"Our president's greatest weakness: He needs adulation. He's hooked on it. The crowds and clapping and cameras are O's cocaine (these days)."
PRESIDENT'S HUGS FOR THUGS
from The New York Post
by Ralph Peters
April 21, 2009
Livin' La Vida Loca Video
MY president went to Trin idad and Tobago, and all I got was this lousy Che Guevara T-shirt.
At a Caribbean resort, Obama grinned through a semi-erotic encounter with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, then failed to answer a "strategic rape" charge lodged against America by ex-Sandinista Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (who knows plenty about rape).
Ignoring America's allies in favor of photo ops with anti-American leftists, such as Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Chavez, Obama blamed the United States for Latin America's problems.
Whoa! Plenty of US policies toward Latin America have been misguided and myopic. But the primary causes of political, economic and social failure from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego have been homemade.
Until Latin American states accept responsibility for what generations of corrupt, oppressive leaders did to their own countries, they won't progress beyond their self-destructive cultures of blame.
It's easy to chant, "Yanquis, go home!" Well, the Yankees went home. And only such countries as Chile, Colombia and, increasingly, Brazil, which have taken responsibility for their own futures, are making progress.
Obama was exactly right on one point: Our relations with Latin America must be a partnership in which all are treated as equals, based upon mutual respect.
But how do the lurid, screwball attacks on us by the likes of Chavez, Ortega or Bolivia's Evo Morales -- a racist demagogue -- count as examples of mutual respect? Doesn't our country deserve some slight defense from our president?
Obama needs to get up off his knees. Foreign leaders have already pegged him as the wimpiest metrosexual this side of the men's grooming-products counter at Barney's.
The egomaniacal Hugo Chavez drones on for hours about his "Bolivarian Revolution." But Bolivar, brave and peerless, stood for the rule of law above all else. A healthy constitution was his first prescription for freedom. Chavez sees the law as an obstacle to be smashed.
Grinning from ear to ear, our president embraced a man who persecutes, jails and, yes, terrorizes Venezuela's last democratically elected officials as he runs a once-vibrant economy into the ground. (Will we soon send aid to Caracas to compensate for the drop in the price of oil?)
Obama should be supporting those who respect the rule of law and the outcome of contested elections, the leaders of such diverse political systems as those of Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Colombia. Instead, he lent his prestige to our declared enemies -- thugs who are doing great harm to their own people.
What we saw on display wasn't just the horrifying naivete the Obama administration shows throughout its foreign policy, but something even more worrisome: our president's greatest weakness.
He needs adulation. He's hooked on it. The crowds and clapping and cameras are O's cocaine (these days).
But to what end? Is it worth humiliating our country for a pat on the back and a fist bump from Hugo Chavez? When the ovations end, as they ultimately will, what will be left for the country our self-adoring president was elected to lead?
Whose president is he?
Ralph Peters is Fox News' strategic analyst and the author of "Looking for Trouble."
Click to read the rest of the article and comments
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment