Posted by
Patrick Henry on Sunday, May 30, 2010 10:03:03 AM
Many Issues vital to Americans also touch the lives of those in other countries. So
sweeping was the Obama promise of hope and change that immigration reform and
a new foreign policy direction were supposedly high on his agenda. Developments
to date bear careful scrutiny.
Even before Obama was elected he began an "apology tour" of the world with
speeches in Europe that denigrated America, calling it "dismissive, derisive and
arrogant." Once elected, he continued the drumbeat with speeches in the Middle
East and at the United Nations dismissing the notion that America was a "Christian
nation," and reversing the perceived unilateralism of his predecessor in fighting
a conflict he refused to call the "war on terror." At the same time he withdrew
from missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic, insulted
the United Kingdom by summarily returning a bust of Churchill that had sat in
the White House for decades and initiated an escalating series of criticisms and
insults toward Isreal, America's only real ally in the Middle East.
He replaced confrontation with diplomacy, declaring to both Iran and North
Korea that if they would "unclench their fists" they would find America with an
open hand. He proclaimed the lofty ambition to de-nuclearize the world, signing
a loose and permissive accord with the Russians, laying bare for the world to see
the details regarding America's own nuclear arsenal and passing the treaty on to
the Senate for ratification. During his travels he made it a practice to bow before
foreign dictators, a practice rejected by Americans since the Revolutionary War,
declined, prior to his election, to place his hand over his heart during the pledge
of allegiance or to wear the American flag lapel pin sported by most candidates
for office.
Obama has scorned those who would see American immigration laws enforced,
filed legal actions against states taking such matters into their own hands, and
refused to enforce existing immigration controls or secure the nation's borders.
He went so far as to invite a foreign head of state to berate, from the floor of the
U.S. House of Representatives, an American state for seeking to keep illegals out,
while his party gave the man a standing ovation. So how has this facet of hope
and change worked out?
Iran and North Korea have rejected Obama's overtures out-of-hand, the
former thumbing its nose at America and the international community while hell-
bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the latter has re-starting its nuclear
program, resuming shipping weapons technology to rogue regimes (if it ever
stopped), sinking a South Korean ship and threatening to ignite all-out war on the
Korean peninsula. Radical Islam has stepped up its maniacal bid to strike at the
American homeland, with six attempted attacks since Obama took office and
one spectacularly successful one that took 13 lives and wounded 32 others at
Fort Hood military base in Texas. Attempts at mass murder by bombing have
been thwarted mainly by the incompetence of the bombers.
To the south, drug and human trafficking have reached crisis proportions,
with thousand of illegals crossing into Arizona, Texas and California daily. The
Obama response has been to pacify the puerile Mexican president, attack the
Arizona governor and the state's laws, threaten, through Immigration and Customs
Enforcement to cease cooperating with the state and do nothing, save the sending
of a mere 1,200 troops to the border with instructions not to stop illegal crossings
unless they clearly involved drugs or weapons.
The guarantee to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has fallen apart,
with American cities refusing to host show trials, states uninterested in having
dangerous terrorists confined in their midst and a beleaguered, impoverished
congress controlled by Obama's own party unwilling to appropriate the funds
necessary for him to keep his largely symbolic promise. Withdrawal from Iraq
faces an endangered timetable and will in no case be complete. An emergency
troop surge in Afghanistan became necessary to blunt a Taliban resurgence and
even military leaders are not yet willing to consider America to be "winning"
there.
National security policy is in disarray, with the recently dismissed National
Intelligence Director locked in a turf battle with the career politician chosen to
head the Central Intelligence Agency, an early warning system that, by Obama's
own admission has failed and remains in part dysfunctional and protective
organizations that are still not talking to one another. And no one seems to
want the DNI job that carries little authority and takes most of the blame when
things go wrong. Anti-terror policy is made at the White House by a cranky
and obdurate presidential advisor and no one in the administration from the
president, to the attorney general, to the secretary of homeland security will
admit that the principal threat is from radical Islamists.
Whatever one might say about the previous administration, there was never
any question in their minds or on their lips about who the enemy was, and no
doubt that they had a plan to deal with the enemy swiftly and harshly, or that
the plan was working to keep America safe. Now, who knows? Not only does
the country face a growing consensus of those who would attack from without,
but an unending poison of those who would sap its strength and resources from
within. This is hardly change of a kind that breeds either confidence or hope.
But the biggest betrayal of the hope and change illusion lies in Obama's
attempt to "fundamentally transform America," by which he meant something
very specific, but that voters perceived to be only cumulative and general. In
tomorrow's post we will examine that phenomenon and see just why hope has
given way to disappointment and rage.