The Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 3B - Foreign Policy

We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:

• Transparency and integrity
• Economic policy
• Foreign policy
• Healthcare policy
• Government management policy

Foreign Policy Part 2

1) This past week, the Yemeni government, a supposed ally of the U.S.in the fight against terrorism, collapsed under the weight of a Shiite rebel force supported and funded by Iran. However, this was not supposed to happen. As late as last September, Obama proclaimed that: "This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us,while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years."

However, most of us and the rest of the world might have a different definition of "success" than the President's, based on the overthrowing of the current government this week. Even with a supportive government in Yemen, Al Qaeda's most vicious and successful branch was in Yemen.With the collapse of the government and the support they gave to Obama in fighting terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular, his strategy is now in tatters and an epic fail.

2)This President, and his closest advisors such as John Kerry, blatantly refuse to admit the obvious: most of the current terrorism going on in the world is being done by Islamic extremists. This does not mean that the majority of Muslims are like this, it just means that much of the terrorism is being done in the name of Islam.

However, failure to recognize a problem means that you will never resolve that problem. Consider a recent article from the Heritage Foundation that listed out recent terror attacks, all of which had an Islamic slant to them:

• December 2010: Stockholm – An Iraqi-born Swedish citizen who had lived in the U.K. carries out a suicide car bombing, injuring two and blowing himself up. Although the planned attack failed, Swedish authorities believed the terrorist intended to detonate the vehicle remotely in an attempt to kill as many people as possible during the busy Christmas shopping season.

• March 2012: Toulouse and Montauban, France – A French national of Algerian origin kills three off-duty soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi in three separate terrorist attacks in southern France. Before being killed by police in a shootout, the terrorist, who carried out the terrorist attack in the name of Islam, told authorities he did so in part because he was mad over France’s military role in Afghanistan.

• May 2013: London – British serviceman Lee Rigby is brutally murdered in broad daylight by two British citizens who were converts to Islam. Rigby is run over by the terrorists before being hacked to death as the murderers shouted “Allahu akbar.” Both terrorists are convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

• May 2014: Brussels – A terror attack carried out against a Jewish museum kills four. A French terrorist who had returned from fighting with Islamists in Syria and Iraq is charged with carrying out the attack. The terrorist is described by one former hostage as a “publicity-loving sadist,” whose depravity knew no bounds even prior to the attack on the Jewish museum.

• December 2014: Joue-les-Tours, France - A 20-year old French national, who is a Muslim convert with known sympathies to radical ideology, injures three after attacking police with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” He is shot and killed by police.

But this denial should not come as a surprise since this administration went years refusing to acknowledge that the Fort Hood attacks was a terrorist attack, classifying the attack as "workplace violence," an insult to those who died and were wounded. Failure to declare the obvious is an epic fail and an insult to the intelligence to the rest of us that see what is going on.

3) The relationship with China has not gotten better during the Obama administration. China has been bullying nations in its region for a number of years now, claiming territorial and island rights that other nations have long held were theirs. There have been military and diplomatic confrontations with Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and others, with the Chinese ignoring any Obama administration pleas to play nice.

In fact, some experts are saying that relations between the U.S. and China have not been this bad in decades: "U.S.-China relations are worse than they have been since the normalization of relations, and East Asia today is less stable than at any time since the end of the Cold War," Robert Ross, a political science professor at Boston College and an associate of Harvard's John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. 

So China ignores us and is not scared or respectful of us, Russia invades countries at will and is not scared or respectful of us, looks like the Obama administration has taken us back to the future with the advent of a Cold War atmosphere as a result of the bumbling foreign relations management of the Obama administration.

4) But it is not just Russia and China where the foreign affairs management of been an epic failure. By allowing the NSA to spy on foreign leaders, even those that were and are considered allies, the Obama administration ticked off a whole range of foreign leaders including such stalwart allies as Angela Merkel of Germany. You cannot spy on people and then expect them to embrace yourself or your foreign affairs policy.

The Prime Minister of Brazil was so ticked off by the spying that she cancelled herself out of a White House state dinner, a highest honor that the White House can bestow on anyone, that is how made the Obama administration made her. Time Magazine reported on how Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sirkorski truly felt about his country;s relationship with the U.S. during Obama's tenure: 

In tapes obtained by a Polish magazine, Radoslaw Sikorski sued an expletive to describe his country's alliance with the U.S. 

Polish magazine Wprost claims to have obtained recordings of a conversation in which Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski says that “the Polish-American alliance is worthless, even harmful, as it gives Poland a false sense of security. It’s bulls—t.

The quote is an excerpt of a longer conversation purportedly between Sikorski and former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski that Wprost is expected to publish Monday or Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The leaked recording comes just two weeks after President Barack Obama visited Poland.

Great, when an ally says the relationship is bulls--t, you really are an epic fail.

The following link to a CNBC news broadcast from earlier this year quite nicely summarized how erratic and non-effective the administration has been relative to all types of other countries, foes and friends alike:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2T304RS41k&app=desktop

From the collapse of Yemen to a new Cold War with Russia and China to ticking off many, many allies, this administration's voeign policy record can be viewed not other way than an epic fail. Today's and Yesterday's examples prove this conclusion, one could not do much worse if one was trying to encourage our enemies and piss off our friends.

