The Little President Who Wasn't There

[Warph]

"The Little President Who Wasn't There"
by James Lewis - June 24, 2009

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little president who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away

The White House is now occupied by a little president who just isn't there when he is called upon to take a clear, moral stand. For such sheer gutless flabbiness and evasion, you have to look back to the dismal Jimmy Carter years. If Tehran seems quieter today, it's because the civilian demonstrators have been identified and are being beaten and tortured and maybe killed in Evin Prison. Don't believe for a moment that the sadistic regime has changed, just because you don't see people bleeding on the streets. They are bleeding all right. It's just out of public view.

The Europeans are being Reaganesque. Angela Merkel is morally serious. She stated officially that

"Germany stands on the side of the people in Iran who want to exercise their right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly."

There. That wasn't so hard, was it? Ronald Reagan would have said it. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair would have said it. Barack Obama couldn't.

Nicolas Sarkozy upheld our real values. He called the pictures of women and teenagers being beated by Basij thugs on motorcycles "brutal" and "totally disproportionate."

"The ruling power claims to have won the elections ... if that were true, we must ask why they find it necessary to imprison their opponents and repress them with such violence."

Barack Obama loves to preen and parade his "higher" morality. But when it comes to Iranians struggling against ugly tyranny or the people of North Korean just trying to fill their bellies with food, our little president just isn't there. Nowhere to be found. Chances are that behind the scenes the mullahs are promising Obama a glorious peace agreement that will allow him to parade his gargantuan ego around the world one more time. They are Persian rug sellers over there, who know all about hard bargaining. They've got his number: He's a pushover. Obama will trade personal glory against the freedom of Iran's people any day of the week.

So the most moralistic president since Jimmy is also a moral coward. Not surprising, is it? Moralizing is just another way of propping up one's ego. Morality is making the tough choices when life presents us with a clear choice between good and evil.

Obama  has never stuck his neck out except to make a play for some constituency -- like the late-term abortion fanatics. As a result the United States is now standing with Vladimir Putin, who routinely assassinates opposition journalists, rather than with our real values.

As Ralph Peters pointed out a few weeks ago, Obama is a Third World socialist circa 1979, when his ideas jelled and crystallized. He's never bothered to change his basic outlook since then.

The Soviet Union crumbled because its own people got sick and tired of its system of apparatchik privileges, it's venal corruption, and its boastful propaganda. Yes, Reagan and Thatcher and Pope Paul II united in a making the moral case. The Helsinki Agreement forced the Soviets to account for their abuses in public. All that helped to create psychological pressure that turned out to be irresistible -- because internally, the children of the power class secretly agreed on the same values. When Ronald Reagan called it an Evil Empire they knew in their hearts he was right. Internal self-doubt and external moral pressure combined to bring down the rotten regime.

Obama isn't looking for that. He mainly wants to be celebrated as Mr. Peace and Love. Vainglory is the driving force of his character. When he is presented with an historic opportunity of college students on the streets of Tehran and other cities, fighting storm troopers with their bodies and moral force alone, he totally flubs the chance. Obama doesn't stand for anything.


When Martin Luther King was risking his life taking a dangerous moral stand in the South, a lot of people kept their heads down. Since the Civil Rights revolution those people have suddenly discovered their outrage at the injustices of Jim Crow, and some of them are making a good living off them. Question: Would Barack Obama have been marching with Dr. King during the hard days when it looked like he would lose? Would Obama have chosen the hard work and danger for the greater good? Would Obama have gone to jail and risked Bull Connor's dogs and axe handles to assert basic human rghts in the segregated South in the 1950s? Or would he be nowhere to be found?

The answer seems all too clear.

[Teresa]

Obama to Iran: Let Them Eat Ice Cream
by  Ann Coulter
06/24/2009


On Iran, President Obama is worse than Hamlet. He's Colin Powell, waiting to see who wins before picking a side.

Last week, massive protests roiled Iran in response to an apparently fraudulent presidential election, in which nutcase Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner within two hours of the polls closing. (ACORN must be involved.)

