The President's Tone Deaf Camp
Investor's Business Daily
Posted 05/31/2012 06:55 PM ET
http://news.investors.com/article/613319/201205311855/obama-gaffe-describes-polish-death-camps-webhed-obamas-tone-deaf-camp-a-question-of-competence.htm?p=full
Leadership: The perils of reading scripts written by hacks from teleprompters were shown by a president who has a habit of insulting and betraying allies. He has succeeded in making his vice president look eloquent.
Maybe President Obama was just tired from campaigning for re-election in all 57 states where he said he campaigned in 2008. But on Tuesday, while presenting World War II Polish resistance hero Jan Karski with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American honor that can be given a civilian, he made a reference to "Polish death camps."
The president, so good at apologizing to our enemies, offered only a meek one to our longstanding Polish ally through White House press Secretary Jay Carney. Responded Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk: "I am certain that our American friends are capable of a more explicit reaction than issuing a correction and the spokesperson of the White House expressing regret."
"When someone says 'Polish death camps,'" Tusk explained, "it's as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler. That is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride."
We might give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, such as when in two recent campaign appearances the father of two daughters twice mistakenly mentioned "my sons" when defending his regulation on contraception. Or when, while speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, the teleprompter once again malfunctioned and he mispronounced "corpsman" as "corpse-man."
Is Obama the Ron Burgundy of presidents, a clone of the talking-head newscaster in the movie "Anchorman" who was all style and no substance and would literally read anything placed on his teleprompter without understanding its meaning or consequence? He knows how to bow to foreign kings, but a world leader that does not make.
Typical of the way Obama has treated loyal allies such as Britain and Israel, the Poles were notified with a midnight phone call on Sept. 17, 2009, the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, telling them we were pulling the plug on the missile defense base they had stuck their necks out to host. Better to betray the Poles than to offend the Russians and to do it on a day with bitter memories for Poles.
Earlier on, President Obama dissed the British by returning a White House bust of Winston Churchill lest it remind him of Churchill's famous phrase, "We shall never surrender." It did not help when he called the French our strongest ally.
At the recent Summit of the Americas, Obama reiterated U.S. "neutrality" toward Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic archipelago under the British flag for 180 years and site of a 1982 war in which Britain had to defend them from Argentina. He tried to use the Argentine term Malvinas, but instead called them the "Maldives," which is an island chain in the Indian Ocean.
The president, apparently worried more about Israeli condos in East Jerusalem than about Iranian nukes, once famously left Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after he abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his wife and daughters.
Through a series of leaks the administration has tried to warn Iran when and if Israel might attack, and to dissuade Tel Aviv from doing so, at least until after the November election. There was even a report in which unnamed U.S. officials allege that Israel has obtained access to bases in Azerbaijan, on Iran's border.
Obama insists he has Israel's back, but he has insisted the country return to its 1967 borders, which may be like saying the Roman Senate had Caesar's back.
His continued rhetorical and policy gaffes makes one wonder if the Preezy of the United Steezy, as late-night host Jimmy Fallon described Obama, is still, after nearly four years of on-the-job training, not ready for prime time.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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