This epic fail series will continue tomorrow when we switch gears to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernmobama,washington post,politifactent.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

While There is Still Hope for America, Part 3...Despite The Political Class: Cutting Unnecessary Defense Spending, Cutting Unnecessary Government Reports, and More

Unfortunately, when discussing the political class in America it usually gets pretty depressing. Runaway national debt, leaky borders, escalating healthcare costs, a lost war on drugs, failing public schools, selfish politicians whose only priority in life is their own personal enrichment and egos, a government bureaucracy that fails at everything it does, etc. It can get pretty depressing with all of the bad news that originates with a petty and inept political class. 

This situation led us to write the book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government,” a fifty step plan to fix what ails the country. Sadly, since the book was published in 2009, the politicians in this country have followed absolutely none of the common sense steps that were proposed. Doing so would have put the country in a much better position today vs. what we are currently living through.

So rather than dwell on the continuing bad news that is spawned by today’s political class, lets take a couple of days to talk about some good things that are going on that should give us all some hope that eventually we can actually fix what the political class has broken and finally actually resolve some major issues of our times.

1) We have often discussed the reality that the American taxpayer wastes at least tens of billions of dollars every year by garrisoning military troops around the world. Step 30 from “Love my Country, Loathe My Government,” strongly suggested that such massive deployment of military personnel around the world was useless and wasteful. 

In fact, like most Washington efforts and strategies, a strong case can be made that these deployments made our international situation and homeland security worse. Every year or so it seems there is another rape case on Okinawa involving a local Japanese woman and U.S. military personnel.

Even though the Korean War ended six decades ago, we still have kept tens of thousands of American troops stationed in South Korea, possibly making North Korean leaders even more paranoid and dangerous if we did not have troops massed on their borders.

And though the Cold War ended about three decades ago, why we have continued to station tens of thousands of troops there to fight a non-existent enemy is beyond logic and certainly wasteful.

Thus, it was encouraging to find out recently that the Pentagon was going to close down 15 U.S.military bases in Europe. The closures are expected to save $500 million a year and be completed by the early 2020s. That’s the good news, a real good first step.

The bad news has several components. These positive steps will not be completed for a decade or so, requiring billions of dollars to still be spent on obsolete military bases. The process should be done much quicker. Second, while a couple of thousand U.S. troops in Great Britain will no longer be needed, there will still be tens of thousands of U.S. troops still on the continent costing tens of billions of dollars a year.

But it is a start and that is the good news. To the tune of half a billion dollars a year.

2) Congress also deserves some credit for starting to cut down on Federal government bureaucracy if only a little bit. They voted to eliminate 48 useless annual government reports that probably very few people ever read and which almost definitely never was worth the effort to compile. Hopefully, the President will sign the bill terminating these reports.

To show you how inane these reports are, consider just a few of the more outlandish ones:

• One report dated back to 1930 and was related to dog and cat fur imports. Yes, in 2014, someone, somewhere in th Federal government was compiling the amount of dog and cat fur imports, all paid for by the American taxpayer.
• Another report tracked how many acres of farmland was devoted to raising peanuts.
• Another report reconciled all of the reports related to the Corporation for National And Community Service.

The good news is that this is a small but positive step at cutting down unnecessary Federal bureaucracies and it will save the American taxpayer about $1 million a year. The bad news is that the Federal government will still be compiling another 4,921 annual reports every year, most of which are probably just as useless as the ones that have been discontinued.

If we could somehow terminate half of those $4,921 annual reports and save at the same rate, we could reduce unnecessary government report expenses by about $50 million a year. $50 million a year could shelter a lot of homeless, feed a lot of hungry, treat a lot of the addicted and do a lot lot more good than being used to create reports that no one ever uses.

3) The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that a statewide grand jury has recommended criminal charges be filed against Pennsylvania State Attorney General Kathleen Kane. The charge include perjury and contempt of court related to the leaking of secret grand jury information. Let me say up front that these are only charges and that she is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

However, the good news is that someone in the state government of Pennsylvania is actually looking out for the integrity of the law in the state regardless of political position held or political power. The fact that charges were brought is a sign of hope that all are treated the same under the law, at least in Pennsylvania.

The background of the case is centered around a local grand jury that handed down indictments of two Democratic state legislators for taking bribes in exchange for their votes on a bill.Although the grand jury came back with criminal indictments, Attorney General Kane refused to prosecute the case involving two members of her same political party.

As a result, a judge convened a state grand jury with a special prosecutor to follow up on the whole situation which ended up indictments of Kane. Again, innocent until proven guilty but the good news is that the process worked and even the top law enforcement agent in the state is not above the law and scrutiny for integrity.

4) And last piece of good news: the price of oil continues to drop with the resultant price of gas at the pump continues to drop also. Now some politicians are licking their jobs at this good news and thinking that raising the gas tax at this time is a good thing to do. God forbid the American consumer get a break. 

However, I am more hopeful than ever that the American consumer will not stand for more taxation at a time when government wasteful spending is at an all time high. Just in case, may I suggest you give your Washington representatives a call and tell them no to more taxes, in any form.

That will do it for the three days of good news we have reviewed.Today we learned that small but positive steps have been taken to cut down unnecessary military base expenses and government report expenses. We have learned that at least in Pennsylvania, no politician is above the law. And gas prices continue to sink despite the best efforts of Washington politicians to make it more expensive to gas up. 

I hope you enjoyed this brief review of hope and good news because tomorrow we dive right back into the insanity, incompetence, wasteful spending, and dangers of the American political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w