It took a while for me to figure out how Obama kept drawing red lines that other countries wouldn’t respect.
But now it all seems clear to me: Obama’s using all of the government’s supply of the color red on the deficit. Hence there’s no red left for the lines he draws in foreign policy.
As reports continue to circulate of armed gunman taking over public property in Ukraine-- gunmen that are likely under the control of the Russian government-- another of Obama’s red lines that wasn’t has been crossed.
“Armed men seized the regional government headquarters and parliament building in Crimea on Thursday and raised the Russian flag,” says our own NightWatch. "Reports on the number of men ranged from 60 to 120. Police made no move to remove them.”
This has been followed up by seizure of airports in Crimea. Crimea, a peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea and therefore affords Russia some access to the Mediterranean, is supposedly an independent republic that’s part of Ukraine.
“This crisis affords President Putin and Russia the best opportunity since the collapse of the Soviet Union for recovering control of Crimea,” concludes NightWatch.
You might remember that Russia engineered the same type of coup in the Republic of Georgia in 2008 when they essentially annexed parts of Georgia known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia as a result of a 5-day war after a Russian invasion.
We'll call that war the first manifestation of the Obama Wars that have broken out in the wake of his weakness, er, election.
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, South Ossetia and Ukraine. I don't know what dictators would do without ethnic minorities.
Mexico anyone?
I’m not saying that Obama is a coward, but if Caesar crossed the Rubicon while Obama was in Rome, the One would schedule a tee time.
Obama wanted to be remembered for something “big” that he accomplished.
Losing the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe certainly qualifies.
Chamberlain was duped by Hitler at Munich, but he was a fool; Roosevelt was gulled by Stalin at Yalta, but FDR, by then, was a sick old man; Truman was taken in at Potsdam, but he eventually saw through ruse and stood up to the old, evil empire.
That’s because Harry Truman, farmer, failed businessman, and volunteer soldier had the capacity to grow in a way that elitists Chamberlain and Roosevelt did not.
Today you can measure someone’s establishment credentials by their inability to embrace new realities, in the same way you used to be able to measure someone’s counter culture affinities by hair and clothes.
You can take the measure of the man Obama by his inability to grow.
He really is the head of the new elite in this country.
As I have said elsewhere: In part, Obama’s troubles stem from the rigidity of his broken ideas. They admit of no compromise here at home.
And no backbone anywhere else.
Egypt, Libya—in fact almost all of North Africa-- Sudan, Mali, Syria, Georgia, and now Ukraine are all a part of Obama’s Wars. Renewed fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan too are part of the bitter legacy of Obama’s Wars.
While Obama picks on the Catholic Church, doctors, patients, the Tea Party, coal miners, truckers, banks and small businesses here at home, a great gouge has been ripped through the globe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea by Obama’s Wars.
It's appeasement, buffet style, all you can eat, one fixed price: Our freedom. Or someone else's. Either way.
William Manchester relates in his epic biography of Winston Churchill that prime minster Ramsay McDonald, a great architect of appeasement, had stopped speaking with Churchill: “Winston had called him ‘the boneless wonder,’ the ‘greatest living master of falling without hurting himself,’ and the man who possessed ‘the gift of compressing the largest numbers of words into the small amount of thought.’”
And it’s the thoughtlessness that’s so maddening about Obama, who like Ramsay McDonald, is the first head of government for his country's labor party.
Because some men will pay for Obama's heedless weakness.
And the red that is spilled won’t just be confined to the ink here at home, but already includes blood spilled abroad as well.
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