Afghanistan was Obama's war, the one he was willing to embrace. Have we achieved our objective in Afghanistan? Was his execution worthy of the human, material and economic treasures expended?You decide.
Obama claims he decimated al Qaeda and killed their leader. This is so but he tends to downplay the recent killing of our Ambassador and three of his staff and the inflamed Arab/Muslim street. Is America more loved, more feared more hated? You decide.
Obama has consistently led from the rear. Libya being the best example and is Libya in our camp as Obama would have us believe? Do we actually know the direction Libya will take?
And can the same be legitimately asked regarding The Muslim Brotherhood and its take over of Egypt!Again, you decide.
Syrians are being slaughtered and we do nothing. Is this the new American way to turn our back on human rights? You decide.
When Iranians began to march in the street protesting their government and Obama ignored them was this a prelude to what we can expect whenever tensions flare? You decide.
Has our relations with Russia improved because of Obama's reset policies? You decide.
Has China become more aggressive in their geographical sphere of influence? Does China's expanded fleet pose a threat to our influence in that region and if so will more nations. once closely aligned with us. begin to shift as the shadow of China widens? You decide
We finally come to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and now we know from Obama's own lips Israel and Netanyahu are 'noise' that must be weighed in the balance and eventually disregarded. Does consulting replace solid conviction and trust? Is this simply another act on the part of Obama to avoid hard decisions which seem to be a hallmark of his political career. You decide.
Does Obama's charge that Romney's attacks on his foreign policy signify Romney is itching to go to war? It may not have dawned on Obama but the war, he believes his feckless policies will avoid, has already begun and appeasement will only expand it. You decide.
Is it fair to raise the specter of Chamberlain's ghost when we review Obama's foreign policy accomplishments and/or failures? You decide.
As for myself I decided a long time ago. Obama's failed domestic policy would soon be followed by comparable failures in the foreign arena. Why? Simply because he is drive by the same modus operandi which is shrink America's involvement, gut America's ability to remain a bastion of strength and shield for world peace, decimate our military posture and reduce our ability to respond to legitimate needs to protect and defend our commercial and territorial interests and relationships with our allies. This has always been the road taken by the extreme left and remains the ultimate goal of ur leftist press and media.
I continue to believe Obama is untrustworthy, his word is worthless except when it comes to appeasement and we and the world will pay dearly for his naivety, peremptory withdrawals and purposeful effort to turn America into a Gulliver.
There comes a time when one must stand against tyranny, when one must throw down the gauntlet and mean what they say. I have yet to see Obama do this nor do I believe he ever will. It is not in his DNA. He is an appeaser first class and a feckless leader. Obama's foreign policy reflects a gifted wordsmith whose pronouncements connote empty sound and fury.
To his credit it appears Obama has finally come clean and informed Israel where they stand. Consult, yes, protect your back, no!
In terms of all the hope and change Obama admitted: " "The most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside."
This self admission validates Obama's lack of leadership skills for he never really tried. Presidents before him were able to - Reagan quickly comes to mind for one. (See 1,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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Another review of Woodruff's book. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) Obama's Unfulfilled Promise of Change
"The most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside," Barack Obama said in an interview Thursday on the Spanish-language Univision network. "You can only change it from the outside."
A better way to put it is that Barack Obama has proved he can't change Washington from the inside.
One case in point is the comprehensive immigration legislation Obama promised to steer to passage in his first term. The Univision interviewers, who asked tougher questions than the president has been getting from David Letterman or various rappers, zeroed in on this issue.
With a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and a solid Democratic majority in the House in 2009 and 2010, Obama could have pushed for an immigration bill.
Instead, he acquiesced in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision not to bring such a measure to the floor. It would require some of her members to cast tough votes.
But, with Obama's encouragement, she did bring to the floor and pushed through a cap-and-trade bill that also required some of her members to cast tough and in some cases career-ending votes.
Cap-and-trade was a favorite of gentry liberals, the kind of people Obama regularly has seen at his 200-plus fundraising events. As for the Hispanics who want immigration legislation, he's now promising that he'll push it in his second term. Wait in line.
George W. Bush managed to get congressional votes on comprehensive immigration bills. Obama didn't bother.
Obama's inability to change Washington from the inside is also on display in Bob Woodward's latest bestseller, "The Price of Politics."
He tells how in a meeting of congressional leaders Pelosi muted a speakerphone as Obama droned on lecturing members on the national interest, so the legislators could get some work done.
He shows how Obama blew up the summer 2011 grand bargain negotiations with Speaker John Boehner by suddenly raising his demands.
