Posted on 02/15/2011 5:37:58 AM PST by SJackson
US president was afraid to push, to call for autocrat to immediately resign from his illegitimate perch. Obama reacted; the people of Egypt led.
I’m sitting and watching President Barack Obama’s speech on the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. He is eloquent as usual, supplying compelling visuals of the protesters demanding a free government in spite of great personal peril. He is quoting Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He has ‘taken charge’ of the situation.
But say what he will, for Obama it’s all too late. Throughout the riveting three weeks of Egypt’s democratic birth, the leader of the free world simply refused to lead. He watched the events unfold just as you and I did. He was afraid to push, afraid to nudge, afraid to call for the autocrat to immediately resign from his illegitimate perch. Obama reacted; the people of Egypt led.
Obama was supposed to be a transformational president. An African-American had risen to the highest office on Earth. Surely, even more than president George W. Bush, he would emerge as a champion of freedom and democracy. Surely such eloquence would be employed in the cause of human liberty. Obama would surely conduct a global freedom train.
BUT WE were all given pause when Obama, in the first months of his presidency, embraced dictator Hugo Chavez with a wide grin and bowed to the tyrant-king of Saudi Arabia. Chavez had called Bush “the devil” from the rostrum of the UN, and has single-handedly dismantled democracy in Venezuela, brutalizing his opponents and throwing them in jail. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia presides over a regime where women are imprisoned and lashed simply for being in a closed space with a strange man.
Perhaps these were just glitches. Perhaps Obama really did have a freedom agenda that he would pull magically out of his hat.
But it only got worse, with Obama’s foreign policy repudiating most of Bush’s democracy-building gestures as unrealistic ‘neocon’ ideology, and moving instead toward Kissingerian realpolitik. Under Obama, America is again doing business with almost any kind of dictator. Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize simply for not being Bush! We thought his lauding of tyrants had reached its zenith when our leader, holding only his second state dinner last month, honored one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth. The new Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner was rotting in jail along with his wife while the Chinese president was eating Maine lobster in the White House.
It’s one thing to do business with China, but to honor its brutal leadership so? With Egypt the circle is complete. Four hundred million Arabs live under brutal tyranny. Egypt is the Arab world’s most populous state. A gift was handed to Obama – who has done next-to-nothing for imprisoned people around the world – when the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt began agitating for liberty. That agitation received one line in his State of the Union address.
And even as the Egyptian people showed they were ready to endure almost any hardship to be free, our president simply watched to see what would happen, got it wrong repeatedly, and suddenly found his voice only when it was all over. You would think that the president would have given a speech when the demonstrations first started, declaring: “The people of Egypt, sovereign in their own land, are demanding the immediate resignation of a president who has presided unlawfully over them for three decades. The people of the United States and their president stand squarely with our brothers and sisters in Egypt, and demand Mubarak’s immediate compliance.”
Instead, we got all this confusing talk from Obama and Hillary Clinton about how the transition to democracy can be messy, and how Mubarak needed time. Time? Three decades isn’t enough?! He had to go now.
SO HERE we are. The greatest democracy on Earth, led by a man whose rhetoric and actions are in conflict. If Obama really believed it wasn’t wise for Mubarak to leave immediately, why didn’t he say it on the day of his resignation? Rather than invoking Gandhi and King, he should have invoked the French Revolution, Iran and Hamas, showing the perils of premature democracy.
The reason he didn’t is that when it comes to promoting democracy, Obama is weak, oddly bereft of strong personal convictions on human liberty, believing that while people deserve to be free, only a superstrong government can guarantee that freedom.
Obama may be our first African-American president, but he is most definitely not a product of the civil rights movement. Thank God the brave people of Egypt have rejected our president’s empty rhetoric of hope and change.
He doesn’t know how to lead. He votes “present” and leaves the work to everyone else. He will NEVER “win the future” because he doesn’t understand the past and he has given away the present.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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OUCH, they took him out to the woodshed with that one.
And his gambling with our future is thus far, paying off; if your name is Obama or George Soros, that is.
der Fuhrer 0bama doesn't know how to lead, but he's getting the dictating part down.
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What an indictment.
Rabbi Schmuley always writes decent stuff.
In the 2012 elections, will the oil companies support the democrats hoping that Obama throws them a bone...or will they support the republicans hoping for a drilling policy 180?
its funny watching the media trying to give credit for obama for doing NOTHING. See it worked, obama’s foreign policy of doing nothing worked!!!
Rabbi,
You need to be preaching this to all of the liberal Jews in America who not only voted for Barry, but gave large sums of money to him to be elected and sell Israel down the drain. He cares nothing about Freedom and Liberty. He cares about himself, whether he made a good speech or not....
The Israelis have stopped pretending Obama is a rational, honest ally.
They accept the fact that when the muslims start WW-III in the mideast Obama will try to put the might of America against Israel.
So they have stopped kissing his arse.
I disagree rather strongly with this notion.
It is not and should not be the job of the US to decide who should rule other countries. We can criticize their leaders for their actions, and we can decide whether or not providing aid serves our interests. (Usually not.)
But it is not our job to decide when “the Egyptian people” have decided their leader should go. By the criteria of mass popular demonstrations, the US military should have overthrown our Constitution during the Vietnam War. “The people” obviously wanted a change.
I guess Lebanon (4 million) may be another exception. If Egypt succeeds in creating a real democracy, that would be 80 million more, but at this point I'm not very optimistic--they may get a regime that reflects better the wishes of the inhabitants, but it isn't likely to be one that is tolerant towards religious or political dissidents.
He isn’t a leader. He’s a “celebrity”.
Isn’t this the same guy who was Rabbi to Micheal Jackson who used Black Panthers (wannabee muslims) as bodyguards?
Flashback...
“Barack Obama contends that he is more experienced in executive matters than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin because he has managed his presidential campaign for the past 18 months.
Speaking on a cable news channel Monday night, the Democratic presidential nominee said he is better prepared to handle a disaster like Hurricane Gustav because of his pursuit of the White House.
“Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We’ve got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years,” Obama said.”
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