The Israeli Prime Minister didn’t make the cut, but the women of “The View” did get several golden moments of President Obama’s time during this week’s New York trip:
It was a difficult decision, I’m sure. Benjamin Netanyahu or Joy Behar?
President Obama has lately seemed an unserious man in serious times—he pronounced himself “eye candy” for the adoring, middle-aged women of “The View,” coming across as a guy who’s not nearly as worried about the future as the rest of us are. But if you’re appalled by the lack of seriousness the carefree leader the free world displayed on “The View,” then you must have missed his speech at the United Nations. Now, that was an unserious performance.
Speaking before the U.N., President Obama did not mention the word terror, even though four U.S. citizens, including an ambassador, were killed earlier this month in Libya on the anniversary of September 11. The president and his secretary of state continue to pretend that a film that nobody has seen was the culprit in the recent attacks on U.S. embassies.
Michael Goodwin writes about how the president’s failure to recognize terrorism for what it is emboldens radical Islamists. As Goodwin points out, the president’s act is wearing thin:
He brought his best scolding, patronizing tone for the day, as though the Turtle Bay club dominated by thugs, theocrats and cowards would be moved by his earnest pleas and frowns. It was an appeal better directed at third-graders than the Third World.
The speech was essentially fatuous: the president said, for example, that burning an American flag “does nothing to provide a child an education.” Alana Goodman captures the utter patheticness of this:
The above may be the most meaningless paragraph of all time. Burning an American flag doesn’t provide children with education? Really? Those rioters in Pakistan must feel pretty foolish to learn they’ve been going about their childhood education advocacy all wrong. Good thing President Obama came out to set them straight.
This is Obama’s fundamental error. The mobs burning our embassies and attacking police are not seeking freedom, or gender equality or jobs. They are seeking the destruction of America and the Western world.
In contrast to President E.C., Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was dead serious—he said, not for the first time, that Israel must be “eliminated.” In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal notes:
The world's civilized nations typically denounce such statements, as the U.S. State Department denounced Mr. Ahamadinejad's on Monday. But denouncing them is not the same as taking them seriously….
The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.
No one knows that more acutely than Israeli leaders, whose state was founded in the wake of such a genocide. The question faced by Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and other Israelis is whether they can afford to allow another regime pledged to Jewish "annihilation" to acquire the means to accomplish it. The answer, in our view, is as obvious as Mr. Ahmadinejad's stated intentions.
In his U.N. speech Tuesday, President Obama took a tougher-than-usual election-season line against Iran, stating that "the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." But the cold reality is that after nearly four years of failed diplomacy and half-hearted sanctions that he opposed until Congress forced his hand, neither Iran nor Israel believe him.
Someone should put Orwell on the President's reading list before it's too late.
I bet you never thought the day would come when an American president would get a little pat on the shoulder for standing up for free speech. Brett Schaefer says on National Review Online that the president’s defense of free speech was stronger than has been customary for this administration. But then the president undermined it with some “improv lines give unwarranted credence to restrictions on freedom of speech by explicitly acknowledging different nations have differing definitions of such rights.”
Maybe the president should have just taped his carefree segment for “The View” and come home without going to the United Nations?
This Just In: Charles Hurt’s column is brutal on why President Eye Candy’s performance on “The View” should have offended women:
He also brought a basket of birthday gifts for the old lady in charge on the show. Because we men always know the hell to pay if you forget a birthday or anniversary.
And most cloying of all, he brought his wife along so he could display all of his best giggle and banter that makes him such a swell man around the house.
All this happy sofa banter is fine, except that into the vacuum of his Empty Chair Diplomacy, on full display down the street at the U.N., races an enemy hellbent on violent mayhem and quashing freedom.
What is particularly sick about watching him ham it up for female voters is that this particular breed of evil that he so cavalierly assuages has a special twist of hatred for women. It is women who bear the cruelest scars, blood and repression when America retreats and radical Islam surges in.