More Liberal Apologists

With all of these apologists, I can't help but think of if they want to take another look at George W.

You are having a bad acid trip.  Do you have any Allman Brothers?

Obama and the End of Greatness

By Jeff Shesol, October 22, 2014

In March of 1977, several weeks into the Carter Administration, “Saturday Night Live” featured a skit called “Ask President Carter.” The premise was a radio program, hosted by Walter Cronkite (Bill Murray), on which callers brought their problems to President Carter (Dan Aykroyd). After walking a postal worker through a highly technical repair to her letter-sorting machine (“There’s a three-digit setting there, where the post and the armature meet”), the President expertly talks a man down from an acid trip. “You did some orange sunshine, Peter,” Carter tells him. “Just remember you’re a living organism on this planet, and you’re very safe.… Relax, stay inside, and listen to some music, O.K.? Do you have any Allman Brothers?”*

What the skit captures is the suspension of disbelief at the start of most Presidencies—that moment when a good number of Americans are able to convince themselves that we might be in the presence of a great man, and that his greatness will be manifest. That this is the man who has the answers. When it becomes clear that he doesn’t, we never quite forgive him for it.

This is where we stand right now with President Obama. There are two years left in his tenure, but we are already in the process of writing him off. The Atlantic is calling him “our passé President”; at a rally in Maryland on Sunday, while Obama delivered a campaign speech, dozens of people drifted out of the auditorium. Yet he is still, of course, our President, and we still, on some level, expect heroics. Deep down, we don’t want Obama to appoint an “Ebola czar.” We want him to march into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, set some new protocols, and put this unpleasant business behind us. Instead, to quell our Ebola freak-out, Obama “hugged and kissed … a couple of the nurses” at a hospital in Atlanta, which, really, is an assignment Joe Biden could have taken.

We are a long way from the ideal Presidency—the kind on display for fourteen hours in “The Roosevelts,” Ken Burns’s new documentary, which aired last month on PBS. Granted, any President—Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore—given the Burns treatment would emerge a monument, but the greatness of Franklin Roosevelt (and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Theodore) is beyond serious question. “Who else among his twelve successors can compete?” asks Aaron David Miller in “The End of Greatness,” a thoughtful new book on Presidential performance. “In almost every category—including longevity, impact, wartime leadership, media mastery, durability of coalition, ensuring party control—F.D.R. seems to have cornered the market.”

By Miller’s reckoning—and he is hardly alone here—F.D.R. is the last “undeniably great president” this country has seen. “Our challenges today,” he argues, “are varied and diffused, our politics too broken and dysfunctional and unforgiving to be resolved by a single or a series of heroic presidential actions.” Though Miller thinks “acts of greatness in the presidency are still possible,” he insists that “we cannot have another giant”—and “seldom need one” at this stage in our national development. It is time, he concludes, for America to “get over the greatness thing” and “come to terms with the limits of a president’s capacity to fix things.”

The current President would most likely agree. Despite the grand hopes and hype of the 2008 campaign, this tempering of ambitions, this recognition—and acceptance—of the constraints on Presidential power has been a leitmotif of the Obama Presidency. In an interview with David Remnick published earlier this year, Obama talked about “that business about the great-man theory of history. The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing. Not ‘probably,’ ” he added. “It’s definitely a good thing.” Over the years, Obama and his advisors have issued a long string of statements to this effect: on foreign policy, “leading from behind” (2011); on the limits of executive authority, “there’s no shortcut to democracy” (2013); on civil rights, we must sometimes take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf” (2014).

It is both easy and fashionable to ridicule such comments (“Stop whining, Mr. President. And stop whiffing,” Maureen Dowd snarked last spring), but they are laudable in important respects. In our system of self-government, you’ve got your checks and you’ve got your balances, but there is no limit more powerful than a President’s sense of restraint. Even as they expanded the power and reach of their office, our greatest Presidents have made compromises, taken half-steps, and stayed within the boundaries prescribed by the Constitution. One of the most significant and under-acknowledged accomplishments of F.D.R. was his refusal to assume dictatorial powers in 1933, despite calls for him to do so. (“A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead,” a Barron’s columnist wrote.) Americans often issue a mandate for “change,” but seldom for revolution.

So, for all our disappointment over the fact that Obama’s Presidency has been—in the parlance of the political scientists—more transactional than transformational, we should probably stop knocking him for not being Lincoln (even if it was Obama himself who encouraged the comparison). Or for not being Roosevelt, or Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the same time, Obama should stop downplaying the power of the office he holds. Every time he tamps down our expectations, it sounds like an excuse, whether for inaction or ineffectiveness or both. Obama is a realist, a grownup; in his first inaugural address, he implored the American people, “in the words of the Scripture … to set aside childish things.” Yet our persistent hope for a strong and good and even a great President is not altogether a childish thing. We might not need all of our Presidents to be great, but we can’t afford to have them stop trying.

*Correction: A previous version of this post suggested that the real-life Jimmy Carter would never have recommended the Allman Brothers. In fact, he had a close relationship with the band.

Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers. 

Nothing's Working

Haven't You Noticed?

The Daydream and the Nightmare

Obama isn't doing his job. He's waiting for history to recognize his greatness.

By PEGGY NOONAN, July 4, 2014

I don't know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We've got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University's respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government. A Zogby Analytics survey asked if respondents are proud or ashamed of the president. Those under 50 were proud, while those over 50, who have of course the longest experienced sense of American history, were ashamed.

We all know the reasons behind the numbers. The scandals that suggest poor stewardship and, in the case of the IRS, destructive political mischief. The president's signature legislation, which popularly bears his name and contains within it the heart of his political meaning, continues to wreak havoc in marketplaces and to be unpopular with the public. He is incapable of working with Congress, the worst at this crucial aspect of the job since Jimmy Carter, though Mr. Carter at least could work with the Mideast and produced the Camp David Accords. Mr. Obama has no regard for Republicans and doesn't like to be with Democrats. Internationally, small states that have traditionally been the locus of trouble (the Mideast) are producing more of it, while large states that have been more stable in their actions (Russia, China) are newly, starkly aggressive.

