Posted on 11/23/2010 5:19:47 AM PST by SJackson
Isn't this called piling on? Well, sometimes piling on is justified.
Yesterday former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer heaped what looks to me like well deserved scorn on the Obama administration's attempt to “bribe” Israel back to the peace table, and predicted it will never work.
This morning Politico's Ben Smith uses a wider club to bash the President, arguing that his unclear, seemingly naive policies in the region have managed to alienate both Israelis and Palestinians, and may actually have set back the cause of peace.
“[F]ar from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has become just another frustrated player on a hardened Mideast landscape,” Smith writes. “The political peace process to which Obama committed so much energy is considered a failure so far. And in the world’s most pro-American state, the public and its leaders have lost any faith in Obama and – increasingly — even in the notion of a politically negotiated peace.”
Some of this, it seems to me, isn't entirely Obama's fault. Neither the Israelis nor Palestinians see a more robust peace process as a real priority; the political situations in Israel and Ramallah are hardly conducive to the risk taking that any real peace process requires.
But the President raised expectations among the Palestinians and sowed distrust among Israelis when he seemed to promise strong U.S. leadership in pressing for a quick agreement, then got slapped upside the head by a Palestinian leadership that had no interest in direct negotiations and a wily Israeli leader who shrewdly outplayed the neophyte foreign policy leader in Washington.
Smith writes: “[T]he American president has been diminished, even in an era without active hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians. His demands on the parties appear to shrink each month, with the path to a grand peace settlement narrowing to the vanishing point. The lack of Israeli faith in him and his process has them using the talks to extract more tangible security assurances – the jets. And though America remains beloved, Obama is about as popular here as he is in Oklahoma.” And, in what strikes me as a particularly telling criticism, Smith writes “Obama has resisted advisers’ suggestions that he travel to Israel or speak directly to Israelis as he has to Muslims in Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia.”
The flaw in Smith's story is that he relies heavily on the political right in Israel for much of the analysis (although he did interview Kadima leader Tzipi Livni).
But I'm 90 percent sure that if he talked to the pro-peace process left, he'd hear the flip side of the criticism in his story - disappointment from a political faction that hoped for U.S. peace processing that was both robust and grounded in reality. It's easy to dismiss many of the hits on Obama as the product of a Jewish right that likes the current status quo just fine. But I don't hear much confidence or praise coming from the pro-peace process left, either.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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No, multiple sources recognizing Obama's failure isn't piling on.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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No, multiple sources recognizing Obama's failure isn't piling on.
Once the little boy says: “The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes”, the end is near. When Ben Smith says it, it’s over.
1. There is no bribe large enough to justify national suicide. There is no payment that makes it worth while to go against God's will.
2. A politically negotiated peace will not come for as long as Islamic terrorists believe they can get more from murder than from being productive. The terrorists will negotiate, accept what Israel gives them, and return only empty words and rockets. It's time to stop pretending that there are people of good will on the other side.
I just pray that today's Jews can survive a superpower leader who hates them every bit as much as the German government of 1933-1945 hated them.
“Another tough hit” isn’t in this idiots vocabulary. The only way to knock him down a peg is for his own party to give him the boot in 2012. And even then, he’ll be in denial for the rest of his miserable life, ala Carter.
These “people” have no soul, no remorse, no clue. Rangel, Dodd, McCain are other excellent examples. Their lack of humanity is akin to that of Ted Bundy’s while on trial as a serial killer.
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