Was that a confident President Obama the Veterans of Foreign Wars heard at their convention in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, or one who's started to sound more than a bit desperate as he continues to push his deal with the mullahs, ayatollahs, and assorted crazies in Teheran, all of whom are now on the cusp of having their own Bomb?
As a salesman, this president clearly has no use for the soft sell, and as a diplomat, he's anything but diplomatic. For his message these days, repeated again at Pittsburgh, is simple enough: I'm smart, you're not. ("Be 'smarter,' OK Iran deal, Obama urges," Page 1A, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Wednesday, July 22, 2015).
But why would someone who's really convinced he's so much smarter than his critics expend so much time and energy, and so many words, words, words trying to convince others of it? Can it be that he's really only trying to convince himself as his own Munich Agreement, like the rest of his foreign policy, has started to show cracks at every seam?
The president pulled out all the rusty stops in his speech Tuesday, accusing his critics of wanting to go to war in Iraq again even as he dispatches American troops there again. (A sense of irony has never been his strong point.)
Talk about a smart foreign policy, how would you describe this president's arbitrary deadlines for leaving Iraq despite the advice of his best military advisers, his war in Afghanistan that has left the Taliban ever stronger, his defense cuts, his "reset" of Russian policy that has left Moscow's latest tsar more aggressive than ever as he invades one little country after another, the careful planning that culminated in Hillary Clinton's disaster at Benghazi and then the clumsy attempts to cover it up . . . .
If all those are examples of this president's smarts, what would be a bad case of the dumbs?
Editorial on 07/23/2015