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Obama's Record Is One Of Weakness In Foreign Policy
The Advocate
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
The North Koreans, in violation of a U.N. Resolution, launch a rocket that flies over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean, possibly with the capability of reaching the U.S. What do we do? We send it to the United Nations, which doesn’t even pass another U.N. Resolution, which would certainly be ignored. It agrees to meet again.
Yes, the U.N. is so pathetically weak, it can’t even come up with another toothless tiger resolution. It can’t even say North Korea is in violation of a resolution adopted in 2006 after a North Korea missile launch of July 5 and a nuclear test on Oct. 9 of that year. The resolution demanded that North Korea refrain from any more nuclear testing and ballistic missile launches. So much for resolutions. If the North Koreans ignored the 2006 resolution why will they suddenly take a 2009 resolution seriously?
And after the tough talk of Barack Obama — words have consequences, violators must be punished, blah, blah, blah, etc. — we come home to his usual response of words, diplomacy, negotiation, consideration and everything but action and forbid the thought of a military option. Our U.N. ambassador pressed for “strong condemnation” of the North Korean action. I’ll bet they’re still trembling as they celebrate the rocket launch and another chance to defy the international community.
What does our president do? He is busy downgrading and killing our missile defense program — which should have been accelerated instead of abandoned in the face of a growing missile/nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. Mr. Obama cuts back on defense, as he continues a wild spending frenzy on about every liberal proposal that could be dreamed up. And he proposes unilateral nuclear disarmament, while proposing a grand world order to eliminate all nuclear weapons. I’m sure North Korea and Iran can’t wait to discuss Mr. Obama’s proposal. North Korea may even be laughing as it made his nuclear disarmament speech look silly.
When you view his foreign policy, national security and defense positions, you realize he’s turned the patriot’s great statement on its head. The patriot said, “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.” Mr. Obama seems to say, “Millions of tributes, not one cent for defense.”
How many different ways can an American president tell terrorists and the rest of the world that he is weak and ineffectual and is unlikely to do anything but deliver speeches and sweet talk while all of our enemies get free passes? Yes, Mr. Obama has the talking disease, mistaking rhetoric for reality, and the campaign disease, thinking he is merely campaigning in Europe while he is supposed to be governing in the U.S.
When he’s not slashing defense programs, he’s busy apologizing for and smearing America. He goes to Europe and accuses his own country of arrogance. He complains again about our problems with slavery and Native Americans. He denies American exceptionalism explaining to Europeans, in effect, that we’re just another country on the list.
Mr. Obama is not interested in the fact that we saved the world from Nazi fascism and from Soviet communism, not to mention saving the world from Germany during World War I. He doesn’t mention that after World War II, for more than 60 years, we provided a defensive shield for the world, with Europe assuming almost none of the burden of fighting the Cold War and the other enemies of the West. He doesn’t mention the fact that we took up the torch of freedom to fight Islamofascism, while Europe and most of the world continued to bask in the peace zone created by America.
When he’s addressing the Muslims, he ought to remind them of how many times we’ve gone to war to save Muslims, such as in Kuwait and Bosnia. He doesn’t bother to mention our rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II, and that rebuilding included even the enemy powers we had defeated.
He doesn’t mention the tradition of America coming to the help of all nations hit by natural disasters. Mr. Obama doesn’t bother to relate the glorious history of the greatest country in the history of the world. To Mr. Obama, apparently, America isn’t the shining city on a hill; it’s just another country in the ditch.
If all that’s not bad enough, Mr. Obama turns down an invitation to visit the American military cemetery near Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. The British newspaper, The Telegraph (April 2, 2009), headlined the story, “Barack Obama rejects Normandy trip to avoid offending Germany.”
It said: “Barack Obama concerned about offending Britain and Germany, rebuffed strenuous attempts by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to persuade the new American president to make a trip to Normandy this week.”