Boehner had already agreed to increased revenues from high earners through tax reform that would eliminate or limit deductions whose benefits go largely to those with high incomes.
That's the kind of tax reform recommended by Obama's Simpson-Bowles Commission, whose report quickly found its way to his round file.
It had the support of congressional Republicans like vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan and Republicans on the supercommittee.
But Obama insisted on higher tax rates for high earners -- proposals that tend to bring in less revenue than forecast -- and raised the ante on Boehner.
All of which prompts the question: Would the economy be doing better today if the grand bargain had been successful, and if we were not headed toward the fiscal cliff resulting from the sequestration process congressional leaders improvised after Obama spiked the negotiations?
We can't know the answer for sure. But it's certainly possible. Instead, the economy is in such disarray that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has embarked on a third round of quantitative easing.
Obama has spent about half of his career in public office running for other office. A couple of years after his election to the state Senate, he ran for Congress. He lost, and a couple of years later ran for the U.S. Senate.
Two years after taking office, he started running for president. And he's spent a lot of time this last two years -- all those fundraisers! -- running again.
In the meantime, he has skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings, including those several days before the attacks on our embassies and consulates that started on Sept. 11, 2012.
Afterward, White House press secretary Jay Carney, Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and Obama himself (on David Letterman) characterized the attacks as spontaneous responses to a video criticizing Islam.
That story line was punctured when the director of the National Counterterrorism Center stated what seemed to be obvious -- that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed "in the course of a terrorist attack." The video was a pretext.
The video alibi was obviously politically motivated. One of the premises of the Obama campaign was that his election would make Muslims love America.
What we see in all this is a president who is much more comfortable campaigning than governing.
What we also see is disarray -- an economy that is foundering, a world where America is on the defensive and under attack. A president who can't change Washington and whose election did not magically change the world.
1a) Niall Ferguson: All the Asian Rage
Rage is all the rage. As we all know, radical Muslims are enraged about blasphemous videos and cartoons—so much so that an American ambassador to a country liberated by the United States was murdered by a howling mob in Libya.
I worry about that. I worry even more about this administration’s lame response to it. But perhaps we should all worry the most about a very different kind of rage: the Chinese rage that takes the form of a hyperventilating nationalism.
Another American ambassador recently had an encounter with Chinese rage. Fortunately, he was unharmed. Still, if I were Gary Locke—the U.S. ambassador in Beijing—I certainly would not have enjoyed being surrounded by 50 Chinese-nationalist protesters chanting: “Down with U.S. imperialism! China will win!”
Off track in Afghanistan
But after a week in which most joint operations between coalition and Afghan troops were suspended, U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is anything but “on track.” In fact, it may be more imperiled than at any other time in Mr. Obama’s presidency.
The halting of contacts below the battalion level between coalition and Afghan forces was ordered last Sunday, after four more American troops were shot and killed by Afghan police. These “green-on-blue” killings, which now account for 51 coalition fatalities this year, are being compared by senior U.S. officials and members of Congress to the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, because of the devastating effect on troop morale and the already weak domestic support for the war.
The parallel is hyperbolic — but the suspension of “partnering” will cripple NATO’s strategy if it is prolonged. Up to 80 percent of combat operations in recent months were joint operations between Western and Afghan forces, often at the company level. Without coalition support, many Afghan units may be unwilling or incapable of fighting. In the countryside, they will be tempted to surrender or strike truces with Taliban forces
Coalition officials say that only about a quarter of the inside killings can be attributed directly or indirectly to the Taliban. Still, the infiltrations represent a clever shift of strategy by an enemy that was driven by the surge from most of its strongholds in southern Afghanistan.
NATO must be equally inventive in finding ways to respond — just as it has reacted to other chronic threats, like roadside bombs. Some obvious steps are already underway, like a rescreening of personnel in the Afghan army and police, which have grown from 100,000 to 350,000 since 2007. More NATO soldiers are being assigned to “guardian angel” patrol duties. When events occur that may inflame Afghan emotions, such as the current reaction to an anti-Muslim film, commanders may be wise to hold back on non-essential operations.
Still, the threat of infiltration and fratricide should not be allowed to break NATO’s strategy of gradually drawing down forces between now and the end of 2014 while continuing to train and mentor Afghan troops. An accelerated withdrawal or the abandonment of the Afghan army would only lead to far greater problems. U.S. strategy on Afghanistan should remain “on track,” as Mr. Panetta put it — even if it is off the rails at the moment.