That's a long way of saying nothing's working.

Which I'm sure you've noticed.

But I'm not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: "So sue me." "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names. It can't be that much fun." 

In a truly stunning piece in early June, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein interviewed many around the president and reported a general feeling that events have left him—well, changed. He is "taking fuller advantage of the perquisites of office," such as hosting "star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight." He travels, leaving the White House more in the first half of 2014 than any other time of his presidency except his re-election year. He enjoys talking to athletes and celebrities, not grubby politicians, even members of his own party. He is above it all.

On his state trip to Italy in the spring, he asked to spend time with "interesting Italians." They were wealthy, famous. The dinner went for four hours. The next morning his staff were briefing him for a "60 Minutes" interview about Ukraine and health care. "One aide paraphrased Obama's response: 'Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we're back to the minuscule things on politics.' ''

Minuscule? Politics is his job.

When the crisis in Ukraine escalated in March, White House aides wondered if Mr. Obama should cancel a planned weekend golf getaway in Florida. He went. At the "lush Ocean Reef Club," he reportedly told his dinner companions: "I needed this. I needed the golf. I needed to laugh. I needed to spend time with friends."

You get the impression his needs are pretty important in his hierarchy of concerns.

***

This is a president with 2½ years to go who shows every sign of running out the clock. Normally in a game you run out the clock when you're winning. He's running it out when he's losing.

All this is weird, unprecedented. The president shows no sign—none—of being overwhelmingly concerned and anxious at his predicaments or challenges. Every president before him would have been. They'd be questioning what they're doing wrong, changing tack. They'd be ordering frantic aides to meet and come up with what to change, how to change it, how to find common ground not only with Congress but with the electorate.

Instead he seems disinterested, disengaged almost to the point of disembodied. He is fatalistic, passive, minimalist. He talks about hitting "singles" and "doubles" in foreign policy.

"The world seems to disappoint him," says the New Yorker's liberal and sympathetic editor, David Remnick.

What kind of illusions do you have to have about the world to be disappointed when it, and its players, act aggressively or foolishly? Presidents aren't supposed to have those illusions, and they're not supposed to check out psychologically when their illusions are shattered.

***

Barack Obama doesn't seem to care about his unpopularity, or the decisions he's made that have not turned out well. He doesn't seem concerned. A guess at the reason: He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more federally controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he's done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers are down now, history will look back on him and see him as heroic, realistic, using his phone and pen each day in spite of unprecedented resistance. He is Lincoln, scorned in his time but loved by history.

He thinks he is in line with the arc of history, that America, for all its stops and starts, for all the recent Supreme Court rulings, has embarked in the long term on governmental and cultural progressivism. Thus in time history will have the wisdom to look back and see him for what he really was: the great one who took every sling and arrow, who endured rising unpopularity, the first black president and the only one made to suffer like this.

That's what he's doing by running out the clock: He's waiting for history to get its act together and see his true size.

He's like someone who's constantly running the movie "Lincoln" in his head. It made a great impression on him, that movie. He told Time magazine, and Mr. Remnick, how much it struck him. President Lincoln of course had been badly abused in his time. Now his greatness is universally acknowledged. But if Mr. Obama read more of Lincoln, he might notice Lincoln's modesty, his plain ways, his willingness every day to work and negotiate with all who opposed him, from radical abolitionists who thought him too slow to supporters of a negotiated peace who thought him too martial. Lincoln showed respect for others. Those who loved him and worked for him thought he showed too much. He was witty and comical but not frivolous and never shallow. He didn't say, "So sue me." He never gave up trying to reach agreement and resolution.

It is weird to have a president who has given up. So many young journalists diligently covering this White House, especially those for whom it is their first, think what they're seeing is normal.

It is not. It is unprecedented and deeply strange. And, because the world is watching and calculating, unbelievably dangerous.

"All I'm Saying is FoxNews Has Its Bias"

Meantime the Situation Deteriorates

The High Price of Obama Fatigue

The IRS isn't Watergate; it's worse than Watergate.

By DANIEL HENNINGER, WSJ Opinion, June 19, 2014

With 2½ years left in the Obama presidency, it is at least an open question what will be left of it by December 2016. Or us.

In this week's Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, conducted as the disintegration of Iraq began, Mr. Obama's approval rating has fallen to 41% and his handling of foreign policy to 37%.

Respondents to this poll know what is going on in the world—Ukraine destabilized, Iraq disintegrating, their economy eternally recovering.

Mr. Obama's world this week consisted of flying to the University of California-Irvine to give a speech about a) himself (check the text if you doubt it) and b) climate change. On Wednesday he was in New York City for a midtown fundraiser, an LGBT fundraiser and a third, $32,000 per person fundraiser at the home of Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The Hill newspaper ran a piece earlier this week wondering if Mr. Obama is "done with Washington." Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist, says, "He's never really made it a secret he's not a fan of this place." Or Syria. Or Ukraine. Or Iraq.

President Barack Obama stands alone in the Green Room Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

The defenders of the Obama presidency—which increasingly is becoming a project separate from the person—argue that GOP obstruction thwarted the president's agenda. If the Republicans were the rank partisans of Democratic myth, Eric Cantor would still be Majority Leader and Mississippi's Sen. Thad Cochran would be waltzing to his seventh term.

As to the American people now pushing his approval below 40%, Barack Obama entered office with more good will than any president since John F. Kennedy. If the Obama presidency has run out of aerobic capacity 2½ years from the finish line, it is because of Mr. Obama's own decisions. He did this to himself.

If there's one Obama foreign-policy decision that sticks in anyone's mind it is the "red line" in Syria. It was Mr. Obama's decision last September, at Vladimir Putin's invitation, to step back from his own criteria for punishing Syria's Bashar Assad if he used chemical weapons against his own people. The voters now tanking Mr. Obama's foreign affairs number don't think it's just random bad luck that Russian tanks ended up in Ukraine and some al Qaeda group they've never heard of took over half of Iraq in two days. The world is slipping beyond President Obama's control, or interest. From here on out, it—and we—are in God's hands.

