Has Obama Chosen Iran over Israel?

Our friends?  Really?

It ordinarily would not be fair or mature to impugn President Obama's motives over a policy disagreement, even an important one. But after the campaign of calumny and personal vilification that was launched against Prime Minister Netanyahu by administration proxies and toadies like the New York Times and The Atlantic, Mr Obama deserves no such courtesy. 

Obama's policy appears to be to throw an ally under the bus to mollify an enemy, a short term policy that re-iterates the anti-proliferation regime by which Bill Clinton did no more than slightly delay North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

It would appear that Obama wants a treaty so he can claim to have a foreign policy achievement to match his one domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act.  Endangering both Israel and the United States to bolster his ego that he was a successful president is less than admirable. It is less than responsible. 

If Obama prevails in this fight and gets his treaty, the eventual Iranian nuclear arsenal, not the treaty, will be his legacy. Future generations will curse his name.

The Trial of Osama bin Laden

The current issue of 'Vanity Fair' magazine has an article titled, "The Hunt for Geronimo" about the White House process leading up to the killing of Osama bin Laden.  The article is adapted by Mark Bowden from his book of the same title.  Bowden personally interviewed most of the participants, including President Obama.

On page 190 Bowden writes, "In the unlikely event that Bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw the opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial.  He was ready to bring him back and put  him on trial in a federal court."

Then follows a direct quote which Bowden attributes to President Obama in double quotes on page 190.

We worked though the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantanamo and to not try him and Article III [of the Constitution].  I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios,  But, frankly, my belief was, if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and the rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.

Whether one supports President Obama's re-election or not, this remark should give one pause.  It is astonishingly naive to think that the message the Muslim world would take away from a public trial of Osama bin Laden in an American court would be to respect us for due process and the rule of law.   That the President could be so wildly wrong cannot help but make one question his judgment.  This is not a partisan issue, it is a matter of simple competence.

A much lesser note is that it illuminates the 2009 fuss when we were told that Attorney-General Eric Holder wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was immediately responsible for planning 9/11, in federal court in Manhattan.  Pretty much every single person in New York thought that was a bad idea and said so.  The plan was withdrawn and Holder wound up with egg on his face for having proposed it.

The President's remark suggests that trial in Manhattan was only one of several option Holder presented to the President and was the one President Obama chose.  It appears to me that when it blew up in their faces, the Attorney-General fell on his sword as ordered, and the President could semi-truthfully claim that Holder had suggested the idea to him.  Taking the hit to deflect flak from the boss is to be expected, so that in itself does not reflect badly on either man. Indeed, it reflects well on Holder.

Two years later, in May 2011 President Obama, unchastened, thought trying Osama bin Laden, a vastly bigger fish than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in federal court was a good idea.  We have just seen how the faithful in the Muslim world reacted to a two-bit Youtube video.  Four of our people died in that.  Imagine what the reaction would have been to a lengthy public trial of the charismatic central figure of the Salafist movement.  Or even just the reaction to the inevitable sermons and exhortations to revenge for his coming death that bin Laden would have delivered in Arabic from the dock and had broadcast around the world.  Not a US embassy, consulate, school, or other American institution anywhere in the Muslim world (the 57 countries in the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Countries) would have survived.

Sure, I have the advantage of hindsight but I do not have the advantages of the resources of the entire federal government and all day every day to think about these things and every smart person in the country to ask advice of.  In any case, President Obama also had the advantage of hindsight.

That. two years after the Holder-Khalid fiasco, President Obama still thought trying Osama bin Laden in federal court was a good idea makes me wonder about his judgment.  It might make you wonder too.

Marriage Rights for All!

[Brigham Young and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and his wife and....]

Doesn't the legalization of same-sex marriage mean that bisexuals will continue to be discriminated against so long as a marriage is only between two people?  Shouldn't a man be able to marry the  man and woman whom he loves?  The woman he loves should have the same right, which would require a second woman, making a minimum of four spouses.


Would President Romney be more sensitive to this issue than President Obama?




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Down Time

I am home in bed with a cough and a sore throat and general crumminess today.  Oliver the doggapotamus is in bed snoring alongside me.  Rita is off running errands including getting chicken soup.   


When you find a woman to whom your being sick is a cue to get you chicken soup rather than to get herself a flu shot, you have really got something.  Or someone.  Someone imprudent, certainly.

My nephew Steve Wilhelm, a perspicacious young man, put up on Facebook a link to a Wall Street Journal article on how difficult it is to cut the deficit.  It contained the following paragraph,

"The White House, after saying all fall that Obama's jobs agenda must be paid for with tax increases on high-income earners, appears willing to simply pad the nation's $15 trillion national debt instead of finding offsetting cuts."

To which I commented, "So why did we vote for this guy?"

Earlier in the day I heard from an old and dear friend, Karen Trendler Petit.  She called me "a cynical old poop".  Unfortunately, I could not find a basis on which to disagree with her.

As it stands, the US economy is dysfunctional.  The Congress is dysfunctional.  The President sees no connection between betraying the people who elected him the first time and his prospects of being elected a second time.  The Left are narcissistic idiots with a strong taint of anti-Semitism.  The Republicans have fielded a row of right-wing idiots.  Their un-electable frontrunner, Gingrich, yesterday proposed repealing the child labor laws.

