The Middle East is in flames, our embassies are under attack,
and four American diplomats have come home in coffins. So who is to
blame?
It’s time for the MSM to round up all the usual suspects — and
to exonerate a president who cavorts with Hollywood celebrities and
goes on the David Letterman show to demonstrate his famous cool
under fire. Perhaps he will do a Top Ten list on why the U.S.
should stand by and do nothing while Iran gets ready to launch a
nuclear attack that will achieve its oft stated goal of destroying
Israel.
In her own inimitable (and nonsensical) prose, Maureen Dowd
began her
column this weekend saying that Paul Ryan has not “sautéed” in
foreign policy. Nor — I will add for her — has Paul Ryan
drizzled, dredged, or deep-fried in foreign policy. She wrote:
Paul Ryan has not sautéed in foreign policy in his years on
Capitol Hill. The 42-year-old congressman is no Middle East savant;
till now, his idea of a border dispute has more likely involved
Wisconsin and Illinois.
Perhaps a copy-editor (if the Times still has such
people) could take Ms. Dowd aside and explain to her that
sauté is a transitive verb: It is an action word that
requires an object (you sauté onions, garlic, or other
things, and you do it quickly; you don’t self-reflexively place
what the reader must assume to be your own bottom in cooking oil or
foreign policy over a great length of time). I would guess that she
meant to say that Paul Ryan has not been steeped in
foreign policy, but then she rejected that as insufficiently
high-brow for her audience.
Undaunted by her own illiteracy, Dowd pressed deeper into the
culinary arts in her next paragraph:
Yet Ryan got up at the Values Voter Summit here [in Washington]
on Friday and skewered the Obama administration as it struggled to
manage the Middle Eastern mess left by clumsily mixed American
signals toward Arab Spring and the disastrous legacy of
war-obsessed Republicans.
On the same page of the Sunday Times, Nicholas D.
Kristof
attempted to make fun of Mitt Romney under the headline “The
Foreign Relations Fumbler.” He opted for explosive devices over
gastronomy in his opening paragraph:
Diplomacy is a minefield, and Mitt Romney spent the last week
blowing up his foreign policy credentials to be president. He
raised doubts about his capacity to deal with global crisis, and we
were left hoping that if (a) 3 a.m. call ever went to him, he’d
have set up call forwarding.
It was of course Hillary Clinton — back when she was running
against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries — who ran
the famous ad questioning whether the American people could trust
Obama to take a 3 a.m. call on the presidential hotline. Kristof
ignored that nice little irony in rehashing Romney’s alleged gaffs
in his recent trip to three of our nation’s staunchest allies
(Britain, Poland, and Israel).
To borrow one of Maureen Dowd’s phrases, Kristof considers
himself to be very much of “Middle East savant.” But he did rather
“blow up” his own “foreign policy credentials” with his absurdly
optimistic coverage of the heady early days of Arab Spring.
In a column written shortly after the resignation of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Kristof posed the
question: “Is the Arab world unready for freedom? A crude
stereotype lingers that some people — Arabs, Chinese and Africans
— are incompatible with democracy. Many around the world fret that
‘people power’ will likely result in Somalia-style chaos,
Iraq-style civil war or Iran-style oppression.” He went on to
answer his own question by saying it was “insulting to the unfree
world” to suggest that Arab countries might fail the test of
peaceful, democratic self-rule.
Needless to say, the jut-jawed pundit set up an Obama-style
straw man in framing the question in the way that he did. Any
culture or national grouping — be it white, black, brown, or
yellow — that celebrates violence against outsiders… and violence
against its own people (through such practices as stoning women to
death accused of adultery)… is far removed from any possibility of
genuine democracy.
In his column this weekend, Kristof went on to repeat the
outrageous falsehood that Obama administration officials have been
peddling over the past week. He wrote: “Yet with the Middle East
exploding in recent days because of (emphasis added) a
video insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, Romney dived in, etc.,
etc.” Surely, no one who is halfway serious believes that the
storming of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi
on September 11 — of all dates! — was anything other than a
well-planned and orchestrated event designed to humiliate the
United States and to accelerate the nation’s decline as a world
power and a force for world peace and freedom.
Nevertheless, the administration continues to hew shamelessly to
the we-did-to-ourselves line in at least partially excusing the
murder of American citizens on supposedly protected American soil…
and in continuing to promote the myth that the so-called Arab
Spring portends a dazzling Arab summer of new-found freedom and
democracy. All will be for the best in this best of all possible
worlds. Hillary said so herself in her best imitation of Voltaire’s
Dr. Pangloss: “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia did
not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”
Tonight Obama goes on the David Letterman’s show. Expect the two
of them to pull long faces for 15 seconds or so over the murder of
the U.S. ambassador to Libya and his three colleagues. Then each of
them will settle down to his own brand of idle banter and cool
aloofness. There’s not much to care or worry about, if you are as
disengaged and self-centered as the gap-toothed comic or the
president who seems to have learned nothing at all from nearly four
years of on-the-job training in his first real job (i.e. one with
real responsibility — if he cared to acknowledge it).
The mainstream media can congratulate themselves for helping to
make this grotesquely conceited and troubling show possible.
