What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (45 page)

Several months later, Obama attended the G-20 meeting in France and was caught by a hot microphone denigrating Netanyahu to French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy said, “I cannot bear Netanyahu. He’s a liar,” to which Obama replied, “You’re fed up with him? I’ve got to deal with him every day!” Sarkozy subsequently apologized to Netanyahu. Obama did not.

Obama made it clear that under his leadership, America was through kissing Israeli butt. He didn’t demand meaningful concessions from the Palestinians in terms of demanding that they recognize Israel’s right to exist, quit terrorism, give up the so-called right of return, which would dilute the Jewish state out of existence, and negotiate in good faith over the final status of Jerusalem. Obama paid sporadic lip service to those things, but he never pushed the Palestinians to carry them out. The burden was always placed on the Israelis to negotiate more, self-reflect more, give up more.

Perhaps this is why, in September 2011, the Palestinians ignored Obama’s entreaties to refrain from seeking statehood through the United Nations and did it anyway. They knew that under Obama, Israel would get the security guarantee of the United States but not much more, even as the United States was rushing to elevate its Islamist enemies and pressuring Israel not to defend itself against the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran. This is somewhat worse than getting your Churchill bust thrown back at you, but it’s reflective of the same anti-ally attitude.

But if you’re an enemy of the United States, belly right up to the bar! Let’s canoodle, Iran! Let’s nuzzle, Russia! How about an aperitif, North Korea? Take a load off and enjoy a state dinner, China! What up, Hugo Chávez!

You can’t treat allies like this and expect them to stay allies for long. But if the overarching Obama objective has been to weaken America’s place in the world in order to create a new world order in which the bad guys are elevated by our own hand, then he has succeeded. The actions of the president have clearly shown that he’s more comfortable consorting with our enemies than bunking with our friends.

In July 2010, President Obama sat down with the
Washington Post
investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who was writing a book about Obama’s national security and foreign policies. During their talk and as quoted in
Obama’s Wars
, the president uttered four incredibly revealing things.

Woodward reported that Obama and his team were bombarded by warnings of terrorist attacks on the homeland and were scrambling to find ways to prevent them. When asked by Woodward about it, Obama replied, “We can absorb a terror attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever … we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

Consider his language: “we can absorb a terror attack.” It’s cold, sterile, robotic. It’s Michael Dukakis’s answer when he was asked what he’d do if his wife were raped and murdered. “We can absorb it.” It’s detached and programmatic. It’s not emotional and raw and real, which is what we would expect a president’s response to be in the post-9/11 era. Just like his September 19, 2001, article, Obama’s answer to Woodward was foreign, alien, inhuman. What if Obama had used that phrase after Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot? He wouldn’t have dared. And yet he can very calmly rationalize something worse happening to all of the American people.

The second revealing moment came in an October 26, 2009, conversation between Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the possible troop surge in Afghanistan. “This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” Obama said, according to Woodward. “I’m not doing ten years. I’m not doing long-term nation building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.”

Suddenly the Keynesian freak was concerned about spending $1 trillion. Also note his Big Daddy tone with Gates and Clinton: you will do this because I said so! Obama was obsessed with pulling all of our troops out of Iraq and as many as logistically possible out of Afghanistan for three reasons: (a) he doesn’t believe that the United States should be projecting its power around the world; (b) to launch meaningful U.S. military retrenchment; and (c) to redirect that $1 trillion (and more) into his domestic adventure. Again, the weakening of the military is a critical part of that project, so it’s a kook two-fer.

In his interview with Woodward, Obama made a third telling comment. When asked about the possibility of nuclear terror in the United States, Obama called it “a potential game changer.” He continued, “When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one where you can’t afford any mistakes.”

If a nuclear attack on the homeland by Islamic terrorists is the highest worry on his list, then why is he so coldly academic about it? Perhaps because he’s a cold academic. He stated that we “could absorb” a terror attack and, in reference to a nuclear attack in particular, referred to it as a
“potential
game changer.” To Obama, a mushroom cloud over Manhattan is just a
“potential
game changer.” Maybe an
actual
game changer, maybe not. Depends on the size of the nuke or if it were detonated by Iran or al-Qaeda or a terrorist lone wolf or how many fallout victims there were or whether Obama had intended to take Michelle on a date night in New York that day and the damn radiation ruined their plans. No American president should ever be referring to a nuclear terror attack on U.S. soil as a
“potential
game changer,” as if he’d have to have Valerie Jarrett run a focus group first to figure out how to respond. It would be a true game changer of such magnitude that the future of the world would be put on a completely different trajectory.

The fourth revealing Obama moment: after he informed the military brass of his decision to ignore their request for 40,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and go with 30,000 in just a brief escalation, the commanders continued to push for more troops. Obama snapped, “Why do we keep having these meetings?”

Woodward then quotes Obama as scolding the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, Gates, and Clinton: “In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, ‘We’re doing fine, Mr. President, but we’d be better if we just do more.’ We’re not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] … unless we’re talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011.”

This was Obama as Super Big Daddy. It was his way or the highway, the nation’s security be damned. According to Woodward, General David Petraeus, who had engineered the successful surge in Iraq, interpreted Obama’s decision as a personal repudiation. Petraeus had argued for continuing a “protect the Afghan people” counterinsurgency approach, but Obama insisted on a far narrower and shorter-term plan because he wanted out of there. And Obama’s own “responsibility to protect” approach had yet to kick in; it was good enough for the Libyans but not, apparently, for the Afghanis.

