Tag: Charles Krauthammer

Amusing

Charles Krauthammer: Obama’s Trip Abroad Symbolizes America’s Decline

Charles Krauthammer nails it!

In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama took note of North Korea’s missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed:

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.”

A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What “strong international response” did Mr. Obama muster to North Korea’s brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 — “binding,” as it were — U.N. resolution prohibiting such a launch?

The obligatory emergency Security Council session produced nothing. No sanctions. No resolution. Not even a statement. China and Russia professed to find no violation whatsoever. They would not even permit a U.N. statement that dared express “concern,” let alone condemnation.

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the United Nations — a fiction and a farce, respectively — what was Mr. Obama’s further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the “realism” Mr. Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

He certainly has a vision. Rather than relying on America’s unique technological edge in missile defenses to provide a measure of nuclear safety, Mr. Obama will instead boldly deploy the force of example. How? By committing his country to disarmament gestures — such as, he promised his cheering acolytes in Prague, ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Really, now. How does U.S. ratification of that treaty — which America has, in any case, voluntarily abided by for 17 years — cause North Korea to cease and desist, and cause Iran to turn nukes into plowshares?

Mr. Obama’s other great enthusiasm is renewing disarmament talks with Russia. Good grief. Of all the useless sideshows. Cut each of our arsenals in half and both countries could still, in Churchill’s immortal phrase, “make the rubble bounce.”

There’s little harm in engaging in talks about redundant nukes because there is nothing of consequence at stake. But Mr. Obama seems not even to understand that these talks are a gift to the Russians for whom a return to anachronistic Reagan-era START talks is a return to the glory of U.S.-Soviet summitry.

I’m not against gift-giving in international relations. But it would be nice to see some reciprocity. Mr. Obama was in a giving mood throughout Europe. While Gordon Brown was trying to make his American DVDs work and the queen was rocking to her new iPod, the rest of Europe was enjoying a more fulsome Obama gift.

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Mr. Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.

And what did he get for this obsessive denigration of his own country?

He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One! (Sadly, he’ll have to leave his swim buddy behind.) The Austrians said they would take none. As Interior Minister Maria Fekter explained with impeccable Germanic logic, if they’re not dangerous, why not just keep them in America?

When Austria is mocking you, you’re having a bad week. Yet who can blame Frau Fekter, considering the disdain Mr. Obama showed his own country while on foreign soil, acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating between his renegade homeland and an otherwise warm and welcoming world?

After all, it was Mr. Obama, not some envious anti-American leader, who noted with satisfaction that a new financial order is being created today by 20 countries, rather than by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy.” And then added: “But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”

It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline. A few more such overseas tours, and Mr. Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.

Source…

Amusing

Charles Krauthammer On Obama’s “American Arrogance” Comment

This was an outstanding analysis by Charles Krauthammer. Obama was disgraceful. An American President should never speak as Obama did. It is obvious he doesn’t love this country.

This is the first time a sitting American President has directly criticized his own country while overseas. It’s an insult to every American. He doesn’t deserve the honor of leading this great nation.

America’s Shame:
Obama Calls U.S. “Arrogant” & “Divisive” in Speech in France


“Europe’s Been Sucking On Our Tit For 60 yrs” ~ Charles Krauthammer

Other

The Politics of Fear and Hopelessness

The real Barack Obama is not a man of Hope and Change. He is just another Chicago thug practicing the Politics of Fear and Hopelessness!

Charles Krauthammer puts into words, our thoughts.

The Fierce Urgency of Pork

“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” — President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn’t understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new — a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the “fierce urgency of now” includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting “planted” for “ready to market” would mean a windfall garnered from a new “bonus depreciation” incentive.

After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Amusing

Charles Krauthammer: I Will Go Down With the McCain Ship

So many Americans are spoiled with a “soft underbelly” and far too concerned about what other countries supposedly think of the United States. It is more important to do the right thing than to win a world popularity contest. It’s like parenting or leading a group of people; you earn more respect when you are predictably firm and structured.

Charles Krauthammer gets it right. He is the most consistent, level-headed, clear-minded voice out there and this is the most convincing, point-by-point unapologetic and reasoned essay on the out-and-out dangers we face and who is better suited to address them; President John McCain.

