Free Republic

It turns out being president is a lot harder than Barack Obama thought it was. After the biggest electoral defeat in 80 years, Obama packed up Air Force One and headed out for a political shellacking abroad. You'd be hard pressed to locate an accurate picture of world opinion regarding Obama's trip from our adoring media, so here are the highlights as reported by the foreign press. Nothing is more emblematic of the Obama Administration's tactful use of "smart power" than the front page of the Drudge Report the other day after Obama delivered his Jakarta speech. As reported by...

There he goes again, bashing Bangalore. Not for the first time, US President Barack Obama invoked India’s much-celebrated economic hotspot, which has become an all-encompassing metaphor to describe everything from job loss to globalization, to rally Americans for a protectionist cause. At a White House event on Monday to unveil tax reforms aimed at forcing American multinationals to pay corporate taxes -- and keep jobs -- at home, Obama lashed out at the current US system, saying it encouraged paying ''lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, New York.'' The...

Clearly, the new Administration in Washington has little time for New Delhi. India, however, needs to put its own house in order before crying hoarse over the changing winds in Washington.India is realizing it’s difficult to be out of the limelight after getting used to it. For the last eight years under the Bush Administration, India occupied a pride of place in the strategic calculus of the US. India was wooed as a rising power, it was seen as a pole in the emerging global balance of power, it was acknowledged as the primary actor in South Asia, de-hyphenated from...