The Obamessiah has returned from his first trip abroad amidst the cheering throngs. And that was just the media. Without even mentioning his deep Muslim bow to the King of Saudi Arabia -- another first for our Rookie President -- Sir Charles Krauthammer sums up the results:
Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, 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 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 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 Obama will have a lot more decline to celebrate.
Retired Marine Major Ollie North isn't so diplomatic as Sir Charles about the infamous "bow."
The president of the United States is back in Washington from his "I like you, you like me" excellent adventure in Europe and "surprise" trip to Baghdad. It was nice of POTUS to thank the troops. He should have bowed to them instead of to King Abdullah.
Members of the O-Team -- recovering from late-night teleprompter edits, grand parties and jet lag -- now deny that the apparently obsequious gesture to the Saudi king was really a "bow." Perhaps it would be better described as a "curtsy."
North agreed with Krauthammer on the unreported (the media is still in full swoon and can't be expected to pay attention) link between Obama's appeasement rhetoric and defense cuts.
The North Koreans defied his warnings of "severe consequences" and test-launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile. In Tehran, the ayatollahs ignored his Utopian plea for "the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons" and claim to have turned on 7,000 more centrifuges to refine uranium. Somali pirates "dissed" his "deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world" and hijacked an American-flagged vessel in the Gulf of Aden.
The O-Team was so exercised over the first piracy of an American-flagged merchant vessel since 1866 that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fired off a full rhetorical volley. While the crew was busy retaking the ship, she said that "we're deeply concerned" and "following it closely" and that "the world must come together to end the scourge of piracy."
More telling than the vacuous hot air blowing from London, Prague, Ankara, Baghdad and Washington was the defense budget presented this week. It assures adversaries and allies alike that we will be unprepared to fight a serious adversary in the future. Hollow talk, empty oratory and impossible dreams are now commonplace in American politics, but the O-Team's Euro-expedition may have set a new foreign fantasy record. Actions speak louder than words -- no matter how flowery the rhetoric...
Unfortunately, less than 24 hours after Mr. Obama mentioned the North Korean "provocation" and Iran's "dangerous pursuit of nuclear weapons," his defense budget revealed how seriously he takes those and other threats. The O-Team intends to reduce our ability to project power overseas and to protect the American people from nuclear attack.
If the Obama defense budget is approved as submitted, we will increase spending on protecting our troops ashore and fleet at sea from attack by ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction but cut homeland ballistic missile defense by $1.4 billion. We will increase the number of small "littoral support ships" but reduce our ability to project power from the sea by cutting our carrier fleet from 12 battle groups to 10. We will not modernize ground combat mobility for the Army or the Marines, and POTUS will have to wait a few more years for a new helicopter.
Obama fiddles and bows while America burns and slides into third-world status. And the crowd applauds (and that was just the media, again).
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