We hear that President Obama hates the Clintons. Frankly, I don't know, but can you blame him if he does?
Back in the late 1990s, an economic boom saved President Clinton from his reckless Oval Office behavior and total indifference to terrorism. President Clinton coasted in the late 1990s and avoided all the tough calls on Osama bin Laden and Social Security reforms.
Again, President Clinton got away with it because everybody was busy working and enjoying what Charles Krauthammer called our "holiday from history":
Like the 1920s, the 1990s were a golden age permeated by a postwar euphoria of apparently endless peace and prosperity. Both eras ended abruptly, undermined ultimately by threats that were ignored as they grew and burrowed underground.President Obama is not going to enjoy any "holiday from history." He is not that lucky. Don't blame President Obama if he prays every night for those late 1990s to come back, and come back soon! It was certainly easier to be president when all you had to do was enjoy the monthly unemployment reports.
Clinton let a decade of unprecedented American prosperity and power go without doing anything about al Qaeda, Afghanistan or Iraq (where his weakness allowed France and Russia to almost totally undermine the post-Gulf War sanctions).
And although al Qaeda declared war on America in 1996 and, as we now know, hatched the Sept. 11 plot that same year, it continued to flourish throughout the decade.
Looking the other way was largely a function of the age -- our holiday from history, our retreat from seriousness, our Seinfeld decade of obsessive ordinariness.
Clinton never could have been elected during the Cold War.
The 1990s produced a president perfectly suited to the time -- a time of domesticity, triviality and self-absorption.
Again, Clinton was born under a lucky star. Obama wasn't! And don't expect any lucky stars over the White House any time soon.
This week, Yemen burst open President Obama's door. Unfortunately for the cultists who blame everything on Bush and the few still faithful "yes we can" screamers,
President Obama is starting to hear it from liberal sources like the Washington Post:
IN DEVOTING 250 of the 6,800 words of his State of the Union address to the fight against “violent extremism,” President Obama offered a boilerplate description of his policy.But here is the clincher or hook from the newspaper that endorsed him twice:
The Yemen mess reveals the weaknesses of Mr. Obama’s “partners” strategy, which has been too narrowly focused on drone strikes and training of specialized units, and not enough on providing security for the population, institution-building and support for moderate political forces. Unfortunately, the president’s cursory and formulaic description of his counterterrorism policies this week, following a year in which jihadist forces and terrorist attacks expanded across the world, suggested that he remains uninterested in correcting his mistakes.Add Thomas Friedman to the list:
When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble.And Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat from Hawaii:
And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq.
We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.
I think this is a bipartisan concern. It's a bipartisan concern for all of us to make sure that we keep the American people safe and specifically when we talk about this terminology, the use of Islamic extremism. Terminology and the use of this specific term is important because words are an expression of your feeling and your understanding. So as, for example, last night, the president came and talked to Congress about coming to request an authorization to use military force.Thanks to Mr. Friedman for saying that "we've entered the theater of the absurd."
The bad news is that we really entered that theater of the absurd when people like Mr. Friedman and others got drunk on the Obama Kool-Aid back in 2008! Wonder how many of them thought that this was the change we were waiting for?
The good news is that some are waking up, looking at the windshield, and screaming, "Look out, look out there's a truck about to hit us!"
P.S. You can hear my show CantoTalk or follow me on Twitter We spoke about foreign policy on Saturday's show:
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