Iran is building an atomic bomb.  Yet Russia and China are more afraid of disrupting the price of oil than they are of a government in which the lunatic Ahmadinejad is the more moderate faction.  And that is even though Iran has missiles to deliver nukes to Russian and Chinese cities.  The survival of the European Union has come to depend on the good will and generosity of the Germans, a people not noted for either.  The Arab Spring is more and more being revealed as merely a device for replacing repressive military regimes with repressive Islamist ones.

Cynicism both at home and abroad is more and more the description that matches reality.

I worked on the 2008 Colorado campaign which brought us a politician created by the Chicago Daley Machine and funded by Wall Street, and I worked on the 2010 debacle which saw the people of Wisconsin discard Senator Russ Feingold like a beer can out a car window.  Clearly, participating in politics and world affairs accomplishes exactly the same result as not participating in them.  Except for the disappointment afterwards.

From which it follows that it is time to stop reading the news.  It is bad for me and it is not helping anyone else.  Further, I am in a perfect position to live as an escapist.  I am retired, Rita wants me to live with her in her big house amid oak trees in a canyon in the Berkeley Hills, and we already have all the gadgets and clothes we want.  The world's reality sucks.  Mine is actually quite good.

Reading used to mean spending time in Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's Russia.  Or visiting the drawing rooms of Austen's England.  It can be that again.  I am going back to reading fiction.

I have been accused of saying, "I've got mine.  Too bad about yours."  Which would be a crummy thing to say.  But "I've got mine.  I've tried and there is not much I can do about yours." does not make me a heartless prick, does it?

A Bridge to Nowhere?

Excerpted from the New York Times, Monday 24 March 2008

Mark Penn, the chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Obama’s Senate career did not back up his promise of being able to forge a new governing coalition across party lines.

“It’s a great promise,” Mr. Penn said. “But are the actions consistent with the words? I don’t see it.”

Still, many of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, often displays the wariness of Democrats who came of political age in the Reagan era, when the party was constantly on the defensive. As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

Mr. Obama significantly outperformed Mrs. Clinton among independents in the coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5, and in several other key contests. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits — from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from the campaign of Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Mr. Obama as just another big-government liberal.

“When you’re rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that’s going to be difficult to explain,” said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

[ a) "Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.” Somebody actually got paid money for writing that sentence.
b) Bernie Sanders is the only avowed socialist ever elected to the US Senate.]

So the situation remains that Obama claims he is going to build bridges. And the people on the other end of the bridge he intends to build are declaring publicly that they oppose everything he favors and that they are going to rip him to shreds at their earliest opportunity.

This is very much like the situation of the peace camp in Israel. They want to build bridges to people who respond to their peaceful intentions with, "Death to the Jews!".

In both cases the problem is that wishful thinking is not a workable policy.

Francine Hardaway and the Queen of Spain

have been mocking Hillary Clinton in Francine's blog for not really being a woman. That is pretty funny considering the parallel knock on Obama, that he's not really Black. He is the descendant not of slaves but of a rich Kenyan foreign exchange student. His stepfather was a wealthy Muslim Indonesian businessman. How he must have suffered from the indignities of racism growing up recognized as the Best and Brightest and Richest, first in Indonesia, then in a wealthy Chicago suburb. The wrenching sorrow of it all! And we all know how badly successful young graduates of Harvard Law are treated. The indignities of being elected to the Illinois state legislature, the House of Representatives, and the US Senate have surely given him a deep empathy for the poor and downtrodden of the earth. (It's a Black Thing -- you wouldn't understand.)

When Hillary went from her wealthy Chicago suburb and Wellesley College to work as an organizer in the slums of Chicago, she was there to Bear the White Woman's Burden. When Obama went from his wealthy Chicago suburb and Harvard to work as an organizer in the slums of Chicago, what color Man's Burden was HE Bearing? Yellow? Red? Want a third guess? (What the hell were they organizing anyway? When I was there in the late '60's the South Side of Chicago was plenty organized -- by the Daly Machine and the Blackstone Rangers crime syndicate. "Stone run it", it said on the walls.)

The leftists of San Francisco got a rude shock a number of years ago. They worked hard to elect former Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, because he was 'A Black Man'. They were furious and betrayed when they discovered a few months into his term in office that he was not 'A Black Man', whatever that meant to them, but a liberal Democrat. Just like the White mayors before and after him. And there is far less that is Black about Obama than about Willie Brown.

The White liberals supporting Obama are in for an even ruder shock when he has been in office for a few months if he is so foolish as to try to reach the promised accommodation with the Republicans.

How much are the liberals willing to concede for Obama's ounce of melanin? Will we concede the rescission of the 2003 tax breaks for the rich? Give up the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq? Forget about the re-imposition of CAFE standards on gas mileage of new cars? Do without subprime mortgage reforms that benefit the borrowers and not just the banks? Will we concede these things in return for having a president who looks credible dancing the boogaloo?

It is clear what we will get if Hillary is elected instead. She has vowed to fight the Republicans. Which means that we will have gridlock rather than Obama's spineless concessions. Pick your poison.

Contrary to the claims of Francine Hardaway and her accomplice the Queen of Spain, though Obama is not Black, Hillary really is a woman. Her election will mean that federal appointments will no longer be limited to wealthy Eastern Establishment white men. Wealthy Eastern Establishment white women will be appointed too.