another homerun by Bolton

Great piece in today's L.A. Times by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton

latimes.com

Opinion

The danger of Obama's dithering

His foreign policy brings to mind Jimmy Carter, or perhaps Ethelred the Unready.

By John R. Bolton

October 18, 2009

Weakness in American foreign policy in one region often invites challenges elsewhere, because our adversaries carefully follow diminished American resolve. Similarly, presidential indecisiveness, whether because of uncertainty or internal political struggles, signals that the United States may not respond to international challenges in clear and coherent ways.

Taken together, weakness and indecisiveness have proved historically to be a toxic combination for America's global interests. That is exactly the combination we now see under President Obama. If anything, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize only underlines the problem. All of Obama's campaign and inaugural talk about "extending an open hand" and "engagement," especially the multilateral variety, isn't exactly unfolding according to plan. Entirely predictably, we see more clearly every day that diplomacy is not a policy but only a technique. Absent presidential leadership, which at a minimum means clear policy direction and persistence in the face of criticism and adversity, engagement simply embodies weakness and indecision.

Obama is no Harry Truman. At best, he is reprising Jimmy Carter. At worst, the real precedent may be Ethelred the Unready, the turn-of the-first-millennium Anglo-Saxon king whose reputation for indecisiveness and his unsuccessful paying of Danegeld -- literally, "Danish tax" -- to buy off Viking raiders made him history's paradigmatic weak leader.

Beyond the disquiet (or outrage for some) prompted by the president's propensity to apologize for his country's pre-Obama history, Americans increasingly sense that his administration is drifting from one foreign policy mistake to another. Worse, the current is growing swifter, and the threats more pronounced, even as the administration tries to turn its face away from the world and toward its domestic priorities. Foreign observers, friend and foe alike, sense the same aimlessness and drift. French President Nicolas Sarkozy had to remind Obama at a Sept. 24 U.N. Security Council meeting that "we live in the real world, not a virtual one."

Examples of weakness abound, and the consequences are readily foreseeable.

Canceling the Polish and Czech missile defense bases is understood in Moscow and Eastern European capitals as backing down in the face of Russian bluster and belligerence. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened the day after our 2008 election to deploy missiles targeting these assets unless they were canceled, a threat duly noted by the Russian media when Obama canceled the sites. Given candidate Obama's reaction to the 2008 Russia-Georgia war -- calling on both sides to exercise restraint -- there is little doubt that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's project to re-extend Russian hegemony over as much of the former Soviet Union as he can will continue apace. Why should he worry about Washington?

Obama's Middle East peace process has stalled, most recently because he set a target for an end to Israeli settlement expansion, couldn't meet it and then proceeded as though he hadn't meant what he said originally. By insisting that Israel freeze settlements as a precondition to renewing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Obama drew a clear line. But when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu withstood Obama's pressure, Obama caved, hosting a photo-op with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that strengthened Netanyahu and weakened Abbas just when Obama wanted to achieve exactly the opposite. However one views the substantive outcome of this vignette, Obama himself looked the weakest of all. It could well be years before his Middle East policy gets back up off the ground.

On nuclear nonproliferation, North Korea responded to the "open hand" of engagement by testing its second nuclear device, continuing an aggressive ballistic missile testing program, cooperating with other rogue states and kidnapping and holding hostage two American reporters. Obama's reaction is to press for more negotiations, which simply encourages Pyongyang to up the ante.

Iran is revealed to have been long constructing an undeclared, uninspected nuclear facility that makes a mockery of almost seven years of European Union negotiation efforts. Forced to deal publicly with this deeply worrying threat, Obama proposes the equivalent of money-laundering for nuclear threats: Iranian uranium enriched in open, unambiguous defiance of four Security Council resolutions will be enriched to higher levels in Russia, and then returned to be burned in a Tehran reactor -- ostensibly for peaceful purposes. Sarkozy again captured the growing international incredulity in his noteworthy Security Council speech: "I support America's 'extended hand.' But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges."

