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The Spectator has a fairly comprehensive article this week about the Empty Suit in the Oval Office on
www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/5549783/a-special-form-of-disrespe...
but I am only using the British magazine's cover to illustrate the latest and best Obama-as-he-is article I have found lately - as it reflects many of the developments - or more properly, non-developments - in the life and times of the Messiah of Hype. Whom I have to keep track of, more or less, in NOTABLES, as he happens to be, empty suit or not, 'the most powerful man in the world'.

But I have to wait for the periodic wrap-up putdown like Mark Steyn's because otherwise, in the November 2009 version of the no-longer-monolithic 'lamestream media', there is enough daily fodder now to feed an 800-pound gorilla one could field a complete new forum everyday with the material.



The Superbower talks big
and carries a small twig


Whenever Obama’s not talking about himself,
it’s like he’s wandered off-message.


By Mark Steyn

Nov. 21, 2009


My radio pal Hugh Hewitt said to me on the air the other day that Barack Obama “doesn’t know how to be president.” It was a low but effective crack and I didn’t pay it much heed.

But, after musing on it over the last week or so, it seems to me frighteningly literally true. I don’t just mean social lapses like his latest cringe-making bow, this time to Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of Japan — though that in itself is deeply weird: After the world superbower’s previous nose-to-toe prostration before the Saudi King, one assumed there’d be someone in the White House to point out tactfully that the citizen-executives of the American republic don’t bow to foreign monarchs.

Along with his choreographic gaucherie goes his peculiar belief that all of human history is just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic — or as he put it in his video address on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

“Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

Tear down that wall . . . so they can get a better look at me!!!

Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that Nov. 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who lead dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state.

They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for Vanity Fair. But it’s their day, not yours. It’s not the narcissism, so much as the crassly parochial nature of it.

Is it the only template in the White House speechwriters’ computer?

“Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand/the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”

Some years ago, when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian and ensuing episodes of her sitcom grew somewhat overly preoccupied with the subject, Elton John remarked: “Okay, we know you’re gay. Now try being funny.”

I wonder if Sir Elton might be prevailed upon to try a similar pitch at the next all-star White House gala: Okay, we know you’re black. Now try being president.

But a few days later Obama dropped in on U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea for the latest episode of The Barack Obama Show (With Full Supporting Chorus). “You guys make a pretty good photo op,” he told them.

Hmm. Do I detect a belated rationale for the Afghan campaign?

Probably not. The above are mostly offences against good taste, but they are, cumulatively, revealing. And they help explain why, whenever the President’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message.

The other day, for example, he told Fox News that “if we keep on adding to the debt . . . people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

That’s a great line — but not from a guy who plans to “keep on adding to the debt” as a conscious strategy.


This is the president who made “trillion” the new default unit of federal budgeting, and whose irresponsibility is prompting key players around the world to consider seriously whether it’s time to ditch the dollar’s role as global reserve currency.

But Obama’s much vaunted “bipartisanship,” to which so many “moderate” conservatives were partial a year ago, seems to have dwindled down to an impressive ability to take one side of an issue in his rhetoric and another in his actions.

Which brings us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He’d been brought before a military commission, and last December indicated he was ready to plead guilty, and itching for the express lane to the 72 virgins.

But that wasn’t good enough for Obama, who in essence declined to accept KSM’s confession and decided to put him on trial in a New York courthouse.


Why? To show “the world” — i.e., European op-ed pages and faculty lounges — that America would fight terror in a way “consistent with our values,” and apparently that means turning KSM into O. J. and loosing his dream team on the civilian justice system.

But, having buttered up Le Monde and the BBC and many of his own lefties by announcing that Mohammed would get a fair trial, Obama then assured NBC that he’d be convicted and was gonna fry.

So it’s like a fair trial consistent with “our values” except for the one about presumption of innocence? If the head of state declaring you guilty and demanding the death penalty doesn’t taint the jury pool, it’s hard to see what would.

The KSM circus is not, technically, a “show trial”: He could well be acquitted. But, even if he is, he’s unlikely to be strolling out a free man like Frank Sinatra beating the rap in Robin and the Seven Hoods and standing on the courthouse steps to sing “My Kind of Town (Manhattan Is)” — although I wouldn’t entirely rule it out.

In a world in which the self-confessed perpetrator of the bloodiest act of war on the American mainland in two centuries is entitled to a civilian trial, all things are possible. The other day, the attorney general, Eric Holder, promised us that it would be “the trial of the century” — and he said it like it’s a good thing. Why would you do that?

So how’s it playing with its intended audience? Alas, the world moves on. Not being George W. Bush may be enough to impress the 2009 Nobush Peace Prize committee in Oslo, but it’s old news everywhere else. America’s enemies have figured out that the Superbower is their best opportunity since the Seventies; and for America’s friends, the short version of the hopeychangey era to date is last week’s cover story at the London Spectator showing an empty suit in the Oval Office over the headline “The Worst Kind of Ally.”