Meanwhile, the Obama domestic presidency is entering its Lois Lerner phase. The Internal Revenue Service says it lost Ms. Lerner's hard drive with emails relevant to its audits of numerous conservative citizen groups. Actually, the IRS says Lois herself lost them because the emails were on her own PC.

Then Tuesday, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa said the IRS also lost similarly relevant emails from six other IRS employees. At a hearing Friday, he will ask IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to explain the AWOL emails.

Barack Obama created Darrell Issa.

On Jan. 27, 2010, Mr. Obama used his State of the Union speech to explicitly criticize the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, seated in front of him, for their campaign-finance ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.

The forces Mr. Obama put in motion with this attack were described in a seminal piece for this newspaper by former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith—"Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal." Through 2012, a succession of Democratic senators urged the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4) nonprofit political groups. Mr. Obama himself in a March 2010 radio address spoke of "shadowy groups with harmless sounding names" that threaten "our democracy."

Here's a partial list of the American place names where the "tea party" groups audited by the IRS were organized: Franklin, Tenn.; Livonia, Mich.; Lucas, Texas; Middletown, Del.; Fishersville, Va.; Jackson, N.J.; Redding, Calif.; Chandler, Ariz.; Laurens, S.C.; Woodstown, N.J.; Wetumpka, Ala.; Kahului, Hawaii; Sidney, Ohio; Newalla, Okla.

He's right, these people do live most of their lives in the shadow of daily American life, out of the public eye. Still, they considered themselves to be very much inside "our democracy." Then the IRS asked them for the names of their donors, what they talked about, political affiliations.

The IRS tea-party audit story isn't Watergate; it's worse than Watergate.

The Watergate break-in was the professionals of the party in power going after the party professionals of the party out of power. The IRS scandal is the party in power going after the most average Americans imaginable.

They didn't need to do this. The Obama campaign machine was a wonder, perfecting the uses of social media in 2008 and 2012. But the Democrats were so crazed in 2010 by Citizens United, so convinced that anyone's new political money might bust their hold on power, that they sicced the most feared agency in government on people who disagreed with them.

Barack Obama wanted this job. He didn't want it to come with Ukraine, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Darrell Issa. But it does.

Leadership & Churchill

Churchill Is Home Again and Here to Stay

As Congress honors Britain's leader, you have to wonder what he'd make of today's isolationists and leakers.

"We shall see, " he wrote after the war, "how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster."

By Dorothy Rabinowitz, Oct. 28, 2013, WSJ Opinion

In January of 1941, Winston Churchill dined at a Glasgow hotel with his physician, Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran ), and his secretary of state for Scotland, Tom Johnston. The other member of the party was Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt's redoubtable unofficial ambassador and the American president's most trusted adviser. Hopkins had been sent to investigate and report back in this hour of deadly peril for Britain, now standing alone in the battle against Nazi Germany.

At the Glasgow dinner he turned to the British prime minister. "I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well I am going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books in the truth of which Mr. Johnston's mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up: 'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.'"

Then he added very quietly: "Even to the end."

"I was surprised to find the P.M. in tears," Lord Moran wrote in his diary. "He knew what it meant."

On Wednesday morning, a ceremony will be held on Capitol Hill to dedicate a new bust of Winston Churchill, to be on permanent display in the Capitol Building. House Speaker John Boehner, whose office conceived of the project, will serve as host for the occasion, advertised as bipartisan, with former speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid expected to attend.

The subject of Churchill busts has a certain resonance—recall the disappearance of the one that had adorned the Oval Office until Barack Obama's election. The planners of Wednesday's event—which came to pass via House Resolution 497 authorizing a Churchill bust to be placed in the Capitol—are assured that this one won't disappear. The resolution, introduced by Mr. Boehner and unanimously passed in December 2011, marked the 70th anniversary of Churchill's 1941 address to a joint session of Congress.

That address, barely three weeks after Pearl Harbor, drew a packed house which included Supreme Court justices and cabinet members, who hung on the prime minister's every word and gave him a roaring ovation. There had been worries that he might face a sparse audience, with members of Congress off for the Christmas holidays. It was a fear that appears ludicrous today, given the extraordinarily heroic stature America has long conferred on Churchill and all things connected with him. Not least those speeches.

Ted Cruz is only the latest in the lengthy line of politicians to employ or, more precisely, mangle one of the more renowned pieces of Churchillian rhetoric, as he did in his recent filibuster: "[W]e will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the streets, we will fight at every step to stop the biggest job killer in America." It doesn't quite have the ring of the original, you'll notice—those wartime lines that begin, "We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be" and that end with the stark, "We shall never surrender."

Still, the hold Churchill exerts on the American imagination is worthy of note and more—it's astounding. Astounding that 70 years after their delivery those speeches, their cadences and the dauntlessness for which they speak have lost none of their power. He brought ordinary language to extraordinary heights of eloquence. But there was little that was ordinary about the point of his renowned wartime speeches rallying the British to battle.

It is tempting, always, to think what Churchill would have said of today's isolationists who think and sound—particularly in America—so much like those of yesterday. "We shall see, " he wrote after the war, "how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster."

What would Churchill have said of the fantastic case of Edward Snowden, leaker of classified documents, embraced as a heroic figure both by the left and the right—but by none more than conservative television and radio stars unable to restrain their swooning over him, a hero on the lam they view as a selfless dissident struggling to save the nation from the evils of government secrecy. What might the prime minister have made of a journalistic specialty devoted entirely to the leaking of America's classified documents, as practiced by that model of brooding self-righteousness Glenn Greenwald ?

We can't know what the prime minister would have said but we can safely guess. Churchill was nothing if not a militant on matters of national security. When he received a plea in 1941 for more support for the work of the Bletchley Park Government Code and Cipher School, charged with the task of breaking enemy codes, he immediately ordered that the request be granted. The code workers must have all the help they wanted, and this was a matter of "extreme priority," he instructed his chief of staff.

