In yesterday’s Impromptus, I talked about President Obama’s foreign policy, and in particular its gestures: the New Year’s message to Iran’s “people and leaders”; the hearty handshakes and grins with Chávez; and so on. All of these gestures have consequences, and I’m afraid that none of them will be good.
At that Americas summit, Daniel Ortega delivered a diatribe against the United States. He took care to slam us for the Bay of Pigs, but said that Obama could not be held responsible for that. Our president’s response? “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.” Yuk, yuk, yuk. Applause all around.
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But not from all of us — not from all of us beyond that summit. The Bay of Pigs was terribly, almost criminally, executed. But it was a noble cause — the overthrow of that brutal dictatorship — and many, many good people died in the effort. If America bears guilt where the Bay of Pigs is concerned, it is not the kind of guilt Obama and his like have in mind, for sure.
Many of Obama’s foreign-policy touches have been sickening — morally sickening. The Arabiya interview. The New Year’s greeting. The bow to the Saudi king. The rejoining of the U.N. “Human Rights Council,” that disgrace. The soul-brother clasp with Chávez. This light remark about the Bay of Pigs. Etc., etc. (And the smooching of the Castros is coming, I feel sure.)
During the campaign, some of us said that Obama appeared to have the mindset of a Marxist grad student. Highly disturbing to see that borne out in his presidency.
Um, does it make me a paranoid Republican if I say that, if a Republican secretary of state had directed reporters to call a phone-sex line, this would have been rather a big deal in American life: a loud, sustained yuk-yuk? Am I wrong? The press and the comedians would have just shrugged it off and moved on? Really? Okay.
I wish reporters were a little less lazy, and a little less biased. Here is a report in the New York Times, from last week: “Mrs. Clinton said . . . that the uncompromising policy of the Bush administration toward Cuba had not worked.” In this report — a straight news article — the Times makes the editorial judgment that Bush’s policy was uncompromising. Some of us do not believe that: We think that that policy included carrots and sticks, and that the Cuban dictatorship did not accept any carrots.
Why do reports in “mainstream media” so often have to incorporate the Left’s worldview? (I know why, of course: Am just being rhetorical.) (For that complete article, go here.)
The 43rd president, George W. Bush, went to the Boao Forum in China (for what reason, I don’t really know). An AP report had this to say: “On Saturday, [Bush] said he would not criticize Barack Obama and wished his successor all the best. ‘He was not my first choice, but now that this election was made, it speaks volumes about the United States of America,’ Bush said.” (Full article, here.)
That reminded me of Dick Cheney last January, right before the inauguration:
“What’s going to happen here [on January 20] is truly remarkable, if you think about it. I mentioned to somebody the other day — they asked me if I thought things had gotten better or worse during the 40 years since I came to Washington. And I thought back for a minute and was reminded that in 1968 we started the year with the Tet offensive in Vietnam. We had Lyndon Johnson withdraw from the campaign, we had Martin Luther King assassinated, we had Bobby Kennedy assassinated, we had riots in the cities, we had a riot in Chicago that was called the Democratic national convention.
“And here we are 40 years later and we’re about to swear in the first African-American president in history. That’s remarkable. I didn’t vote for him and don’t agree with him on a lot of issues, but I think it really says a hell of a lot for the country that we’ve come that far in that period of time.”
Well, the Democrats have always been balanced, far-seeing, and gracious about Bush, Cheney, and the GOP, right? (For the report from which those Cheney remarks are drawn, go here.)
I wanted to say something about Anderson Cooper, the CNN star. These recent years have been clarifying: The media have become more overtly partisan. Everyone’s letting it all hang out. That is better than pretending, I believe: better than pretending that people are neutral when they’re not. Still, there is something sad about the new era. Anderson Cooper is about as mainstream as you can get, right? And yet he’s cracking vulgar, mocking jokes about conservative rallies just like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the rest of that type. It’s just one big smirk-e-tariat, or snark-e-tariat, or smug-e-tariat, or take your pick.
Kind of a shame.