These four exchanges tell us a few things about the commander in chief. They tell us that to him, the American people are a blob he’s forced to protect instead of millions of individuals with lives, families, and beating hearts. They tell us that “no drama Obama” has drama happening all around him, much of it self-created. They tell us that he’s a petty man who’s a terrible manager and a reckless commander of the armed forces. And they tell us that he’s a stone cold kook.

American superpower exists to keep the world’s most malevolent forces at bay, but when we’re considered a pushover, the bad guys act up and it never ends well. The inevitable result will be a collapse of order and violent chaos, in which the forces of evil march forward—unless they are stopped by force applied by the good guys. But when the world’s biggest and most powerful good guy checks out, it’s curtains for peace and stability.

In Obama’s hands, American decline isn’t just a few statistics on a piece of paper. It’s a steep, irreversible, and very real plummet to weakness and irrelevance—and Obama is taking us there fast with his own foot on the $4-per-gallon gas.

By turning us from America the Exceptional into America the Ho-Hum, Obama has ushered us into the years of living dangerously.

DOROTHY:
Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?

GLINDA:
You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.

DOROTHY:
I have?

SCARECROW:
Then why didn’t you tell her before?

GLINDA:
Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

—The Wizard of Oz

“You are an American, yes?” The burly New York City cabdriver looked at me through the rearview mirror as he asked the question, his voice saturated with a heavy Eastern European accent.

“Yes, I am,” I replied.

“Tell me: what are you doing?”

About a year into Barack Obama’s presidency, I climbed into this man’s cab for a short trip across Manhattan. Engaging city taxi drivers can go one of two ways: it can either be an enjoyable, interesting experience or it can end in a torrent of profanity in multiple languages. This particular cabdriver was friendly and gregarious, particularly when I asked him about the source of his accent.

“The Bronx,” he replied. “Oh, you mean where I am
from
?” He paused for a moment and then said, “I was born in Bulgaria. But I am an
American
.” And then this big, strapping man grew emotional as he told me his story: “I am an American by choice. And you’ll forgive me, but I think those of us who are Americans by choice rather than by birth have a different view. Many Americans, you do not appreciate your freedom. You have always had it. You don’t know anything else. I have lived under communism. I have been beaten and put in jail. I have heard the knock of the secret police in the middle of the night. I have had neighbors disappear. I have had the government open my mail and listen in to my phone. I have gone days eating only potatoes because the store shelves were bare. There was no medicine, no good doctors.”

He told me that his family fled Bulgaria to escape the tyranny and brutality of Communist rule and came to the United States to seek the very promise of America: freedom. That’s when he asked me, “Tell me: what are you doing? Why are you letting America be destroyed?”

His voice quaked with despair and frustration as he railed against what he called “enslaving debt,” “communist medicine,” and “a jackboot government.” As he stopped at my destination, this refugee from communist hell turned around, threw his arm over the seat, and looked directly at me. “Please don’t let this happen to America. It’s creeping in here, and it’s creeping in fast. We came to America to get
away
from socialism. If it comes here, where will we go? Where will
any
of us go? There’s no other hope anywhere else. You’re letting your freedoms be taken from you, and you don’t even see it. Or you see it but you don’t care, which is the worst kind of treason.”

Treason
. The word stung me. By allowing the insidious tyranny of the ever-growing state, were we actively betraying our country? Were we all essentially traitors to America for permitting our own government to seize our freedoms and move us into debilitating dependency with our own lazy acquiescence? Were we complicit in our own destruction? Were we guilty of citizen malpractice?

That grizzled New York City cabdriver pointed to an enduring truth about America: that it is still seen by billions of people around the world as—in Abraham Lincoln’s words—“the last best hope of earth.” But he also warned that the country was in grave danger of slipping beneath the waves, pulling that last best hope of humanity into the perpetual darkness of state domination, economic collectivism, and human misery. Would we allow our current government to cripple us and atrophy American power? Or would we heed the words of Thomas Paine: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect their country from its government.”

America. The name itself is lyrical, carrying dulcet notes of promise and optimism. America the place is spectacular. But America the
idea
is what has animated a way of life based not on government coercion but on the freedom of the individual, limited and constrained government, economic opportunity, personal generosity, tolerance and responsibility, community, faith, and human dignity. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers crafted the philosophy first and then built a nation—a nation that kindled blazing liberty, endless aspiration, and fierce independence. No other country on earth had ever tried such an enterprise. They knew the exceptional nature of the system they were bequeathing as well as its fragility. On the final day of deliberation at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin descended the steps of Independence Hall. A woman approached him to ask what kind of government they had given us. “A Republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

That was, perhaps, the first warning that the American system would require constant care if it were to remain exceptional. The Founders admonished the American people to remain vigilant because threats to liberty come in many forms. They may appear as international threats or as “emergency” responses to domestic crises. They may appear as seemingly innocuous appeals for “modernizing” or “updating” the Constitution. They may come in the polished package of a professed “savior,” or as a philosophy that promises to deliver a “more perfect union.” All threats to liberty must be turned back before they have the chance to take root and metastasize. As Patrick Henry put it, “Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else! Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.”