Name a single thing that has improved under his rule.
How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider voting for Barack Obama now? That's what lots of conservatives and moderates are asking each other, again and again. It's completely baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what America means and what the American character traditionally has been, that anybody can look at the man's record and want more of the same.
Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against an American president who promised that his olive branches to Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined. In short, the United States is in worse position with all sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are embarrassed, feckless, wounded... and in four tragic cases, dead.
Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let down and sometimes insulted. The "re-set" with Russia earned us only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive branches, or Obama's supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius for diplomacy.
Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama's first month in office, even though his economic team said his outrageously expensive "stimulus" package would ensure that it would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop below 6 percent within four years.
Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever -- and as Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in history to push through a major new program without a single vote from the opposing party -- and while refusing to incorporate a single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice rejecting the president's own pitiful budget proposal byunanimous votes.
Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of dubious constitutionality. Congress won't pass cap-and-trade, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't undermine the work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.
His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not holdnonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect the black "candidates of choice" if the candidate weren't identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!) of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment were dashed.
And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions. Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 -- dropped the cases, indeed, just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in municipal elections in 2009.
Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office -- and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums. Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive. Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare's scourges -- and most of the law hasn't yet taken effect. Coming soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical technology.
Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto bailouts, even as most of GM's new jobs have been created overseas rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on the hook for politically inspired "investments" to Obama cronies in failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.
Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President Clinton.
The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for making things better in a second term.
This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its degradations of American society.
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Townhall Exclusive: Bob Woodward on the Price of Politics
President Barack Obama said that he would accept a one-term presidency.
According to Bob Woodward’s new book,The Price of Politics, the 44th President of the United States was willing to concede to a four-year presidency if the nation got its financial house back in order under his watch. Woodward writes that Obama -- when speaking to Senator Kent Conrad about the ongoing budget crisis -- noted, “I’d be willing to be a one-term president over this,” agreeing with Conrad’s assessment that our country was on an “unsustainable [financial] course.”
Now, nearly-four years after Obama took office, the debt crisis has only worsened and the United States is faced with a daunting debt of over sixteen trillion dollars.
So what changed?
At the National Book Festival earlier today, I spoke to Woodward about what made Obama -- who spoke out against our nation’s ruinous spending policies both before and after becoming president -- carelessly accept trillions of dollars of more debt under his watch. “The answer is politics,” Woodward said. “That’s why the book is called the price of politics.”
Woodward added that Obama’s one-term promise -- which he compared to Speaker John Boehner saying that he was serious about resolving our spending issues -- was simply a rhetorical claim, one that Obama failed to live up to.
Woodward said that both parties attempted to make major progress on the debt but failed to. “They all tried but they were gonna have to do painful things that people in their party didn’t want to do,” he said. He noted that Obama just wasn’t able to “take it over the finish line.”
But the author recognized that this isn’t a new issue, nor is it one that any politician should be surprised by. This is a major issue that nearly everyone recognizes but few are willing to resolve. “It’s the thing that we know is out there,” he said. “The financial house is not in order and [the] government’s gonna have to get authority to borrow trillions of dollars more just to stay afloat.”
He added that “we have [a] political campaign going on in which people are not really addressing that question. They’re skirting it.” He noted that much of the campaign this year has focused on mistakes and gaffes, rather than the issue of entitlement spending that threatens the future of this country.
He said that he wasn’t sure if our spending crisis would be addressed after the election but said that it will only grow worse over time.
He compared the problem to a captain facing problems at sea. “There’s a big hole in the ship. It only keeps growing and growing. There’s no effort to repair it “
I asked Woodward if our political leaders would truly recognize the seriousness of the issue one day and make the tough choices our nation needs. He said that nothing happens in one day. “Things in government happen when there’s a crisis,” he said, “[and] we’re gonna run into a crisis because there just isn’t gonna be enough money…”
Politics, Woodward argues, have hampered our nation’s ability to reach a deal to solve this crisis. He added that “political calculations” drove us to where we are now and fixing those issues is going to be “painful.” “Reforming the tax system which both President Obama and Speaker Boehner [and] Republicans and Democrats agree has to be done is really hard.” But, he added, “Reagan did it with Democrats in 1986. It’s possible.”
At a lecture after the interview, Woodward noted that both the Democrats and the Republicans share responsibility for their inability to get our deficit under control. However, when an audience member asked who was more responsible, Woodward noted that “the leader of this country is the president.”
“Presidents have to lead and presidents have to know how,” he said before walking off the stage.
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