Hang on, wasn’t that title retired with Bush? Well, no. Apparently, he routinely called up prime ministers hither and yon and kept them in the picture and up to speed.

Obama doesn’t have time for any of that: When he stiffed Poland on missile defense, he got Hillary to phone it in. The Poles, bless ’em, declined to take her call. In Delhi, meanwhile, they’re horrified by Obama’s performance in China.

America’s enemies smell weakness, and our allies feel only the vacuum of U.S. leadership. About himself, the president speaks loudly. For America, he carries a small twig.



Mark Steyn is a conservative writer, so his article may not be all that surprising, but UK's The Spectator is not, and the German Der Spiegelmost certainly isn't either.

Nonetheless, signs of Obamania crumbling even among his once most enthusiastic rah-rah boys overseas are piling up even as his personal popularity and job approval numbers have gone below 50% in the United States itself.

Thank God the saying "You can fool some of the people all the time, or all the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time" appears to still attest to common sense in this world!




Obama's nice guy act gets him
nowhere on the world stage

By Gabor Steingart

11/23/09

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.

There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.

Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn.

The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said "thank you, guys," and disappeared.

David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists' questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public's expectations had been "too high."

The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.

Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama's currency isn't as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik.

[Not that the Bush administration failed to respect other nations. It listened, but made its decision on what it believed to be, first and foremost, in the interests of the United States, which is the constitutional duty of elected US officials, after all. And mutatis mutandis, of every elected national leader anywhere.]

The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington's new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.

In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign.

In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed.

Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.

The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden.

Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.

A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over.

Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: "I believe this is democracy!"

Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama's plane was about to land.

Obama's new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry.

For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama's call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians.

"We thought we had some leverage," says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. "But that proved to be an illusion."

Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed.

"We're searching for an exit strategy," [And Obama kept saying during the campaign that unlike Iraq, Afghanistan was 'the necessary war'!] said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.

An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington's policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned "consequences" unless it followed his advice.

This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began -- with threats. "Time is running out," Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.

There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama's advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush.

Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft.

"Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead," Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: "This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan


What I am still waiting for the MSM to acknowledge is two things that are very obvious to anyone who has been following Obama's statements in the past ten months.

One is his facility for habitual lying in many ways - from half-truths to distortions to historical revisionism to outright false statements. His public statements are a constantly changing kaleidoscope of what is politically expedient - and almost always, lies in some form - at a given moment and for a particular audience.

The second is his apparent ignorance of many basic things - in far worse ways than George W. Bush, who at least always mocked himself as a C student - such as the language spoken by Austrians.

But even worse is his apparent ignoring of fundamental law, for someone who touts his Harvard law degree. Like pre-judging a case he himself said he did not have the facts about [denouncing a Cambridge police officer for doing his duty in the case of a black Harvard law professor who was an friend of Obama].

And lately, saying to the world he has no doubt the 9/11 conspirators will be found guilty and executed after he and his attorney-general made the ill-conceived decision to have them tried in a civilian court in New York for sheer grandstanding purposes, and absolutely not one practical reason that can be given in defense of the decision.

So Mr. Almighty and All-Knowing Harvard law graduate Obama, what ever happened to the judicial principle that every man is presumed innocent until proven guilty? Your flunky, the attorney-general, made the same pre-judgment to the US Senate, in an attempt to justify the civilian trial.

Remember Obama's sanctimonious reason for the civilian trial is "to show the world American justice at its best". Then he and his AG start out by violating the most basic foundation of that justice!




It turns out the Times of London ran a similr story one day earlier, but reins in its headline - residual Ombamania? - and appreciably soft-pedals its criticisms even though its commentary more comprehensive than Spiegel's because it also covers Obama's domestic ineptitudes:



Barack Obama dream fades
as China visit fails to bring change


Even his allies feel let down by the President’s
lack of progress both in Asia and at home


by Tony Allen-Mills in New York

Nov. 22, 2009


Gazing serenely from the Great Wall of China last week, President Barack Obama appeared to be making the most of one of the supreme perks of White House occupancy — a private guided tour of Asia’s most spectacular tourist destination.

White House aides exulted that perfectly choreographed pictures of this moment would make front pages around the world. Yet an experience Obama declared to be “magical” turned sour as he returned home to a spreading domestic revolt that is fanning Democratic unease.

It was not just that the US media have suddenly turned a lot more sceptical about aPpresident with grand ambitions to reshape politics at home and abroad — even one previously friendly newspaper noted dismissively: “Obama goes to China, brings home a T-shirt.”

Nor was the steady decline in the president’s approval ratings — which fell below 50% for the first time in a Gallup poll last week — the main cause of White House angst. Obama remains more popular than either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton a year after their elections, and both presidents eventually cruised to second terms.

The real problem may be Obama’s friends — or rather, those among his formerly most enthusiastic supporters who are now having second thoughts.

