From Charles Krauthammer on the Right to Peggy Noonan in the middle, denunciation of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Libya is expected. But tough talk from a reliable liberal like Eugene Robinson? Now, that’s progressive.
Robinson has done his best to keep up with Obama’s ever-shifting views on military involvement in Libya. No more. Today, Robinson apparently can’t interpret the blizzard of mealy-mouthed talking points flying out the White House press office. So, he’s asking for a little clarity:
So what the hell are we doing? I realize that President Obama and his advisers have answered this question many times, but I feel it’s necessary to keep asking until the answers begin to make sense.
What’s that you say, Mr. Robinson? Obama isn’t making sense? Welcome to the club.
In an interview with CFIF, Professor Kori Schake, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the United States Military Academy, discusses the Libya campaign and the Obama Administration’s sudden change of direction.
It’s nice to see liberal members of the Obama regime getting in a dust-up over whether the president’s Libya bombing is legal.
Today’s combatants are Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN) whose thinking on foreign affairs is usually in lock-step with Kerry’s.
Until, that is, President Obama forgot to ask Lugar’s permission before going to war. As one of then-Senator Obama’s earliest Republican admirers, Lugar takes pride in his status as elder adviser to a young president. Trouble is, Obama no longer needs Lugar for anything.
And as Lugar is finding out, that includes setting aside procedural niceties like declaring war or getting congressional authorization for military action. (Far better to go the Lugar-approved route of U.N. permission slips.)
Thanks, Senator. He couldn’t have done it without you.
Washington is a town where being an intellectual means being relentlessly synchronized with the conventional wisdom, no matter how vapid. That’s how President Obama (no doubt a smart man by any reasonable standard — all presidents are, almost inevitably) has been elevated to the commanding heights of the cognitive elite by the Beltway press corps. Not so fast, says one guy who actually knows what he’s talking about.
In one brief run in a piece in the new edition of Newsweek, famed Harvard historian Niall Ferguson absolutely eviscerates President Obama’s glib reading of revolutionary history:
President Obama is reluctant to intervene in the bloody civil war now underway in Libya. As a senior aide told The New York Times last week, “He keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic.” I like that notion of organic revolutions—guaranteed no foreign additives, exclusive to Whole Foods. I like it because, like so much about this administration, it is both trendy and ignorant.
Was the American Revolution “completely organic”? Funny, I could have sworn those were French ships off Yorktown. What about Britain’s Glorious Revolution, the one that established parliamentary rule? Strange, I had this crazy idea that William III was a Dutchman.
The reality is that very few revolutions, good or bad, succeed without some foreign assistance. Lenin had German money; Mao had Soviet arms. Revolutions that don’t get some help from outside aren’t so much inorganic as unsuccessful.
President Obama is that cocky student always ready to wow the class with a raised hand and a lithe tongue. Dr. Ferguson is the kid who actually read the material and, after a certain point, just can’t take the prima donna’s hollow showboating. Nice work, Dr. F.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino provides viewers with three tips for how to think about the growing revolutionary fervor and ongoing unrest in the Middle East.
Somebody better tell Team Obama that world crises abhor leadership vacuums. With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton incapable of acting without a UN permission slip, American allies are taking matters into their own hands.
It’s clear Britain and France aren’t waiting for Belize and Lichtenstein to approve sensible responses to the Libyan crisis. Is President Barack Obama so contemptuous of America’s superpower status that he’s willing to cede its leadership role to countries whose foreign policy significance ended with the demise of their colonial empires?
Britain’s The Guardian has a funny quiz listing statements made recently by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen, and asking people to pick which comment belongs to which personality. The top ten are:
(1) I have defeated this earthworm with my words – imagine what I would have done with my fire-breathing fists.
(2) Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.
(3) Life without dignity is worthless.
(4) I’m extremely old-fashioned, I’m a nobleman, I’m chivalrous.
(5) I am like the Queen of England.
(6) I am much bigger than any rank, for those who are talking about rank, I am a fighter.
(7) Every great movement begins with one man.
(8) These resentments, they are the rocket fuel that lives in the tip of my sabre.
(9) I woke up at 4am, before dawn. You should be asleep. You’re all tired after a sleepless night.
(10) The US commission report on 9/11 was ‘an absolute fairytale, a complete work of fiction’
If you’re looking for proof that the situation in Libya is the worst in the North Africa, consider these statistics from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon: 22,000 Libyans have fled across the border into Tunisia, and another 15,000 have crossed over into Egypt.
One of the appeals of American federalism is the ability of people to ‘vote with their feet’ when they don’t like the policies of a particular state. In Libya, citizens are sending unmistakable signals that Muammar Gaddafi’s crackdown on dissent is a terror worth opposing.
Time magazine reports that scandal-plagued Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi can add another rotten olive wreath to his spoils: first friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Berlusconi’s acts of fealty include not only a bow to the strongman, but also kissing his hand.
Not even President Barack Obama has gone that far (yet).
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