To this directive he attached the note "Action This Day." Attendees of Wednesday's dedication ceremony will receive—compliments of the Churchill Centre, which donated the new bust—an Action This Day pin, replicating the color and type of the original note.

It is impossible to think of the ties that bound Britain and America—unforgettably echoed in those words of Harry Hopkins, and that Churchill himself felt so profoundly—without thinking of the August 1941 meeting between FDR and Churchill, their first, arranged in the deepest secrecy. Held off the coast of Newfoundland, the four-day visit concerned plans for postwar Europe. Its other vital aim was the expression of British-American solidarity—the U.S. had after all not yet entered the war.

On the day of the joint Sunday prayer service, with American and British crews packed tightly together on the HMS Prince of Wales, the American and British flags hung side by side. Side by side, too, the American president and the British prime minister sat singing the hymns well known to everyone present. Churchill had carefully selected them: "Onward Christian Soldiers," "The Navy Hymn," "O God Our Help in Ages Past." The same language, the same hymns, Churchill would later note. "It was," he wrote, "a great hour to live."

Leadership & Obama

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

The president didn't know the NSA was spying on world leaders, but he's found time for at least 146 rounds of golf.

By BRET STEPHENS, Oct. 28, 2013 WSJ Opinion

Is there a method to President Obama's style of leadership, his methods of decision-making, his habits of attention, oversight and follow-through? In recent months I've been keeping a file of stories that might suggest an answer. See what you think.

***
"President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them.

"They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection 'priorities,' but that those below him make decisions about specific targets."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013


One of at least 146 rounds of golf this president has played. ASSOCIATED PRESS

"HealthCare.gov is the highest-profile experiment yet in the Obama administration's effort to modernize government by using technology, with the site intended to become a user-friendly pathway to new health insurance options for millions of uninsured Americans.

"'This was the president's signature project and no one with the right technology experience was in charge,' said Bob Kocher, a former White House aide who helped draft the law."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2013

"Tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have grown sharply in recent months. President Barack Obama authorized the CIA to provide limited arms to carefully vetted Syrian rebels, but it took months for the program to commence. . . .

"One Western diplomat described Saudi Arabia as eager to be a military partner in what was to have been the U.S.-led military strikes on Syria. As part of that, the Saudis asked to be given the list of military targets for the proposed strikes. The Saudis indicated they never got the information, the diplomat said."

—The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 21, 2013

"Besides the Syrian government's gains, there was mounting evidence that Mr. Assad's troops had repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians.

"Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient and disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum."

— New York Times, Oct. 22, 2013

"On Saturday, as the shutdown drama played out on Capitol Hill, President Obama played golf at Fort Belvoir in Virginia."

— Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2013

"For French President François Hollande, it seemed like the perfect response: a lightning-quick strike on Syria to punish the government for an alleged chemical weapons attack.

"But with President Obama's surprise decision to ask Congress for a go-ahead on military action, Hollande has found himself embroiled in political controversy abroad and at home. Instead of vaunting Hollande as a warrior charging off to do battle, critics say he now looks more like a sidekick who was left in the lurch by his American ally."

—Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2013

"The essence of Eisenhower's hidden hand, of course, is that there was real work going on that people didn't know at the time. If that's true now, then Obama really is emulating Ike. If, on the other hand, he's simply doing nothing or very little, that would be passivity, not hidden-hand leadership."

—Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton, quoted in New York Times, July 15, 2013

"In polo shirt, shorts and sandals, President Obama headed to the golf course Friday morning with a couple of old friends, then flew to Camp David for a long weekend. Secretary of State John Kerry was relaxing at his vacation home in Nantucket.

"Aides said both men were updated as increasingly bloody clashes left dozens dead in Egypt, but from outward appearances they gave little sense that the Obama administration viewed the broader crisis in Cairo with great alarm."

—New York Times, July 5, 2013

"The president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give Republicans."

— Vali Nasr, "The Dispensable Nation," April 2013

"Mr. Obama's reluctance to put American forces on the ground during the fight, and his decision to keep America's diplomatic and C.I.A. presence minimal in post-Qaddafi Libya, may have helped lead the United States to miss signals and get caught unaware in the attack on the American mission in Benghazi. Military forces were too far from Libya's shores during the Sept. 11 attack to intervene."

—New York Times, Nov. 17, 2012

"For the people who go out, on to the edge, to represent our country, we believe that if we get in trouble, they're coming to get us, that our back is covered. To hear that it's not, that's a terrible, terrible experience."

— Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, on "60 Minutes," Oct. 27, 2013

***
Call Mr. Obama's style indifferent, aloof or irresponsible, but a president who governs like this reaps the whirlwind—if not for himself, then for his country.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Question of Leadership

Syria Tells You Everything You Need to Know About Barack Obama

This security crisis put the president's best and worst attributes on display for the whole world to judge.

By Ron Fournier, September 10, 2013

The good news is we're not at war. The bad news is … almost everything else about President Obama's handling of Syria--the fumbling and flip-flopping and marble-mouthing--undercut his credibility, and possibly with it his ability to lead the nation and world.

As he addressed a global audience Tuesday night, liberal elites blindly accepted White House fiction that Russian intervention this week was somehow part of Obama's master plan. Their conservative counterparts practically rooted against a diplomatic breakthrough, preferring an Obama black eye over peace.

Obama won! Obama lost! The fact is, it's too soon to keep score. In the long view of this past week, I suspect the Syria standoff will stand as an example of the best and worst of Obama's leadership. Granted, in the heat of the moment, it's far easier to catalog the worst.

BEST:

Open-minded: The man elected in part as repudiation of President George W. Bush's narrow approach to decision-making never closed off his options. He is paying a price for waffling (more on that later), but the president deserves credit for rethinking his plan to wage war without congressional approval. For anybody unwilling to cut Obama some slack, ask yourself: What would Bush and Dick Cheney have done?

Unflappable: From all public appearances, this was the "no drama Obama" his aides brag about. Certainly, he was affected by public criticism and even swayed by polling, but the president kept searching for a way out of a complicated situation. He may have stumbled into peace but that's better than rushing into war.