Finally, Obama's agonizing, very public reappraisal of his own 7-month-old Afghanistan policy epitomizes indecisiveness. While there is no virtue in sustaining policy merely for continuity's sake, neither is credit due for too-quickly adopting policies without appreciating the risks entailed and then fleeing precipitously when the risks become manifest. The administration's stated reason for its policy re-evaluation was widespread fraud in Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election. But this explanation is simply not credible. Did not the administration's generals and diplomats on the ground, not to mention United Nations observers, see the election mess coming? Was the Hamid Karzai administration's cupidity and corruption overlooked or ignored during Obama's original review and revision of his predecessor's policy?

The unmistakable inference is that Obama did not carefully think through his March Afghan policy, or did not have full confidence then or now in Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal or Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, or that it is now politically inconvenient among increasingly antiwar Democrats to follow through on that policy.

None of these explanations reflect credit on the president. He is dithering. Whatever decision Obama reaches on Afghanistan, his credibility and leadership have been badly wounded by his continuing public display of indecisiveness.

Our international adversaries undoubtedly welcome all of these "resets" in U.S. foreign policy, but Americans should be appalled at how much of our posture in the world has already been given away. If Obama's first nine months indicate the direction of the next 39, we still have a long way to fall.

John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."

Fox News beats Obama at his own game

Poor Barry. He just has not had a good week in the p.r. department. His Communications Director tried to take on Fox News...only to have it blown up in their face and give Fox a nice ratings boost.








Even the left leaning rag, New York Times agreed. The story is here:

October 18, 2009

The Media Equation

The Battle Between the White House and Fox News

By DAVID CARR

The Obama administration, which would seem to have its hands full with a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened up a third front last week, this time with Fox News.

Until this point, the conflict had been mostly a one-sided affair, with Fox News hosts promoting tax day “tea parties” that focused protest on the new president, and more recently bringing down the presidential adviser Van Jones through rugged coverage that caught the administration, and other news organizations, off guard. During the health care debate, Fox News has put a megaphone to opponents, some of whom have advanced far-fetched theories about the impact of reform. And even farther out on the edge, the network’s most visible star of the moment, Glenn Beck, has said the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

Not that they haven’t tried. In his second Inaugural Address, Ulysses S. Grant said he had “been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.” President William McKinley labeled a gathering of the press a “congress of inventors,” and President Franklin D. Roosevelt assigned less favored press members to his “Dunce Club.” Sometimes the strategy worked — or caused no lasting damage. McKinley, like Grant, was elected to a second term. Roosevelt also won a third and fourth.

As Americans turned to TV for news, enmity from presidents soon followed. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said “self-appointed analysts” at the Big Three networks exhibited undisguised “hostility” toward President Richard M. Nixon, subjecting his speeches to “instant analysis and querulous criticism.” Later, in the dispute with The Times over the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, accused the newspaper of treason.

Neither of the Bush presidents had a particularly cozy relationship with the press. George H.W. Bush finished the campaign in 1992 with a bumper sticker that suggested, “Annoy the Media. Vote Bush.” And George W. Bush, in the words of ABC’s Mark Halperin, viewed “the media as a special interest rather than as guardians of the public interest.” Bill Clinton, too, distrusted the press, as did others in his administration. When Vincent Foster, Mr. Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, committed suicide in 1993, he left behind a note accusing the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page of lying.

Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president

It could all be written off as a sideshow, but it may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling. In his victory speech he promised, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”

Or not. Under the direction of Ms. Dunn, the administration has begun to punch back. On Sept. 20, the president visited all the Sunday talk shows save Fox News’, with Ms. Dunn explaining that Fox was not a legitimate news organization, but a “wing of the Republican Party.”

The one weapon all administrations can wield is access, and the White House, making it clear that it will use that leverage going forward, informed Fox News not to expect to bump knees with the president until 2010. But Fox News, as many have pointed out, is not in the access business. They are in the agitation business. And the administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.

