Posted on 08/09/2014 6:01:03 PM PDT by Ooh-Ah
President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman About Iraq, Putin and Israel
... Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement. That’s a tough thing to do. With respect to Abu Mazen, it’s a slightly different problem. In some ways, Bibi is too strong [and] in some ways Abu Mazen is too weak to bring them together and make the kinds of bold decisions that Sadat or Begin or Rabin were willing to make. It’s going to require leadership among both the Palestinians and the Israelis to look beyond tomorrow. ... And that’s the hardest thing for politicians to do is to take the long view on things.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He really is asking Israel to compromise with the mass murderers.
Delusional.
Perhaps Netanyhu’s poll numbers are high because he actually REPELLED an invasion of his country unlike Obama?? When will these folks get it?
I cannot even get my head around the way he “thinks”. His high poll numbers are preventing him from “doing the right thing”! It’s like everything is upside down and inside out with Obama
Maybe his (Netanyahu’s) poll numbers are high because his people see him doing the right thing.
Typical backwards liberal thinking. Like when a state passes a concealed carry law and crime goes down, it confounds liberals ... they can’t explain it!
“..Delusional.”
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In spite of the obvious “personal issues” we are dealing with, the Congress allows this to continue when it is ALL to the detriment of this country and its citizens. A very bad nightmare.
Tweedledumb talking to Tweedledee.
This is what he really means.
What an idiot. So he decided to allow the most vicious and determined gang of terrorists yet seen to just convoy and attack all over northern Iraq when the most damage could have been done to them with air strikes.
The "pressure" he claims he was putting on Maliki just left much of northern Iraq wide open for conquest. And they had the intelligence about ISIS weeks and months before they invaded Iraq.
“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”
Obamacare. Not one GOP vote. I guess YOU, Mr. President, have no trouble with “maximalist” positions.
Tom Friedman, one of the few columnists who is wrong almost as often as Obama-I can see these two snuggling together on a loveseat at the Times arguing over who hates Israel more.
Tom Friedman....the human BOBBLE HEAD!! All he did in that interview was NOD in APPROVAL of EVRYTHING Obama was spewing.
Obama says he regrets that he did not do in Libya what Bush did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Friedman does not ask “What the hell did you just say?”.
“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”
While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. “Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”
Like Stalin trying to make agriculture more efficient ends up starving five million people to death, and he still refused to acknowledge a flaw in his collectivization theory. No Obama caused catastrophe will ever shake his absolute faith in his own infallibility.
ISIS stole a half billion dollars.
They are gonna be able to make Baraq a helluva deal to become Caliph in 2017.
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