One of the saddest of all experiences is watching a supposedly smart and responsible individual engage in exercises that all but effect buffoonery. President Obama began early in his tenure toward buffoonery when he made those trips abroad and apologized for virtually the existence of this nation. With regard to this hemisphere alone, his appearances with Ortega and Chavez, along with the ridicule he (and the U.S., through him) lapped up in the process, were sickening.
A few months ago, he made it to Copenhagen twice (unsuccessful Olympics-bid fiasco and even more unsuccessful climate-change frivolity) and continued the silliness by spending a whole 25 minutes on the former trip with his military commander, who had to fly there all the way from England…for 25 minutes, hardly enough time to cool the coffee and wonder who would make it to the Super-Bowl. He showed up in Afghanistan the other night (no daylight hours) and actually spent two of six hours on the ground with President Karzai, apparently antagonizing poor Karzai to the point of his threatening to join the Taliban (Mullah Omar’s thugs), the coalition’s deadly enemy. Okay…maybe Karzai was on the joy-juice, plentiful in his domain.
Illinois Senator Durbin was unhappy last year with Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s appointment of Illinois African-American Attorney General Roland Burris to Obama’s Senate seat and the president was unthinking enough to join Durbin, a white guy (gasp), by expressing his distaste for the process, with the result being that Burris refused to be thrown under the bus with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, a U.S. condemner and former terrorist, respectively (both friends of the prez), but carrying too much baggage to be on the administration’s bus. This made the prez into a paper tiger at best, an incompetent meddler at worst.
One could go on, such as mentioning the prexy’s pronouncement concerning white Boston policemen (they act stupidly) without even knowing the circumstances endemic to a specific action; however, consider the latest uncalled-for stuff, i.e., what the U.S. will and will not do with regard to being attacked by another nation or terrorists enabled by another nation. According to Obama, the nation’s position is simply that the U.S. will not nuke an attacker if that attacker either doesn’t have nukes or is living up to non-proliferating promises (as if any such things exist). This applies even if the attack is chemical in nature.
No! The retaliation (if any) will be engaged by using “conventional actions.” Assuming that everyone understands that these actions cannot be successful (proven in both Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) through the use of “conventional” bombs and/or missiles, i.e., air power alone, Obama is actually saying that the retaliation (if any) means U.S. troops on the ground, another way of putting American GIs in harm’s way. Has Obama no sense of history?
There’s more. The president envisions a world without nuclear weapons, of which the U.S. and a relative handful of other nations have quite a quantity. Translated: Obama envisions no further development in this country of nukes or weapons as deadly as nukes. This is tantamount to the standing-down of this nation in terms of its own defense-posture. There should never under any circumstances be a foreclosing of the research and development of new weapons – weapons of all kinds, no matter what any other nation or group of nations undertakes.
Treaties are often not worth the paper wasted on printing them, and disarming is deadly, as the U.S. learned in 1941 after virtually disarming itself after WWI 20 years earlier. Does anyone actually believe, for instance, that Israel or England or France or Pakistan or India or Russia would do away with its ace-in-the-hole – the nuke? Only a fool would believe that.
To think for a moment that this country should do away with its nuclear arsenal – though downsizing is not unthinkable – is so wrongheaded as to amount to another exercise in buffoonery. The plan seems to be that in the event of an attack – even using WMD – there must be a determination as to its source before the proper response can be effected…but in no wise by nukes against non-nukes, with the interesting caveat of Iran and North Korea. That caveat blows the whole scheme into wishful thinking or sheer lunacy. Why should anyone trust Russia or Pakistan any more than Iran or North Korea? And, in today’s era of technology, there would be no time to waste in sorting out the facts surrounding an attack. Recognizing the source(s) is all that would be necessary.
Under the Constitution, the most important responsibility of both the Administration and the Congress is national defense. The key component is the president, the commander-in-chief. The nation does not need a buffoon in this vital position; rather, it needs a hard-headed leader who understands the world as it is, not as he wishes it to be.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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