Hugh Hewitt
Washington Examiner
5/22/2011
If it had been a fight, they would have stopped it.
Friday’s showdown between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t close, and it wasn’t pretty — though Netanyahu didn’t want to leave any obvious marks. The end result was that our president is suddenly aware that Chicago rules don’t work on tough-minded leaders of countries surrounded by terrorists.
The battle between the warrior and the academic was bound to turn out this way. President Obama was a community organizer once. Netanyahu was commander of the Israeli Defense Forces’ elite special forces unit, Sayeret Matkal. Faculty meetings can get rough, but not as rough as the hostage rescue mission to free Sabena Flight 571.
So the president’s absurd declaration about 1967 borders is off the table. In fact, the table is gone. Israel can wait out the 20 months left to Obama’s presidency, or even 48 months if American voters insanely choose to experiment with epic incompetence at the top for another term. Israel isn’t going back to the Auschwitz borders, and only a naive and inexperienced academic would think that Thursday’s speech would do other than worsen prospects for a negotiated settlement.
Netanyahu’s take-down of the president should be on the TiVo of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Jon Huntsman (and, yes, Rick Perry if what I have been hearing is true). One of those men will be standing opposite the president in the debates of September and October of 2012, and Netanyahu showed exactly how to respond to the prolixities and pauses of the teleprompter-dependent president…
The article continues at the Washington Examiner.
