The president parties while the world burns
Editorial
The Washington Times
3/17/2011
If the world is in crisis, you wouldn’t know it by watching President Obama’s spring break. Between golf, basketball and the president’s upcoming trip to Rio de Janeiro, the White House is projecting a disinterested aura of business as usual. For this administration, “tuned-out” is the new normal.
The Mideast crisis is continuing, and Hillary Rodham Clinton has been the one taking the 3 a.m. phone calls. The secretary of state has been dealing with political reform in Egypt, a military crackdown in Bahrain and the continuing civil war in Libya. However, she is hampered by a chief executive who can’t make up his mind which course of action would best secure his place in history. It’s no wonder she took the opportunity to tell CNN she had no interest in continuing in the job in a theoretical Obama second term.
For the president’s part, he did manage to squeeze in a phone call to the kings of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to express his “deep concern over the violence in Bahrain” and stress “the importance of a political process as the only way to peacefully address the legitimate grievances of Bahrainis.” After this exercise in talking-point leadership, Bahrain’s crackdown continued apace. Mr. Obama’s views simply don’t matter to a world that views him as weak.
The news from Japan grows direr as the nuclear crisis intensifies. The Obama administration has shown considerably less interest in responding to this disaster – actually three disasters: earthquake, tsunami and potential nuclear meltdown – than it did to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This is strange given the possibility for a monumental nuclear catastrophe and destabilizing the world’s third-largest economy, which also happens to be one of America’s best friends…
The editorial continues at The Washington Times.
