PJ: I was reminded of a little joke I heard during the first year of President Obama's administration: "If a republican looked out of the window and saw Obama walking across the water of the Potomac River they would shake their head and proclaim: see the guy can't even swim!"
The Guardian
The Right Word: Obama gets B grade on Libya
Fox News' armchair generals award Obama a grudging pass on the Libyan intervention, but Michael Savage is incensed
By Sadhbh Walshe
Sean Hannity was never happy about the US involvement in the Libyan conflict, because he believed that the president displayed weakness by not leading the charge and that he was wrong to drag America into what could end up being another intractable conflict in the first place. Now that, a tidy five months later, a brutal dictator has been overthrown, paving the way for Libyans to get a shot, at least, at democracy, Hannity's focus of discontent has shifted to the fact that President Obama has not yet presented a plan for how a post-Gaddafi Libya should be governed. He discussed what he perceives as yet another example of the president's failure of leadership with Colonel Oliver North (view clip).
I'm concerned. Because if you remember during the Arab spring, which, by the way, is responsible for our economic collapse in the country according to the Obama administration, but all the predictions were: this new democracy is emerging, and it seems that as bad as Mubarak was, that it seems things are going to get rather worse. So, the question is obvious right now, you know: what are the president's plans? He did not lay out an economic plan. What are the plans for the short term, what are his plans for the long term?
North agreed that the whole thing was yet another case of "irrational exuberance". He didn't think it was a bad thing to see the back of Gaddafi, but we still don't know where the fallen dictator is (though he's clearly not running Libya any longer), and he is pretty sure that there are months of chaos ahead and that it may well become a "Somalia with oil, with tribal warlords and, of course, piracy". Hannity shared North's lack of faith in the ability of the Transitional National Council (TNC) to bring democracy to Libya and was particularly worried by the draft constitutional charter they recently issued, which he discussed on a subsequent segment with Ambassador John Bolton (view clip).
What's interesting if you read this constitution – and you and I actually had a private discussion about this last night – I mean it talks about freedoms, it talks about freedoms of the press, of assembly, all these freedoms. They're all words, and then it goes into the sharia law aspect of it – and I think we have a pretty good idea of what would emerge if, in fact, as they say here, Islam is the religion of the state and the source of their legislation is Islamic jurisprudence, sharia law.
It is true that the constitution says "Islam is the religion of the state", but this is not a new departure as Islam was also the religion of the state under Gadaffi. It remains to be seen whether his concerns about Islamic jurisprudence being the "principal source of legislation" are justified. In the meantime, Hannity fears that even though the only reason President Obama managed to orchestrate Gaddafi's overthrow, which everyone is cheering about, is that he embraced the pre-emptive policies of his predecessor, George W Bush, once again, as happened with the assassination of Osama bin Laden, it is the presiding president and not the retired one, who is getting all the credit.
Bill O'Reilly has been relentless in his criticism of President Obama ever since the Tea Party victory in the debt ceiling debate gave him hope that an even bigger victory may be within reach in 2012. When it comes to the Libya action, however, O'Reilly was prepared to give Obama credit for a job reasonably well done (view clip.
He discussed the issue with former Bush adviser Karl Rove, who did not share his assessment that, by partnering with our allies in Britain and France and enabling the Libyans to fight their own battles, the president at the very least didn't make any new enemies. Rove felt that if the president hadn't been so reluctant to implement the full force of America's military might, we could have been out of the Libyan quagmire in two months, instead of five; but O'Reilly set him straight.
It's a little bit more than that. Here's the box score. No Americans killed, costs kept down. If the full brunt of American airpower in the Mediterranean had been unleashed, you would have had a lot of civilian casualties. Very difficult to do the bombing that they did. The bottom line is: Gaddafi's gone after six months not to come back again. No American dead.
Rove persisted in arguing that if there had been boots on the ground, the whole matter could have been resolved in six to eight weeks, but nevertheless awarded the president a B grade for his handling of the situation. The president fared better on a later segment with Lt Col Ralph Peters, who actually awarded him an A – while making it clear that he was still "the worst president since James Buchanan" and that he was "not a fan of the guy". These caveats aside, Peters did feel compelled to point out that arming and training the rebels and turning them from a disorganised mob into a group of skilled fighters, capable of pulling off their own coup, without shedding a drop of American blood, "is about as good as war gets".
Michael Savage
Michael Savage
Michael Savage was never a fan of the Libya intervention – and is even less so now that Gaddafi has been more or less disposed of, because he does not believe that what is ahead for Libyans will be any better than what they have put behind them (listen to clip).
"It's a sad day for me, in a way, because no one's listening to the news. I mean, Obama has overthrown Gaddafi – and now what? He talks about it as though this is a good thing. He has overthrown Gaddafi. Are you listening to me out there? Who do you think is more dangerous, Gaddafi or those who will replace him?"
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about the transition to democratic rule, but the rebels have beaten the odds so far, and the fact that they managed to maintain some semblance of order throughout the months of conflict, issued a draft constitutional charter and are open to cooperating with the international community at least bodes well. Savage is more concerned, however, that President Obama seems to be more supportive of the Libyan rebels than he is of the Tea Party protesters in America, which he put down to the fact that the Tea Party is "composed of tax payers and not tax takers". This reminded him of the president's recent failed attempt to roll back the tax cuts for the super-rich in America, which he compares to Lenin's treatment of peasant farmers in Russia (the Kulaks), whose grain was confiscated and many of whom were "eliminated" when they resisted giving up their farms to collectivisation.
He [Obama] wants to take away every dollar of every taxpayer if he can. Now, of course, he wouldn't do that but that's his goal; he would love to do that. That's the protocols of Leninism, which is to tax the Kulaks and if the Kulaks refuse to hand over their farms, what you do is you put the Kulaks in the archipelagos. The Gulag archipelagos are Obama's manifestation of the federal homeland security act.
Though Savage's fear of a Bolshevik revolution in America may be overstated, the threat that his taxes may one day increase continues to torment him; and he seems to connect this threat with President Obama's support for the democratic uprisings in the Middle East or what Savage dismisses as "Arab Spring garbage".
The man [Obama] has destroyed the world, wrecked the economy, wrecked the peace of the … look, I mean, the world was already in trouble, the man has wrecked everything; wherever there was peace, he made war; wherever there should have been war, he made peace. Instead of going to war against Syria, instead of going to war against Iranian mullahs, he goes to war against a little tin pot dictator like Gaddafi!
And in doing so, the allegedly weak president has added another string to his Osama bin Laden bow. No wonder Savage is depressed.
To view the clips referenced in this article, please go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/25/obama-libya-fox-news
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