Principles: He deserves credit for trying to do something about the slaughter of innocents. The "red line" that looks laughably opaque today will look better in time if (and this is a big if) Syrian chemical attacks stop. In his address from the White House, Obama made a compelling moral argument to respond to last month's chemical attack in Syria. "The world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons," the president said.

WORST:

Naive about the levers of power: Where to start? Obama reversed course on congressional authorization at the last minute, after a private chat with his chief of staff, and to the surprise of his national security team--all in violation of presidential best practices. He then left the country on a quixotic trip to Russia, allowing misgivings to grow in Congress and the public before he could build a case for striking Syria. Boxed in, Obama seized upon a Russian proposal to put Syria's weapons in the hands of the international community. It's an impractical solution, a fig leaf. Either Obama trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin (a mistake) or he is a partner in deceit (an outrage). A Democratic strategist who works closely with the White House, and who requested anonymity to avoid political retribution, told me, "This has been one of the most humiliating episodes in presidential history."

Too cute by half: Obama and his allies are masters of "spin," packaging partial truths and outright distortions to a malleable public. With Syria, their dark arts are on full display. There is no other way to explain the White House disowning Secretary of State John Kerry's call for Syria to turn over its stockpiles until the savvy Putin seized on the off-the-cuff remark as a way to protect ally Bashar al-Assad. Suddenly, the White House is touting the Putin plan as their brainchild, an outcome Obama had in mind when he travelled to Russia. Don't buy it. A broader problem is the Obama White House's inability to break through the clutter of 21st century media to educate and persuade Americans on policy, a communications conundrum that dates to the 2009 health care debate.

No friends: No student of the presidency would claim that Obama's problems with Congress could be solved simply by schmoozing them. There are structural and political problems that no amount of alcohol can solve. But as a matter of history and common sense, Obama could do better for himself and his causes if he got to know Congress better--if he listened and engaged in a way that pushes leaders toward solutions that help both sides. Instead, Obama has what one former top adviser called a "check-the-box" approach to Washington relations. He'll spend enough time to maintain appearances, nothing more, and lectures people who demand to be heard. And so, as he faced an international and constitutional crisis, Obama and his team were in a familiar state: isolated, insular, and alone.

Whenever his leadership is questioned, Obama and his allies accuse the critics of overstating the powers of the presidency and understating the intransigence of the opposition. Their argument has some merit. At home, the presidency has ceded power to Congress in recent years and the Republican Party is unusually obstinate.  

Abroad, Putin, Assad, and other nefarious world leaders cannot be swayed by reason alone. But Obama bears more responsibility than he is willing to admit, and polls show a growing number of voters are questioning his leadership.

Who Looked More Presidential?

Contempt For The Opposition

The Bully vs. the Wonk

The Veep's strategy: Show contempt for your opponent.

WSJ Editorial, October 12, 2012

So now we know what Team Obama's comeback plan was following last week's defeat in the Presidential debate. Unleash Joe Biden to interrupt, filibuster, snarl, smirk and otherwise show contempt for Paul Ryan. The carnival act contributed to the least illuminating presidential or vice presidential debate of our lifetimes.

From the opening bell, Mr. Biden seemed to take to heart the interpretation that President Obama offered this week of his debate performance—that he had been "too polite." That was not a problem for the Veep, whose marching orders were clearly to steamroll the overmatched moderator Martha Raddatz and dismiss everything Mr. Ryan said with a condescending sneer.

By unofficial media counts, Mr. Biden interrupted the Republican some 80 to 100 times. Mr. Ryan let the bully get away with too much for our tastes, at least until he finally pushed back on the interruptions or until Mr. Biden lost steam in the last half hour. But as anyone who's been in a tavern past midnight understands, it's hard to win a fight with a guy who is shouting from the corner bar stool.

No doubt the performance cheered Democrats who needed cheering after last week, but we wonder how well it played with independents or undecided voters who tuned in to learn something.

To the extent that substance mattered, and it didn't count for much, Mr. Biden had his strongest notes on foreign policy. He too glibly rolled past the murders of four Americans at the Benghazi consulate a month ago, attributing the Administration's false early explanations to "the intelligence community." We doubt that's what the investigation will ultimately show. But on Afghanistan, Syria and to a lesser extent Iran, Mr. Biden was more sure-footed than Mr. Ryan. On Syria in particular, Mr. Ryan never said what a Romney Administration would do differently.

Mr. Ryan was stronger on domestic issues, calmly laying out the facts of Mitt Romney's proposals on taxes, Medicare and job creation. Even here, though, the debate devolved into an exchange between Mr. Ryan's policy details and Mr. Biden's free-association appeals to emotion and class solidarity—"Who do you trust on this?"

On nearly every specific issue on which Mr. Biden attacked, he was demonstrably wrong. The Administration's Medicare actuary really does say that 15% of hospitals will take on operating deficits as a result of ObamaCare's cuts in payments to Medicare providers. The American Enterprise Institute study doesn't say that Mr. Romney's plan will raise taxes on the middle class, and Mr. Ryan's Medicare plan doesn't raise costs for seniors by $6,400. Mr. Biden never even tried to offer a second-term agenda.

But this 90 minutes wasn't about an exchange of ideas or a debate over policies. It was a Democratic show of contempt for the opposition, an attempt to claim by repetitive assertion that Messrs. Ryan and Romney are radicals who want to destroy "the middle class." Mr. Ryan's cool under assault was a visual rebuttal of that claim, and we certainly know who looked more presidential.

Bad Democrat, Good Progressive

When An Individual Leader Does Make a Difference

Transformers 2

Obama was honest when he said he wanted to remake America.

WSJ Editorial, September 7, 2012

For all the spin and deception of politics, sooner or later every politician reveals his true purposes. For Barack Obama, one of those moments came when he declared shortly before the 2008 election that "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Above all else, the President who asked voters for a second term Thursday night sees himself as destined to transform America according to his own progressive dreams.

For most of 2008, Mr. Obama was able to disguise this ambition behind his gauzy rhetoric of hope and post-partisanship. The fine print of his agenda betrayed his plans to expand and entrench the entitlement state, but most voters ignored that as they chose his cool confidence over John McCain's manic intensity amid a financial panic.

Candidate Obama was eloquent and likable. His personal story echoed of America's history as a land of opportunity. Voters put aside any worry about his ideology and took a chance on his promise of a better tomorrow.

Four years later the shooting liberal star, as we called him then, has come down to earth. What should have been a buoyant recovery coming out of a deep recession was lackluster to start and has grown weaker. The partisanship he claimed to want to dampen has become more fierce. The middle-class incomes he sought to lift have fallen. These results aren't bad luck or the lingering effects of a crash four years ago. They flow directly from his "transforming" purposes.

***

To our mind, two events amid hundreds stand out as defining President Obama's first term. The first is his go-for-broke pursuit of progressive social legislation instead of focusing on economic recovery. The second is his refusal to strike a budget deal with Speaker John Boehner in 2011. Both reveal a President more bent on transforming America than addressing the needs of our time.

Mr. Obama was elected first and foremost with a mandate to fix the economy. Yet when he found himself by rare confluence of luck with 60 votes in the Senate, he put nurturing a fragile recovery secondary to the pursuit of pent-up liberal social policies.

Consider the amazing course of ObamaCare. Rather than craft a White House proposal and draw in Republicans from the start, he let Pete Stark and the most liberal House Democrats write the bill. As public opposition built and the tea party rose in 2009, he doubled down with a September speech extolling the virtues of government.

Opposition continued to build. But when Rahm Emanuel and other advisers urged him to compromise on something smaller, he still pressed ahead. Even after Scott Brown's January 2010 victory to replace Ted Kennedy gave the GOP 41 Senators, Mr. Obama endorsed an effort to abuse Congressional procedure to ram the bill through.

The result is a monster that will transform a sixth of the U.S. economy, but at huge cost to growth, political comity and America's long-term fiscal health. Never before has a new entitlement passed on such narrowly partisan lines. The new taxes and burdens on small business in particular have helped to slow job creation. Voters reacted by imposing historic losses on House Democrats.

After that 2010 "shellacking," as Mr. Obama called it, he had another chance to steer a more moderate course. Believing that bipartisan cover offered a unique chance to control the deficit, House Speaker Boehner agreed to back-room talks to pursue a grand budget bargain.

The Republican put tax increases on the table that might have cost him his Speakership, even as Mr. Obama refused to consider any modifications to ObamaCare and would allow only tinkering around the edges of other entitlements. As the deadline neared for raising the national debt limit, Mr. Obama demanded $400 billion more in revenue, and Mr. Boehner had little choice but to walk away.

This episode is all the more remarkable because the deal Mr. Boehner was offering would have divided Republicans, helped Mr. Obama with independents, and probably guaranteed his re-election. Yet the President poisoned the deal for the sake of higher taxes.

***

So now Mr. Obama is seeking a second term by asking the voters to give him more time to finish the job he started. But what job is that?

The President tried to reprise the spirit of 2008 in his speech Thursday night, but the preoccupation of this week's nominating convention has been to portray Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Republicans as mummies from the crypt.

The second-term agenda he offered Thursday was a diminished and vague version of what he offered in 2008: More government spending disguised as "investment," more subsidies for green energy, more regulation for other parts of the economy. What he didn't mention was his goal of protecting ObamaCare at all costs and passing one of the largest tax increases in history.

In recent interviews, Mr. Obama has said that if he wins he believes a chastened GOP will have no choice but to strike a grand fiscal bargain on his terms. This assumes that the same Republicans he has savaged for 18 months will want to become the tax collectors for his agenda. We support immigration reform, but his executive branch actions have poisoned that prospect too.

The more likely forecast is for more gridlock and rancor. As an unnamed adviser recently told a Journal reporter, Mr. Obama thought he could work with Republicans but "he won't make that mistake again."

Yet by Mr. Obama's transforming lights, his Presidency would still be a success. Re-election guarantees the implementation of ObamaCare, which means he would join FDR and LBJ in the pantheon of progressives who expanded the reach of government to "spread the wealth." Republicans may cavil, but over time they would have no choice but to agree to a value-added tax or some other tap on the middle class to finance a permanently larger, European-sized welfare state.

***

Were he a man of lesser ideological ambition, President Obama would now be presiding over a stronger economy and probably be cruising to re-election. He gambled instead that he could use the economic crisis as a political lever to achieve his progressive policy goals, and he now finds himself struggling to be re-elected with a campaign based almost entirely on savaging his opponents. Americans who are disappointed with Transformers 1 aren't likely to enjoy the sequel any better.

A version of this article appeared September 7, 2012, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Transformers 2.

Mental Incapacity

"This is a Big Fucking Deal" - Joe Biden

The Trouble with Joe

By John Fund, National Review, August 15, 2012

The Obama campaign told the Hill on Tuesday that it “is confident Vice President Biden will be an effective foil” for Paul Ryan despite Biden’s latest gaffe. I’m not so sure, and neither are some Democrats.

Biden’s rhetorical belly-flop yesterday was a doozy. He first told a largely black audience in Danville, Va., that he hoped they could help Obama win North Carolina. He followed that up with the claim that Mitt Romney wanted to “unchain Wall Street.” He then switched to a comic down-home accent and bellowed, “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains!”

Willie Geist, a co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, was blunt: “If Paul Ryan, the Republican candidate, said that to an African-American audience, there would be calls this morning for him to get out of the race, for Mitt Romney to withdraw from the race. There’s a double standard.”

But there has been a double standard for Joe Biden for decades, and almost every reporter in Washington knows it. Last night, a frustrated Rudy Giuliani acknowledged it on CNBC. “I’ve never seen a vice president that has made as many mistakes, said as many stupid things,” he told Larry Kudlow. “I mean, there’s a real fear if, God forbid, he ever had to be entrusted with the presidency, whether he really has the mental capacity to handle it. I mean, this guy just isn’t bright. He’s never been bright. He isn’t bright. And people think, ‘Well, he just talks a little too much.’ Actually, he’s just not very smart.”

Biden has been very lucky that the national media have largely given him a pass until now. American history for the last half-century has been replete with Republicans who have been portrayed by the elite media as dim or addled — from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle to, of course, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. No Democrat with comparable national stature has been saddled with a similar reputation. The media have tended to explain away Biden’s strange statements and unforced errors by saying, “Oh, well. That’s just Joe, you know.” Or they casually admit, “Well, he just talks a bit too much,” and then move on.

In the middle of a hotly contested presidential campaign, that may now be changing. In the Washington Post yesterday, Alexandra Petri discussed “the trouble with Joe” and took the VP to task for “periodically alarming outbursts” that are unbecoming of the second-highest office in the land. “He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had a Scotch too many,” Petri scolded. “His cringe-inducing gaffes . . . inspire less anger than embarrassment.” A New York publishing source told me that “Biden is now seen as a Catholic Sam Goldwyn, and that’s not a good place to be.” Sam Goldwyn was the legendary Hollywood producer who was known for malapropisms (“A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”).

The White House has to worry that for the next 82 days Joe Biden will be under tremendous scrutiny — especially given the fact that Paul Ryan has become such a media-attention magnet. Everyone is anticipating the October 11 debate between Biden and Ryan. Biden’s penchant for off-the-cuff remarks doesn’t inspire confidence that he won’t unintentionally blurt something out when facing Ryan. For example, he embarrassed the Obama administration recently by prematurely revealing he was “comfortable” with gay marriage — forcing his boss to suddenly endorse gay marriage on a timetable not of his choosing.

Biden’s erratic statements certainly should make Team Obama nervous. I’ve no doubt that some Democratic strategists would love for Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to swap jobs and bolster the Democratic ticket with a little Clinton magic. But there’s no evidence that Hillary would take that deal. If she wants to run, she is already the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination and would gain no advantage by being yoked to Obama, her old adversary, for the next three months if they lost or the next four years if they won.

So Democrats are stuck with Old Joe, who will turn 70 this November. It’s said that few people vote for a presidential ticket based on who is filling the No. 2 slot. But some do, and they may matter in a very close race. It’s likely that by the time this campaign ends, a lot of people will be more nervous about Joe Biden being a heartbeat away from the presidency than about Paul Ryan.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

Nelson Mandela, Dalia Lama & Dubbya.

Dalai Lama Tells Shocked Piers Morgan 'I Love President Bush'

by Noel Sheppard via Newsbusters.com

The Dalai Lama said something Tuesday guaranteed to make liberal heads explode.

Appearing on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight, the Dalai Lama told his very shocked host, "I love President Bush" :

During an interview to be aired Wednesday evening, Morgan asked his honored guest, “Which people that you’ve ever met have really impressed you?”

“I think Nelson Mandela,” responded the Dalai Lama. "Of course as individual, individual person, I love President Bush."

"Which one?" asked Morgan.

"The younger one," said the Dalai Lama

Morgan incredulously responded, “Really?”

“Really,” he clarified. "As a human being. Not as a president of America. Sometimes his policy may not be very, very successful. But as a person, as a human being, very nice person. I love him."

Still seemingly mystified by this, Morgan pressed, “But how did you feel that President Bush went to war so much and was responsible for so many deaths if you’re a man of peace?”

"After he sort of start the Iraq sort of crisis then my other occasion meeting with him,” the Dalai Lama replied, “then I expressed to him, ‘I love you, but your policies concerned, I have some reservations’ I told him."

Makes you wonder how many CNN viewers Wednesday evening will be wondering if they accidentally turned on Fox News.

Thrill Up His Conscience? Don't Count On It

Mathews on Obama: 'Thank you, now watch how smart I am.' 

ALEX WITT, HOST: You say, “Nations die or thrive on the ability and judgment of their leaders to stir them at perilous times.” Does Barack Obama have that ability to pass the proper judgment, to properly analyze and to stir this nation?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, he has great analytical ability. Clearly has made the right judgments in his executive leadership. He has moved us very effectively in self-defense in fighting terrorism. I'm not sure he's able to move the country. He had that ability as a candidate, and then the day he was inaugurated, with the Mall filled with people, African-Americans and everyone else, he sent us all home. It was the worst mistake of his presidency. The day he got inaugurated, he sent us all home and said, “Thank you, now watch how smart I am.” That's the worst kind of a notion of the presidency.

The presidency's not about being smart. Most of our great presidents have not been that brilliant. Kennedy wasn’t brilliant. Roosevelt certainly wasn’t brilliant. Truman wasn’t. But what they did was they lead the American people. They lead us. This is so simple. If I could say one thing to Barack Obama, “Stop showing us how smart you are and lead us. Ask us to do something. Pull us behind you. Enlist us in the service of our country. Ask us to do something." There is no Peace Corps. There is no Special Forces. There is no 50 mile hikes. There’s no moon program. There’s nothing to root for.

What are we trying to do in this administration? Why does he want a second term? Would he tell us? What's he going to do in the second term? More of this? Is this it? Is this as good as it gets? Where are we going? Are we going to do something the second term? He has yet to tell us. He has not said one thing about what he would do in the second term. He never tells us what he is going to do with reforming our healthcare systems, Medicare, Medicaid, how is going to reform Social Security. Is he going to deal with long-term debt? How? Is he going to reform the tax system? How? Just tell us. Why are we in this fight with him? Just tell us, Commander, give us our orders and tell us where we’re going, give us the mission. And he hasn't done it.

And I think it's the people around him, too many people around, they’re little kids with propellers on their heads. They're all virtual. Politics, this social networking, I get these e-mails, you probably get them. I'm tired of getting them. Stop giving them to me. I want to meet people. Their idea of running a campaign is a virtual universe of sending e-mails around to people. No it's not. It's meetings with people, it’s forging alliances. It's White House meetings and dinner parties that go on till midnight, and he should be sitting late at night now with senators and members of Congress and governors working together on how they're going to win this political fight that's coming.

