You have to strain to find the Washington Post‘s editors acknowledging that Obama’s Honduras policy has been a bust.
Elliott Abrams on the human-rights consequences of raising “multilateralism” to the end-all and be-all of American foreign policy: “Multilateral diplomacy means small talk with torturers, tea with dictators, negotiations with regimes that survive through sheer brutal repression — and it means putting such unpleasant facts aside to gather UN votes and seek consensus.”
David Ignatius has figured out what scares Democrats: “If the Fed’s projections are right, the public is going to be very angry next year — at big business and at the elected officials who have spent trillions of dollars without putting the country fully back to work.” Translation: they mortgaged our future economic security and growth for nothing.
Clarence Page is scared about the gap in enthusiasm, which shows that in 2010, “81 percent of self-described Republicans say they are certain or likely to vote, compared to 65 percent of independent voters and only 56 percent of Democrats.”
Charles Krauthammer keeps getting hung up on that whole Constitution thing: “I think what’s interesting about Obama is he is going to be at the U.N. [conference in Copenhagen] to announce the [new] policy about climate change on the basis of — nothing. He is going to be proposing what the House has passed — that he knows is not going to pass in the Senate. And we are actually a constitutional democracy where the president can’t announce a policy unilaterally. It actually has to pass the two houses of the Congress, and our allies abroad know that, and they’re going to look at this announcement he is going to make and think it … extremely strange.”
Apparently Americans don’t like panels of experts telling them what to do about health care: “A federal medical panel’s recommendation that women can now wait until age 50 to get a routine mammogram instead of age 40 is stirring up strong debate. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 81% of adults disagree with the panel’s recommendation. Just nine percent (8%) agree with the new guideline, and another nine percent (9%) are not sure.”
We certainly have seen lots of these already: “It’s one of the oldest tricks in the presidential playbook: when you want to focus attention on an issue, hold a meeting and call it a ‘summit.'” But if you really don’t have a plan to address unemployment and your agenda items are anti–job growth (e.g., raising taxes on small businesses), is it such a good idea to hold a summit?
The New York Times pans Obama’s Middle East approach: “Nine months later, the president’s promising peace initiative has unraveled. The Israelis have refused to stop all building. The Palestinians say that they won’t talk to the Israelis until they do, and President Mahmoud Abbas is so despondent he has threatened to quit. Arab states are refusing to do anything. Mr. Obama’s own credibility is so diminished (his approval rating in Israel is 4 percent) that serious negotiations may be farther off than ever.” And to boot, even the Times can see that George Mitchell and Rahm Emanuel bear responsibility for the debacle. So will either be canned?