If Obama wins, I hope the electorate who voted for him and the media get what they deserve, because they will surely deserve whom they get. Unfortunately we who will not vote for him may be burdened with the Axis of Idiots “Pelosi, Reid and Obama”.

McCain for President

Contrarian that I am, I’m voting for John McCain. I’m not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it’s over before it’s over. I’m talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they’re left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

First, I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “erratic” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association — with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Other

The antiwar movement!

Charles Krauthammer has one of the sharpest minds. He has a good artical over at Townhall on the antiwar movement.

“Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son-of-a-bitch that killed my son Joe?’ (Joseph P.) Kennedy said, referring to his oldest son, who had died in the war. Kennedy went on, saying Roosevelt had caused the war. Truman, by his later account, stood all he could, then told Kennedy to keep quiet or he would throw him out the window.” — “Truman,” by David McCullough, Page 328

WASHINGTON — A large number of Americans feel deep and understandable unease about the war in Iraq, and want nothing more than to pull out. But the antiwar movement is singularly disserved by its leadership, such as it is. Its de facto leader is Cindy Sheehan, who catapulted herself into that role by quite brilliantly exploiting the media’s hunger for political news during the August recess, and by wrapping herself in the courage of her son Casey, who died in Iraq. Her loss and grief deserve sympathy and respect. However, Sheehan believes that it entitles her to special standing in opposing a war in which her son served, about which he (as far as we know) expressed no misgivings, and for which he indeed re-enlisted.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times claims that Sheehan’s “moral authority” on the war is “absolute.” This is obtuse. Sheehan’s diatribes against George Bush — “lying bastard;” “filth-spewer and warmonger;” “biggest terrorist in the world” — have no more moral standing than Joseph Kennedy’s vilification of Franklin Roosevelt. And if Sheehan speaks with absolute moral authority, then so does Diane Ibbotson — and the other mothers who have lost sons in Iraq yet continue to support the mission their sons died for and bitterly oppose Sheehan for discrediting it.

The antiwar movement has found itself ill-served by endowing absolute moral authority on a political radical who demanded that American troops leave not just Iraq but “occupied New Orleans.” Who blames Israel for her son’s death. Who complained that the news media went “100 percent Rita” — “a little wind and a little rain” — rather than covering other things in the world, meaning her.

Most tellingly, Sheehan demands withdrawal not just from Iraq, but from Afghanistan, a war not only just by every possible measure, but also remarkably successful. The mainstream opposition view of Iraq is that, while deposing the murderous Saddam was a moral and even worthy cause, the enterprise was misconceived and/or bungled, too ambitious and unwinnable, and therefore not worth expending more American lives. That is not Sheehan’s view. Like the hard left in the Vietnam War, she declares the mission itself corrupt and evil: The good guys are the “`freedom fighters” — the very ones who besides killing thousands of Iraqi innocents, killed her son too.

You don’t build a mass movement on that. Nor on antiwar rallies, like the one last week in Washington, organized and run by a front group for the Workers World Party. The WWP is descended from Cold War Stalinists who found other communists insufficiently rigorous for refusing to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Thus a rally ostensibly against war is run by a group that supported the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; the massacre in Tiananmen Square; and a litany of the very worst mass murderers of our time, including Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il. You don’t seize the moral high ground in America with fellow travelers like these.

For all the Vietnam nostalgia at the Washington march, things are different today. In Vietnam it could never be plausibly argued that Ho Chi Minh was training commandos to bring down skyscrapers in New York City. Today, however, Americans know that this is precisely what our jihadist enemies are pledged to do.

Moreover, Vietnam offered a seeming middle way between immediate withdrawal on the one hand and staying the course on the other: negotiations, which in the end did in fact take place. Today there is no one to negotiate with, no middle ground, no even apparent plausible compromise. The only choices are to succeed in establishing a self-sufficient, democratic Iraq or to call an abject retreat that not only gives Iraq over to the tender mercies of people who specialize in blowing up innocents, but makes it a base of operations for worldwide jihad.

The very fact that Cindy Sheehan and her WWP comrades are so enthusiastic for the latter outcome tells you how difficult it will be to turn widespread discontent about the war into a mainstream antiwar movement.

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