I don't have a sense that he's ever had a meeting. I hear stories that you will not believe. Not a single phone call since the last election.

WITT: Tell me one.

MATTHEWS: They don't call. He never calls. That's the, that’s the message. Members of Congress, I keep asking, “When did you hear from him last?”

WITT: Silence.

MATTHEWS: He doesn't like their company.

WITT: You've just…

MATTHEWS: That's a problem, by the way.

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Goldman Sachs, US Senate, Governor & MF Global

Corzine Had It Coming

By Charlie Gasparino, The Daily Beast, October 31, 2011

The ex-governor’s screw-up at MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy protection following bad bets on euro-zone debt, is not surprising given his poor track record as a Wall Street boss, says Charles Gasparino.  

Jon Corzine is many things: Erudite, down to earth, and well-meaning being chief among them, people who know him tell me. But is he a good businessman? Not even close, these same people openly admit.

In fact, based on his long years in the financial business, from CEO of Goldman Sachs to his current job as chief executive of the failing MF Global, Corzine is proof positive that on Wall Street you don’t have to be very good at your job to get paid a lot of money, which is why hatred of fat cats remains a bipartisan pastime—and will for the foreseeable future. 

I say this as someone who both personally likes Corzine and who has covered his career from his days as a successful bond trader at Goldman Sachs, when it didn’t take much more than a balance sheet and a phone to make money—and Corzine did, a lot of it. So much in fact that people I know put his net worth at around $500 million, more than enough money to buy multiple elections in New Jersey as U.S. senator and then as governor. 

But his record of achievement on Wall Street as someone who had to run something? Pretty poor and it goes beyond his latest flop at MF Global, which was forced to declare bankruptcy Monday morning following massive losses tied to its investments in sovereign debt. 

In fact, Corzine’s career has failure written all over it. Yes, he made a lot of money trading bonds over the years, but also lost a lot of money managing people who trade bonds, which made his latest screw-up at MF Global all the more inevitable.  

Even friends of Corzine say his management style is erratic at best. For all his affability, he consults with almost no one except a small coterie of advisers, and often makes decisions based purely on gut instinct. 

Gut instincts might be good for a trader, but they are lousy in management; particularly when you’re the manager in charge of reining in risk-taking traders from losing so much money that it might imperil the franchise.  

At Goldman, that’s exactly what happened. It was Corzine who led Goldman into its first major financial morass (its second one would come just 10 years later and nearly destroy the firm) in 1998, when as chief executive he approved money-losing trading positions along the lines of those committed by the faltering hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.  

Those trading losses were costing the firm nearly $500 million, and forced the delay of its long-awaited initial public offering, in which Goldman wanted to transform itself from a private partnership to a public company that enriched it partners to no end (Corzine included). 

Goldman eventually would go public once the Long-Term Capital storm passed and the losses subsided, thanks in large part to a government-led bailout of the hedge fund. But Corzine wouldn’t survive the ordeal. He was ousted by his second-in-command, Hank Paulson, when it became clear that Corzine wasn’t just a lousy manager, he was lousy at the very skill you get paid big bucks at Goldman to possess—risk management. 

With that, Corzine left Goldman with $500 million to indulge his second-biggest passion after making money on Wall Street: politics of the left-wing variety. A longtime liberal Democrat, Corzine used his Wall Street winnings to launch successful campaigns first as U.S. senator from New Jersey, and then as the state’s governor.  

In 2009, when the voters of New Jersey had enough of him, as people did at Goldman, Corzine was back to where he started, looking for a job on Wall Street. At first, most of the big firms wanted nothing to do with him, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis, where risk-taking bond traders like Corzine were the cause of the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers—and absent the taxpayer bailouts, probably nearly every other major firm and bank, including his old one, Goldman Sachs. 

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Leadership Headline of the Week (and it's only Monday)

Obama opposes repeal of healthcare program he suspended just last week

By Julian Pecquet - 10/17/11 01:51 PM ET

President Obama is against repealing the health law's long-term care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government's announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.


"We do not support repeal," the official said Monday. "Repealing the CLASS Act isn't necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country."

Continue: http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/187949-white-house-opposes-formal-class-act-repeal

So Sorry for the Nukes (WikiLeaks)

Apologies Not Accepted

 Investor's Business Daily - Posted 10/11/2011

In November 2009, Barack Obama became the first U.S. 

president to bow to Japan's emperor.

Leadership: Leaked cables show Japan nixed a presidential apology to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for using nukes to end the overseas contingency operation known as World War II. Will the next president apologize for the current one?

The obsessive need of this president to apologize for American exceptionalism and our defense of freedom continued recently when Barack Obama's State Department (run by Hillary Clinton) contacted the family of al-Qaida propagandist and recruiter Samir Khan to "express its condolences" to his family.

Khan, a right-hand man to Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed along with Awlaki in an airstrike in Yemen on Sept. 30[, 2011]. We apologized for killing a terrorist before he could help kill any more of us.

It's yet another part of the world apology tour that began with Obama taking the oath of office to protect and defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, something he immediately felt sorry for.

One stop on his tour was Prague in August 2009. There he spoke of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," ignoring that before 1945 we lived in such a world and it was neither peaceful nor secure.

Another stop on the tour was in Japan, where Obama in November 2009 bowed to the emperor, something no American president had ever done. It could have been worse if plans to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima to apologize for winning the war with the atom bombs had come to pass.

A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan's Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that "the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a 'nonstarter.'"

The Japanese feared the apology would be exploited by anti-nuclear groups and those opposed to the defensive alliance between Japan and the U.S.

Whatever Tokyo's motive, Obama's motive was to once again apologize for defending freedom, this time for winning with devastating finality the war Japan started.

While Obama envisions a world without nuclear weapons, and moves steadily toward unilateral disarmament of our nuclear arsenal, we envision a world without tyrants and thugs willing to use them against us. We do not fear nuclear weapons in the hands of Britain or France, countries that share our love of freedom and democracy.