This political sicko thinks he’s still campaigning, now in Europe rather than governing in the U.S. He thinks that by bowing and scraping to enemies and allies we will get them to do our will. But as he learned in Europe, they applaud his rhetoric and ignore his entreaties.
He went to Europe to get a stimulus package and combat troops for Afghanistan and got neither. And he was probably angling for help in Iran, in the U.N. and with Russia. No results there, either. He won the popularity contest for himself, but he lost the foreign policy contest, which he is supposed to try to win for America.
Mr. Obama not only turned his back on America’s heroes resting in Normandy, but also bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. We know he’s soft on Muslims, but should an American president be bowing and scraping to the King of Saudi Arabia? Should President Obama send a message of subservience to a Muslim king? And then to make matters worse, when the White House is asked about this incident, the response was that he did not bow.
He was merely giving a double handshake with a shorter man, so he had to bow down. Give me a break. I’ve seen thousands of handshakes with shorter men and taller men, and not once did one of those look like a handshake. This has got to be another giant Obama lie about on the order of the Rev. Wright lie: I’ve been sitting in his church for 20 years and closely associating with him, but I never really heard any of those anti-American views. If you can’t come up with a better lie than that, it’s time to tell the truth.
His domestic policies are so wildly leftist and spending crazy that he’s even criticized by European socialism for excessive spending. He gets advice on how to protect a capitalistic economy from communist China. And China and other countries talk of a world currency because they know that Mr. Obama’s spending jag will inevitably lead to printing money and inflation. That will devalue the dollar and devalue all those who hold American debt.
Even the European socialists think he is spending too much. And Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament, points out even in Zimbabwe, a newspaper is amazed at the fiscal mess America is getting itself into.
But all this should come as no surprise. That is, it should come as no surprise if you happen to be familiar with the Obama record and background. Many were not because he simply wasn’t questioned or vetted by the mainstream media. They sold America Mr. Obama, the cat-in-a-bag presidency, the first in our history.
So don’t be surprised at Mr. Obama’s viewing America as arrogant, Mr. Obama’s obsession with slavery and the mistreatment of American Indians, and his failure to appreciate and speak of American exceptionalism. This is the man that sat in the Church of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years. This is the man who associated with the terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. He associated with another America hater, Father Michael Pfleger.
Mr. Obama even indirectly insulted America by telling the Europeans we have some special responsibility for nuclear weapons as we were the first to use them (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Brit Hume of Fox News says this was just to win the favor of Muslims who like to think of America as the bad guy. But it is an outrageous comment as dropping those nuclear bombs saved perhaps one million American lives that might have been lost in an invasion of Japan.
Mr. Obama should have paid respects to a great Democratic president, Harry Truman, who had the good sense to properly use this most powerful of weapons. He should have not condemned America or Truman for saving a million American lives.
Those who know his record will not be surprised by his weak approach to foreign policy and the war on terror. He was one of the first to call for retreat and defeat in Iraq and was the darling of the anti-war movement. Even while a state senator in Illinois, right after 9/11, instead of calling on a war against such terrorism, he was explaining, analyzing and making excuses for the terrorists in terms of poverty and the like.
He has an administration that doesn’t want to call an act of terrorism by its right name, but instead labels it a man-made disaster and the war on terror is an overseas contingency operation. This is semantic and political insanity, and reveals a president who can’t even identify our enemy — and who is, therefore, setting us up to lose to that enemy.
Don’t be surprised by Mr. Obama’s lack of bipartisanship and his hard-left party line approach. His record showed he never even once made any significant bipartisanship gesture in his political career and was always a party-line legislator. And don’t be surprised by his socialist, hard-left, radical views. He was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate — more liberal even than Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry, both from the most liberal state in the union.
As a socialist, he wants a big government and he wants power to the government. That’s the explanation for the Obama administration forcing bailouts on financial institutions and refusing to accept the pay-off of bailout. Stuart Varney explains this in the Wall Street Journal (April 4, 2009), “The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed [with the bailout money] is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell ’em what to do. Control Direct. Command.”
