Posted by
RME KRNL on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 8:17:43 PM
Such is the title of an article, which I recently read on RealClearPolitics.com, by Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at New York University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
It's too bad if the Arab world has really given up on America as an agent of change to help democratize more countries around the world. But, if true, much of it lies at the feet of Barack Obama, despite his being the great American apologist and all-around Muslim mollifier.
Professor Bazzi wrote: "With Tunisia's revolution, Obama missed a chance to show the Arab world that he can live up to his lofty rhetoric. He must seize the next opportunity to portray America as a more sympathetic power -- a country that sticks up for the little guy and does not tolerate repression."
True, but it's certainly not the first time our current all-too-cerebral and too-cool-for-school president has been too slow out of the starting blocks, both domestically or internationally.
He took "forever" to think and deliberate, then announce his decision about our continued involvement in Afghanistan and, even then, committed only about a third of what his own, handpicked on-the-ground commander had requested, plus he made it all conditional by adding an arbitrary withdrawal date, against which the Taliban could count down and wait it out.
He was slow to comment on, much less condemn, the actions of an Army major, acting as a Muslim terrorist, in gunning down dozens of innocents in the Fort Hood massacre.
He was slow to condemn Iran's brutality in suppressing a genuine civil uprising of Iranians over patently false election results which kept Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs in power.
He's been slow, soft and sophomoric in dealing with Iran, North Korea, individual acts of Islamic terrorism and world-wide terrorism in general.
And on the few matters in which he has acted quickly, he's repeatedly gotten it wrong. For example, about the white cop and the black Harvard professor or about saying he delayed commenting on Iran's crushing of a legitimate uprising so as not to meddle, while at almost the same time immediately jumping into Honduras' "internal affairs" by supporting its president who wanted to in essence become a dictator-for-life against the will of the Honduran people, its military and its other government agencies.
For all the talk by the liberal lamestream media and its slobbering, sycophantic, so-called "journalists," as well as even Obama's fellow Harvard alum, Bill O'Reilly, all of whom extol Obama's "brilliance," I think not.
Methinks he sometimes thinks too much and other times seemingly not at all. And in both cases, he often gets it wrong.
Smart, yes. Politically crafty, definitely. Brilliant? No. He makes too many mistakes, tells too many verifiable lies, makes too many unkept promises and is way too dependent on his ever-present teleprompter to be "brilliant."
But what actually hampers Obama most in such cases as Iran's uprising and more recently with Tunisia's revolution is not his brainpower but something Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had in abundance -- for all the fun the elitists in Hollyweird, the lamestream media, the left-wing loons and the "progressive" pols poked at them -- a strong moral compass. And since we just celebrated his birthday, Martin Luther King had it, too.
If you have that, even if you are smart but not necessarily "brilliant," you still almost intuitively and immediately know what is right from wrong. And you support the right and condemn the wrong.
As a Saul Alinsky acolyte, who believes that the ends indeed do justify the means, whatever and however nefarious those means may be, Obama has not evidenced such a strong moral compass.
One cannot take a principled stand if one has no principles, and Obama often shows he lacks the conviction of his own soaring rhetoric, as when he breaks promises made to both the Left, the Right and the Middle in the interests of his own political expediency. One cannot take the moral high ground with any conviction if one lacks the real conviction of one's own words.
Thus, unfortunately, I think that Reagan's America as a "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere" will be dimmed as long as Obama occupies the White House.