The doubters are suddenly stretching across a broad section of the Democratic party’s natural constituency. They include black congressional leaders upset by the sluggish economy; women and Hispanics appalled by concessions made to Republicans on healthcare; anti-war liberals depressed by the debate over troops for Afghanistan; and growing numbers of blue-collar workers who are continuing to lose their jobs and homes.

Obama’s Asian adventure perceptibly increased the murmurings of dissent when he returned to Washington last week, having failed to wring any public concessions from China on any major issue.

For most Americans, the most talked-about moment of the trip was not the Great Wall visit but his low bow to Emperor Akihito of Japan, which the president’s right-wing critics assailed as “a spineless blunder” and excessively deferential.

While some commentators acknowledged that behind-the-scenes progress may have been made on issues such as North Korea, financial stability and human rights, even the pro-Obama New York Times noted in an editorial yesterday that “the trip wasn’t all that we had hoped it would be”.

Nor have the president’s domestic policies proved everything Congressman John Conyers wanted. The prominent liberal black Democrat startled colleagues last week by launching a direct assault on Obama’s handling of healthcare reforms, which were facing an important Senate vote last night.

Asked on Thursday if Obama had provided sufficient leadership on so divisive an issue, Conyers responded tartly: “Of course not ... bowing down to every nutty right-wing proposal about healthcare ... is doing a disservice to the Barack Obama that I first met.”

Tension over healthcare and what many Democratic legislators now view as neglect of economic issues reached an unexpected breaking point when members of the Congressional Black Caucus — previously regarded as unshakeable Obama loyalists — staged a startling rebellion over what they regarded as a lack of economic support for the AfricanAmerican community.

A vote on proposed financial reforms had to be shelved at the last minute as black caucus members threatened to oppose it as a protest against broader economic policy. The revolt came as new reports showed that one in seven Americans were struggling to pay for food; that mortgage delinquencies are continuing to rise with almost 2m homeowners more than three months overdue on their payments; and that unemployment rose to 10.2% in October.

While many Democrats remain unswervingly loyal to Obama — and would rather blame President George W Bush for most of America’s ills — there has been no escaping a damaging sense of disappointment in liberal circles that a historic presidency is failing to deliver on its promises.

Others are disturbed that the president’s promises to clean up Washington’s “politics as usual” have dissolved in a familiar murk of cronyism and political patronage.

Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association, noted last week that the age-old tradition of presidents handing out ambassadorships as rewards for campaign donors had continued undiminished under Obama, who has so far rewarded more than 40 of his key fundraisers with plum diplomatic jobs.

“There is a bit of disappointment, largely because expectations were raised by the ‘change’ theme of Obama’s campaign,” said Johnson.

Perhaps most depressing of all for a small number of influential Washingtonians was the little-noticed resignation of Gregory Craig, Obama’s former White House counsel, who is widely believed in legal circles to have been made a scapegoat for the administration’s difficulties in resolving the future of Guantanamo Bay.

Craig was a key campaign aide to Obama and played the role of Senator John McCain in rehearsals for television debates. Charged with implementing the president’s instruction to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo, he fell foul of Obama aides who had failed to predict the wave of public hostility to the prospect of Al-Qaeda inmates being shipped to American soil.

Elizabeth Drew, a presidential biographer and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the effective dumping of Craig as “the shabbiest episode of Obama’s presidency”.

Drew blamed the “small Chicago crowd” that surrounds the president for undermining Craig’s position with a series of anonymous leaks — notably suggesting that the lawyer was “too close to human rights groups”.

This kind of White House infighting is par for the course in most presidencies — but Obama was not supposed to be the kind of man who jettisons old friends at the first hint of trouble.

All this provides the Republicans with an unexpected propaganda bonanza. “We don’t need to slam Obama — his own folks are doing it for us,” one gleeful conservative declared.

The Republicans’ own divisions — magnified now that Sarah Palin, the defeated vice-presidential candidate, is crossing middle America with a new conservative manifesto under her arm — are nonetheless going largely unexamined as the Democrats implode.

Last week Republican governors meeting in Texas talked openly of winning all the states due for midterm elections next year.

The news is not all bad for Obama — America remains enchanted with his family [??????], and many Democrat insiders are convinced that the party’s internal squabbling will melt away at the first hint of real economic recovery.

“Do Democrats have to worry about turnout and voter intensity? You bet,” said Peter Hart, a leading pollster. “But it’s nothing that lowering unemployment by two points can’t solve.”

TOP FLOPS

Israel — Obama wanted: A freeze on settlement building as a precondition for the resumption of Palestinian peace talks.

He got: An Israeli brush-off. Construction of a new Jewish housing complex began last week.

Iran — Obama wanted: A deal to ship low-enriched uranium to Russia to curb Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons.

He got: Another brush-off. Tehran reneged last week.

China — Obama wanted: Concessions on climate, currency rates, trade and human rights.

He got: A bland statement with no firm commitments and no mention of internet censorship or Tibet.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/11/2009 03:35]
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