So if you expected him to be the great uniter, that’s because you listened only to his campaign oratory and the propaganda for him featured by the mainstream media. Because he is so radical left and so partisan, he is proving to be the great divider, not the great uniter. That’s why the Pew Research Center found “Partisan Gap in Obama Job Approval Widest in Modern Era” (April 2, 2009).
The Pew Center found: “For all his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 81-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democratic ratings for the president — 88 percent job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans (27 percent).” Other presidents, from Richard Nixon to Bush II, had differentials ranging from 25 to 51.
You should also not be surprised at Mr. Obama’s love affair with the new world order, and his enthusiasm for participation in international bodies and willingness to surrender American sovereignty to them. That’s part of the radical liberal tradition from which he comes. So it should surprise no one that he, in Dick Morris’s words, repealed the Declaration of Independence on his recent trip to Europe. Mr. Morris writes in his April 6, 2009 column: “On April 2, 2009, the work of July 4, 1776 was nullified at the meeting of the G-20 in London. The joint communiqué essentially announces a global economic union with uniform regulations and bylaws for all nations, including the United States. Henceforth, our SEC, Commodities Trading Commission Federal Reserve Board and other regulators will have to march to the beat of drums pounded by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a body of central bankers from each of the G-20 states and the European Union.”
This FSB will regulate and oversee all “systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets … [including] systematically important hedge funds.” The FSB will also regulate executive pay and will enforce its idea of corporate social responsibility on “all firms.”
Mr. Morris concludes, “Obama, perhaps feeling guilty for the U.S. role in the international crisis, has, indeed, given away the store. Now we may no longer look to presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, to make policy for our economy. These decisions will be made internationally.” In this the U.S. will have only one vote in a 12-member body.
We are finding out now what the mainstream media should have been telling us during the campaign. Yes, the last presidential election was the biggest election fraud in history, courtesy of the mainstream media, and the likes of The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
Yes, the U.N. is so pathetically weak, it can’t even come up with another toothless tiger resolution. It can’t even say North Korea is in violation of a resolution adopted in 2006 after a North Korea missile launch of July 5 and a nuclear test on Oct. 9 of that year. The resolution demanded that North Korea refrain from any more nuclear testing and ballistic missile launches. So much for resolutions. If the North Koreans ignored the 2006 resolution why will they suddenly take a 2009 resolution seriously?
And after the tough talk of Barack Obama — words have consequences, violators must be punished, blah, blah, blah, etc. — we come home to his usual response of words, diplomacy, negotiation, consideration and everything but action and forbid the thought of a military option. Our U.N. ambassador pressed for “strong condemnation” of the North Korean action. I’ll bet they’re still trembling as they celebrate the rocket launch and another chance to defy the international community.
What does our president do? He is busy downgrading and killing our missile defense program — which should have been accelerated instead of abandoned in the face of a growing missile/nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran. Mr. Obama cuts back on defense, as he continues a wild spending frenzy on about every liberal proposal that could be dreamed up. And he proposes unilateral nuclear disarmament, while proposing a grand world order to eliminate all nuclear weapons. I’m sure North Korea and Iran can’t wait to discuss Mr. Obama’s proposal. North Korea may even be laughing as it made his nuclear disarmament speech look silly.
When you view his foreign policy, national security and defense positions, you realize he’s turned the patriot’s great statement on its head. The patriot said, “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.” Mr. Obama seems to say, “Millions of tributes, not one cent for defense.”
How many different ways can an American president tell terrorists and the rest of the world that he is weak and ineffectual and is unlikely to do anything but deliver speeches and sweet talk while all of our enemies get free passes? Yes, Mr. Obama has the talking disease, mistaking rhetoric for reality, and the campaign disease, thinking he is merely campaigning in Europe while he is supposed to be governing in the U.S.