Tactics aside, something more fundamental is at risk. Even the president’s most avid critics admit he exudes a certain cool confidence. The public impression of him is that if anyone were to, say, talk trash on the basketball court with Mr. Obama, he would not find much space for rent in Mr. Obama’s head.

Mr. Obama has also shown a consistent ability to disarm or at least engage his critics. When he eventually sat for an interview with the Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly two months before the election, it made for great television. But for the time being, détente seems very far away and the gap seems to be widening.

On the official White House Web site, a blog called Reality Check provides a running tally of transgressions by Fox News. It ends with this: “For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter’ feature from Politifact that debunks a false claim about a White House staffer that continues to be repeated by Glenn Beck and others on the network.”

People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue.

The American presidency was conceived as a corrective to the royals, but trading punches with cable shouters seems a bit too common. Perhaps it’s time to restore a little imperiousness to the relationship.

Obama Bucks...

Take a look at the new greenback. Yes, the Dollar is almost value-less. Charmin. The U.S. Treasury department proudly announced that our total national debt is $1.42 Trillion Dollars. This is more national debt than we have for the first 200 years of the U.S. of A(mnesty) In my prior post, I mentioned how this debt may, like, rebound. Some economists are now warning that unless the government cuts spending or (gulp) raises taxes, another economic crisis could occur. No shit. So let me see here. The Treasury released numbers on Friday showing that the government paid $46.6 billion more than it took in. This put the checkbook negative $1.42 trillion. (Bad enough it was $459 billion this same time last year under Bush...bad enough...and I know even though Bush was President, the Democrats had control of the House and Senate since 2006..) it's the biggest deficit since World War II. So what if this is the worst deficit since World War II. The government's credit card has no credit limit. No re-payment plan (yet). So what if Kenneth Rogoff, a Hahhvard professor and former chief for the International Monetary Fund said "The rudderless U.S. fiscal policy is the biggest long-term risk to the U.S. economy. As we accumulate more and more debt, we leave ourselves very vulnerable."
The government paid $190 billion just in interest over the last year on Treasury securities to finance the debt. This could go up to $17.1 trillion in 2019.
One of the worst parts of this tale is that we owe China $800 Billion. Hey we can top that. The U.S. government owes the Social Security trust $4.4 Trillion. It's all about the Benjamin's baby! Not to worry, with Obama bucks..we'll be fine. ( or fined?)

that's not what I voted for....

Seems to be what many of the Lord Obama's followers are saying to themselves these days. In a rather interesting move, the Obama mean team has threatened Fox News, calling them a wing of the Republican party. Not denying it...Fox does lean right..as it should. CNN is left, MSNBC is so far left the plane is ready to crash. Obama has done a rating good for Fox. Fox News is enjoying a 20 percent ratings boost. Not bad for a recession. (For those of you who think this thing is over and believe the p.r. spin in the media...don't be too panicked when unemployment continues to rise and all of those wonderful cash for clunker and home buyer programs start to fall apart. It seems a decent percentage of those folks are due to lose their jobs...resulting in loan defaults..and the financial mess/rebound continues.) We must also not forget....all these stimulus programs (which by the way...each stimulus job as been shown to cost $66,000) has to be paid back somehow. Heck even the Pillsbury Dough Boy is pissed. But don't worry...when it comes to Bling....we are all set. Plenty of Obama Bucks to go around. I hope you Republican spenders of the mid 2000's are taking notes from your past indiscretions.

behind closed doors...

So the Big O is continuing to sway like the windsurfer Kerry was back in 2004. Here is an interesting "gotcha Big O" story in the Washington Post...So much for having a transparent White House....

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 18, 2009

Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table," he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be "televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

But now, as a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) sits at the head of a wooden table at his office as he and Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) work to merge two competing versions of health-care legislation into one bill. The three men will be joined by top aides as well as by members of President Obama's health-care team, led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The sessions started on Wednesday and could be completed this week.

The group will make such key decisions as whether to include a government-run insurance plan designed to compete with private insurance companies. The bill passed in July by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Dodd led while Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) was ailing, included such a provision, but the legislation passed last week by Baucus's Finance Committee did not.

The bills also differ on how much Americans who do not buy insurance should be fined as the government seeks to get everyone covered.

In the sessions, Dodd in effect represents advocates of the government-insurance option and Baucus represents those less committed to that proposal. The tie-breaking votes are likely to be Reid and, on Obama's behalf, Emanuel. Obama and Reid have said they personally back the government-insurance option but have not ruled out supporting a bill that lacks such a provision.

Although much of the writing of legislation happens in closed-door meetings, congressional Republicans have sharply criticized the ongoing process.

"This bill is being written in the dark of night," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), adding that "the president ought to keep his promise to the American people and open this process up."

"It's ironic that Congressman Boehner would be complaining since he has refused every step of the way to participate in the effort to reform health insurance," Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. "The House and Senate have held scores of hearings on health insurance reform -- as Congressman Boehner well knows -- and at the White House we've held an unprecedented series of webcast meetings with key health care stakeholders to gather their input in a public forum."

Baucus played down the private nature of the group's meetings. "In a real sense, all senators who want health-care reform are in the room because we'll be talking to all of them, they'll be talking to us," he said.

The three senators and Emanuel won't be the only ones playing a role in shaping the legislation. Every member of the Senate will have a chance to offer amendments to the bill the three senators write. And even though the final legislation is expected to resemble more closely the version in the Senate, where final passage would require support from more-conservative Democrats, House Democrats have been meeting for weeks on their version of the bill.

The House Democratic leadership and several key chairmen meet daily, and are regularly briefing smaller groups of lawmakers. As in the Senate, House moderates and liberals remain divided over the government-insurance option, which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) strongly favors.

The House meetings are also not televised on C-SPAN or open to the public. But unlike the Senate negotiations, the House discussions tend to be open to more lawmakers.

"We have meetings and more meetings and gripe sessions," said Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). "This process has been almost open to death."

But after weeks of Senate Finance Committee public hearings, the Senate negotiations are now an invitation-only affair in Reid's office. The majority leader is unlikely to expand his group, even as some senators unhappy with parts of the legislation, such as John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), have asked to be in the room.

Instead, lawmakers try to influence the three senators however they can. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a close Reid ally, annoyed him recently by publicly pressing the majority leader to include a government-run public insurance option. Moderate Democrats are privately prodding Baucus to defend the approach in the bill passed by his committee.

In addition to being well-versed in health-care policy, some of the negotiators gathering in Reid's office are quite health-conscious. Baucus has run 50-mile "ultramarathons" and wants to complete a 100-mile race. Reid and Emanuel do yoga, and Dodd turned the recent announcement of his prostate cancer diagnosis into a virtual public health campaign.

While fellow lawmakers seek to influence them, Dodd and Reid are dogged by low approval ratings in their home states and are facing reelection next year. As they emerged from a health-care session last week, Dodd and Reid touted the number of uninsured in their home states who would benefit from the legislation.

"All of my polling numbers are good," Reid said, even as polls show him trailing several potential challengers. On Friday, he took the highly unusual step of starting to run campaign ads more than a year before the election.

Reid, in particular, faces a balancing act. As majority leader, he is tasked with shepherding the bill and ensuring that it has the support of conservative Democrats necessary for passage. But liberal activists who could raise money and help him win next year, including the group MoveOn.org, are demanding he aggressively back the public option.

Reid, like the other members of the group, seems prepared to disappoint some people to get the broader bill finished.

"Neither I nor any other senator has the luxury of passing a perfect bill -- I wish we could -- that conforms exactly to his or her beliefs," he said. "But we must act."

watch your wallet....