Barack Obama -- July 6, 2009

July 6, 2009

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"Islam has always been a part of America’s story"

Barack Hussein Obama

event	description
Obama May Bypass Senate On Treaty	HotAir blog reports that after listening to the Democrats screech for the last two years about the rule of law, this Jake Tapper report should be surprising …. but it’s not. Apparently, Barack Obama finds treaty ratification a little too complicated, and so he figures he can just commit the US to nuclear disarmament and bypass Congressional oversight: With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a "provisional basis" until the Senate ratifies the treaty. "The most ideal situation would be to finish it in time that it could be submitted to the Senate so that it can be ratified," said White House Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Security and Arms Control Gary Samore. "If we’re not able to do that, we’ll have to look at arrangements to continue some of the inspection provisions, keep them enforced in a provisional basis, while the Senate considers the treaty." Samore said administration lawyers are exploring the "different options that are available. One option is that both sides could agree to continue the inspections by executive agreement; that would work on our side. On the Russian side, as I understand it, that would require Duma approval." The fact that the administration is preparing for such an extraordinary measure shows just how much pressure the two administrations are under to arrive at an agreement before the 18-year-old treaty expires. Uh, pardon me, but how many seats in the Senate does Obama’s party hold? Isn’t it 60? If Obama is simply moving forward with a straightforward, supportable treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear stockpiles in an effective verification system, why couldn’t he get a quick ratification? The GOP gave George H. W. Bush enough support in 1991 to pass the original START treaty, so it’s not as if ratification would be impossibly complicated. Well, that is, if the deal actually does put in place an effective verification system and doesn’t amount to a de facto unilateral disarmament. With exactly five months to win Senate approval, the effort by the Obama White House in floating this idea now makes it sound like Obama wants to give away the store in order to score some points with his 1980s no-nukes agenda (see next item). And as much as the Democrats howled over the supposed devotion of George Bush to a "unitary executive," Obama seems to have no trouble bypassing the check on executive power for treaty negotiation written explicitly into the Constitution, in Article II, Section 2: He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; Words. Just words.
Obama Has Gotten It Wrong For 25 Years	Jennifer Rubin says that those who suspect the president is engaged in a bit of dangerous self-delusion and denial about certain unpleasant realities regarding the threats from rogue states won’t be heartened to read that his current non-proliferation fetish stems, at least according to the New York Times, from his college infatuation with the nuclear freeze movement. Apparently, youthful Obama did not focus on the results from Ronald Reagan’s refusal to buy into the fantasies of liberals -- namely the fall of the Soviet Empire. That lesson has entirely eluded Obama. Is it any wonder his critics find his current posture fraught with peril and entirely out-of-touch with the threats we face? As the Times reports: "This is dangerous, wishful thinking," Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that "the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces." In the interview, Obama described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world. "It’s naïve for us to think," he said, "that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves." But what is naïve, of course, is to think that Iran and North Korea will be impressed by our disarmament efforts. No consideration is given, just as none was given by the nuclear freeze crowd a generation ago, to the possibility that disarmament will only embolden our adversaries and confuse our allies. But apparently Obama’s worldview has not matured much since his Columbia days: Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called "the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country" amid "the growing threat of war." The two groups, he wrote, "visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track." So little has changed. Twenty-five years later, Obama still fails to grasp the moral and political dimensions of the struggle we are involved in, still lacks any appreciation for the nature of totalitarian despots and of the motives compelling them to seek nuclear weapons. He is still fixated on the notion that weakness can resolve international threats. Unfortunately, the consequences for student Obama were not potentially fatal to his country. The reality is different today. As the Times notes: Critics argue that the North Koreas of the world will simply defy the ban -- and that the international community will fail to punish offenders. "If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr. Obama’s plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious," said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan-era Pentagon official who directs the Center for Security Policy, a private group in Washington. "There is only one country on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively denuclearize: Ours." And really, what excuse is there for Obama’s ludicrous worldview? Unlike student Obama, the Obama sitting in the Oval Office knows how the Cold War ended. And it wasn’t by disarming America.
Obama Is Already Over	I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and -- no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up -- I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim. Obama is already over. In six short months, the now-spattered bumper stickers with "Hope and Change" seem like pathetic remnants from the days of "23 Skidoo," the echoes of "Yes, we can" more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan -- if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all -- has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it. On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringe-worthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama. Continue reading here . . .
Michelle Obama’s European Vacation	America may be in the midst of a deep recession, and the nation may be facing unprecedented deficit spending and debt, but the White House will not reveal the cost to taxpayers of the European vacation that first lady Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, took last month. Travel by an American first lady typically includes the military passenger jet that carries her and the children, Secret Service personnel to provide security, and a separate cargo plane to haul official vehicles. Michelle Obama’s tour of Paris with her children included a convoy of 20 vehicles, according to news reports. She also moved by "motorcade" through London. The full cost of such a trip would also include the expense of meals and lodging for Secret Service agents and possibly other staff. In response to inquiries from CNSNews.com last week about the cost to taxpayers of the first lady’s European vacation, the White House did not provide a figure. "Like previous administrations, the first lady will follow all the rules and regulations that are related to reimbursement for personal travel," Michelle Obama’s press secretary Katie McCormick Lelyveld told CNSNews.com in a written response. CNSNews.com inquiries to the White House on the cost of the trip were made by both phone and e-mail on June 30, July 1, July 2 and July 3. Though White House rules for vacations, or unofficial travel, requires reimbursing the government the equivalent to the cost of what a commercial flight would have been, such a reimbursement would amount to only a fraction of the total cost of the first lady’s European trip. Continue reading here . . .