Obama responded by boldly declaring that the difference between the loon Ahmadinejad and his reformist challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, "may not be as great as advertised."


Maybe the thousands of dissenters risking their lives protesting on the streets of Tehran are doing so because they liked Mousavi's answer to the "boxers or briefs" question better than Ahmadinejad's.

Then, in a manly rebuke to the cheating mullahs, Obama said: "You've seen in Iran some initial reaction from the supreme leader" -- peace be upon him -- "that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Did FDR give speeches referring to Adolf Hilter as "Herr Fuhrer"? What's with Obama?

Even the French condemned the Iranian government's "brutal" reaction to the protesters -- and the French have tanks with one speed in forward and five speeds in reverse.

You might be a scaredy-cat if ... the president of France is talking tougher than you are.

More than a week ago, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The ruling power claims to have won the elections ... if that were true, we must ask why they find it necessary to imprison their opponents and repress them with such violence."

But liberals rushed to assure us that Obama's weak-kneed response to the Iranian uprising and the consequent brutal crackdown was a brilliant foreign policy move. (They also proclaimed his admission that he still smokes "lion-hearted" and "statesmanlike.")

As our own Supreme Leader B. Hussein Obama (peace be upon him) explained, "It's not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling."

You see, if the president of the United States condemned election fraud in Iran, much less put in a kind word for the presidential candidate who is not crazy, it would somehow crush the spirit of the protesters when they discovered, to their horror, that the Great Satan was on their side. (It also wouldn't do much for Al Franken in Minnesota.)

Liberals hate America, so they assume everyone else does, too.

So when a beautiful Iranian woman, Neda Agha Soltan, was shot dead in the streets of Iran during a protest on Saturday and a video of her death ricocheted around the World Wide Web, Obama valiantly responded by ... going out for an ice cream cone. (Masterful!)

Commenting on a woman's cold-blooded murder in the streets of Tehran, like the murder of babies, is evidently above Obama's "pay grade."

If it were true that a U.S. president should stay neutral between freedom-loving Iranian students and their oppressors, then why is Obama speaking in support of the protesters now? Are liberals no longer worried about the parade of horribles they claimed would ensue if the U.S. president condemned the mullahs?

Obama's tough talk this week proves that his gentle words last week about Ahmadinejad and Iran's "supreme leader" (peace be upon him) constituted, at best, spinelessness and, at worst, an endorsement of the fraud.

Moreover, if the better part of valor is for America to stand neutral between freedom and Islamic oppression, why are liberals trying to credit Obama's ridiculous Cairo speech for emboldening the Iranian protesters?

The only reason that bald contradiction doesn't smack you in the face is that it is utterly preposterous that Obama's Cairo speech accomplished anything -- anything worthwhile, that is. Not even the people who say that believe it.

The only reaction to Obama's Cairo speech in the Middle East is that the mullahs probably sighed in relief upon discovering that the U.S. president is a coward and an imbecile.

Two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was exulting over the "free and fair" national election in Lebanon, in which the voters threw out Hezbollah and voted in the "U.S.-supported coalition." (Apparently support from America is not deemed the vote-killer in Lebanon that it allegedly is in Iran.)

To justify his Times-expensed airfare to Beirut, Friedman added some local color, noting that "more than one Lebanese whispered to me: Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 ... this free election would not have happened."

That's what Lebanese voters said.

But Friedman also placed a phone call to a guy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- which he didn't have to go to Lebanon for -- to get a quote supporting the ludicrous proposition that Obama's Cairo speech was responsible for the favorable election results in Lebanon.

"And then here came this man (Obama)," Mr. Carnegie Fund said, "who came to them with respect, speaking these deep values about their identity and dignity and economic progress and education, and this person indicated that this little prison that people are living in here was not the whole world. That change was possible."

I think the fact that their Muslim brethren are now living in freedom in a democratic Iraq might have made the point that "change was possible" and "this little prison" is "not the whole world" somewhat more forcefully than a speech apologizing for Westerners who dislike the hijab.

Obama -- and America -- are still living off President Bush's successes in the war on terrorism. For the country's sake, may those successes outlast Obama's attempt to dismantle them