When he’s not slashing defense programs, he’s busy apologizing for and smearing America. He goes to Europe and accuses his own country of arrogance. He complains again about our problems with slavery and Native Americans. He denies American exceptionalism explaining to Europeans, in effect, that we’re just another country on the list.
Mr. Obama is not interested in the fact that we saved the world from Nazi fascism and from Soviet communism, not to mention saving the world from Germany during World War I. He doesn’t mention that after World War II, for more than 60 years, we provided a defensive shield for the world, with Europe assuming almost none of the burden of fighting the Cold War and the other enemies of the West. He doesn’t mention the fact that we took up the torch of freedom to fight Islamofascism, while Europe and most of the world continued to bask in the peace zone created by America.
When he’s addressing the Muslims, he ought to remind them of how many times we’ve gone to war to save Muslims, such as in Kuwait and Bosnia. He doesn’t bother to mention our rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II, and that rebuilding included even the enemy powers we had defeated.
He doesn’t mention the tradition of America coming to the help of all nations hit by natural disasters. Mr. Obama doesn’t bother to relate the glorious history of the greatest country in the history of the world. To Mr. Obama, apparently, America isn’t the shining city on a hill; it’s just another country in the ditch.
If all that’s not bad enough, Mr. Obama turns down an invitation to visit the American military cemetery near Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. The British newspaper, The Telegraph (April 2, 2009), headlined the story, “Barack Obama rejects Normandy trip to avoid offending Germany.”
It said: “Barack Obama concerned about offending Britain and Germany, rebuffed strenuous attempts by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to persuade the new American president to make a trip to Normandy this week.”
This political sicko thinks he’s still campaigning, now in Europe rather than governing in the U.S. He thinks that by bowing and scraping to enemies and allies we will get them to do our will. But as he learned in Europe, they applaud his rhetoric and ignore his entreaties.
He went to Europe to get a stimulus package and combat troops for Afghanistan and got neither. And he was probably angling for help in Iran, in the U.N. and with Russia. No results there, either. He won the popularity contest for himself, but he lost the foreign policy contest, which he is supposed to try to win for America.
Mr. Obama not only turned his back on America’s heroes resting in Normandy, but also bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. We know he’s soft on Muslims, but should an American president be bowing and scraping to the King of Saudi Arabia? Should President Obama send a message of subservience to a Muslim king? And then to make matters worse, when the White House is asked about this incident, the response was that he did not bow.
He was merely giving a double handshake with a shorter man, so he had to bow down. Give me a break. I’ve seen thousands of handshakes with shorter men and taller men, and not once did one of those look like a handshake. This has got to be another giant Obama lie about on the order of the Rev. Wright lie: I’ve been sitting in his church for 20 years and closely associating with him, but I never really heard any of those anti-American views. If you can’t come up with a better lie than that, it’s time to tell the truth.
His domestic policies are so wildly leftist and spending crazy that he’s even criticized by European socialism for excessive spending. He gets advice on how to protect a capitalistic economy from communist China. And China and other countries talk of a world currency because they know that Mr. Obama’s spending jag will inevitably lead to printing money and inflation. That will devalue the dollar and devalue all those who hold American debt.
Even the European socialists think he is spending too much. And Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament, points out even in Zimbabwe, a newspaper is amazed at the fiscal mess America is getting itself into.
But all this should come as no surprise. That is, it should come as no surprise if you happen to be familiar with the Obama record and background. Many were not because he simply wasn’t questioned or vetted by the mainstream media. They sold America Mr. Obama, the cat-in-a-bag presidency, the first in our history.
So don’t be surprised at Mr. Obama’s viewing America as arrogant, Mr. Obama’s obsession with slavery and the mistreatment of American Indians, and his failure to appreciate and speak of American exceptionalism. This is the man that sat in the Church of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years. This is the man who associated with the terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. He associated with another America hater, Father Michael Pfleger.
Mr. Obama even indirectly insulted America by telling the Europeans we have some special responsibility for nuclear weapons as we were the first to use them (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Brit Hume of Fox News says this was just to win the favor of Muslims who like to think of America as the bad guy. But it is an outrageous comment as dropping those nuclear bombs saved perhaps one million American lives that might have been lost in an invasion of Japan.
Mr. Obama should have paid respects to a great Democratic president, Harry Truman, who had the good sense to properly use this most powerful of weapons. He should have not condemned America or Truman for saving a million American lives.
Those who know his record will not be surprised by his weak approach to foreign policy and the war on terror. He was one of the first to call for retreat and defeat in Iraq and was the darling of the anti-war movement. Even while a state senator in Illinois, right after 9/11, instead of calling on a war against such terrorism, he was explaining, analyzing and making excuses for the terrorists in terms of poverty and the like.
He has an administration that doesn’t want to call an act of terrorism by its right name, but instead labels it a man-made disaster and the war on terror is an overseas contingency operation. This is semantic and political insanity, and reveals a president who can’t even identify our enemy — and who is, therefore, setting us up to lose to that enemy.
Don’t be surprised by Mr. Obama’s lack of bipartisanship and his hard-left party line approach. His record showed he never even once made any significant bipartisanship gesture in his political career and was always a party-line legislator. And don’t be surprised by his socialist, hard-left, radical views. He was the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate — more liberal even than Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry, both from the most liberal state in the union.
As a socialist, he wants a big government and he wants power to the government. That’s the explanation for the Obama administration forcing bailouts on financial institutions and refusing to accept the pay-off of bailout. Stuart Varney explains this in the Wall Street Journal (April 4, 2009), “The government wants to control the banks, just as it now controls GM and Chrysler, and will surely control the health industry in the not-too-distant future. Keeping them TARP-stuffed [with the bailout money] is the key to control. And for this intensely political president, mere influence is not enough. The White House wants to tell ’em what to do. Control Direct. Command.”
So if you expected him to be the great uniter, that’s because you listened only to his campaign oratory and the propaganda for him featured by the mainstream media. Because he is so radical left and so partisan, he is proving to be the great divider, not the great uniter. That’s why the Pew Research Center found “Partisan Gap in Obama Job Approval Widest in Modern Era” (April 2, 2009).
The Pew Center found: “For all his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 81-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democratic ratings for the president — 88 percent job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans (27 percent).” Other presidents, from Richard Nixon to Bush II, had differentials ranging from 25 to 51.
You should also not be surprised at Mr. Obama’s love affair with the new world order, and his enthusiasm for participation in international bodies and willingness to surrender American sovereignty to them. That’s part of the radical liberal tradition from which he comes. So it should surprise no one that he, in Dick Morris’s words, repealed the Declaration of Independence on his recent trip to Europe. Mr. Morris writes in his April 6, 2009 column: “On April 2, 2009, the work of July 4, 1776 was nullified at the meeting of the G-20 in London. The joint communiqué essentially announces a global economic union with uniform regulations and bylaws for all nations, including the United States. Henceforth, our SEC, Commodities Trading Commission Federal Reserve Board and other regulators will have to march to the beat of drums pounded by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a body of central bankers from each of the G-20 states and the European Union.”
This FSB will regulate and oversee all “systemically important financial institutions, instruments and markets … [including] systematically important hedge funds.” The FSB will also regulate executive pay and will enforce its idea of corporate social responsibility on “all firms.”
Mr. Morris concludes, “Obama, perhaps feeling guilty for the U.S. role in the international crisis, has, indeed, given away the store. Now we may no longer look to presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, to make policy for our economy. These decisions will be made internationally.” In this the U.S. will have only one vote in a 12-member body.
We are finding out now what the mainstream media should have been telling us during the campaign. Yes, the last presidential election was the biggest election fraud in history, courtesy of the mainstream media, and the likes of The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
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tricia_lynn70 wrote on Apr 11, 2009 1:39 AM: