair. His commitment to peace
was born of his direct knowledge of the awful costs and consequences of war.
General Marshall once said, ‘The only way human beings can win a war is to
prevent it.’ Those words were true in his time—and they still echo in
ours.”
Romney then began in earnest to demolish
the president’s foreign policy by raising the issue of Benghazi. “As the dust
settles, as the murdered are buried, Americans are asking how this happened,
how the threats we face have grown so much worse, and what this calls on
America to do. These are the right questions. And I have come here
today to offer a larger perspective on these tragic recent events—and to share
with you, and all Americans, my vision for a freer, more prosperous, and more
peaceful world.”
“The attacks
on America last month should not be seen as random acts. They are
expressions of a larger struggle that is playing out across the broader Middle
East—a region that is now in the midst of the most profound upheaval in a
century. And the fault lines of this struggle can be seen clearly in
Benghazi itself.”
“The attack on
our Consulate in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012 was likely the work of forces
affiliated with those that attacked our homeland on September 11th, 2001. This
latest assault cannot be blamed on a reprehensible video insulting Islam,
despite the Administration’s attempts to convince us of that for so long.
No, as the Administration has finally conceded, these attacks were the
deliberate work of terrorists who use violence to impose their dark ideology on
others, especially women and girls; who are fighting to control much of the
Middle East today; and who seek to wage perpetual war on the West.”
Lara Logan, CBS correspondent told
60 Minutes in a passionate plea, “that our government is downplaying the
strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a rationale of getting
us out of the longest war. We have been
lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: ‘You’re not listening to what the people who
are fighting you say about this fight.
In your arrogance, you think you write the script. Our enemies are writing the story and there’s
no happy ending for us.’”
Romney
emphatically said it is the “responsibility of our President to use America’s
great power to shape history—not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at
the mercy of events. Unfortunately, that
is exactly where we find ourselves in the Middle East under President Obama.”
The
world is in the throes of a crisis and this president has grabbed at baubles
and glitter, made endless speeches, attended fundraisers and played at least 100 rounds
of golf.
Romney said he
would support Israel, the nation most obviously at risk if Iran acquired
nuclear weapons, and charged that Obama’s poor relationship with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has helped embolden Iran and other adversaries.
“I will
reaffirm our historic ties to Israel and our abiding commitment to its
security,” Romney said. “The world must never see any daylight between our two
nations.”
He
closed his speech with optimism, “The 21st century can and must be an American
century. It began with terror, war, and economic calamity. It is our duty to
steer it onto the path of freedom, peace, and prosperity.”
“The torch
America carries is one of decency and hope. It is not America’s torch alone.
But it is America’s duty—and honor—to hold it high enough that all the world
can see its light.”
Bing
West echoes my sentiment about Romney’s speech today: “In summary, Mr. Romney has presented a
foreign-policy view akin to that of President Reagan, asserting faith in
American leadership—while equating Mr. Obama’s leadership to that of the timid
President Jimmy Carter.”
