I’m going to be the curmudgeon here, Shmuel. I want to convince you why all of this fawning over the gangster regime in Damascus is awful, and in particular why it’s bad that so many people who are close to Obama are so dedicated to it. You conclude:
Like it or not, this is (I suspect) Obama’s bedrock position regarding talks with Syria. The rest — Kurtzer, visits, statements, shocks, and dismays — is all mere detail.
The problem with Obama and Syria, or Obama and (insert any number of countries or regions) is that Obama doesn’t in fact have a bedrock position, because he doesn’t know much about the region and actually isn’t that interested in it. This is basically okay. The President cannot, after all, be a specialist on every topic. But the President does need to be able to operate from a set of premises about how regimes such as the one in Damascus work. Obama, I think, clearly is not in possession of such premises. Bashar al-Assad is a blank slate to him.
So he relies inordinately on mainstream liberal advisers, such as Ross and Kurtzer, for wisdom. And what do they say? They say largely the same thing–that there’s no harm in talking. Ross was a peace process envoy for both Bush I and Clinton, and spent a decade sitting with the Syrians in locales around the world trying to negotiate peace deals, all to no avail–and now says innocently that talks are worth exploring, never mind the number of U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq by Syrian-sponsored insurgents, or the number of American allies in Lebanon and Israel killed by Syrian cutouts.
When Assad sees that his involvement in the slaughter of American soldiers and allies is met by the United States with polite diplomatic gestures, he correctly understands that America is unwilling to make him pay for his behavior in even the mildest fashion. I doubt that Obama has ever thought much about any of this. Kurtzer and Ross surely have. And that’s why their influence should be cause for concern.
One small portent of things to come. The Treasury auction today saw interest rates climb. This bill will, among other bad things, cause a climb in interest rates as they have to sell those t-bills. That should help the recovery a lot.
Obama happened to be as bad as I was afraid and then some.
Well, I don’t whether to laugh or cry that it took less than 3 weeks of Obama in office to see his true colors. He’s every bit as bad and in over his head as most rational people who actually LOOKED at his track record said he’d be.
God you people are mouth breathing morons. It’s not just Barack Obama saying there’s an economic crisis happening. It’s him and… gosh… everyone else in the world. UNLIKE Bush threatening us with the detonation of Saddam’s inexistent WMDs in an American city to spur the Iraq war. Do you really not see a difference?
“If Obama thought this was so critical and so right then it would have passed.”
Clearly you are a clueless simpleton, Jay from Texas. It DID pass the house. Now it’s going to pass in the Senate. Then they will go to a conference committee to match up the two bills. It’s called the legislative process. It’s as if you have never heard of this thing we have in America called Congress.
The Dems realize you need to be distracted from reality so they can pass this porcine pork-o-rama, Jimmy Dean, Jones Farm, Lord of the Flies, bacon bacon bacon fest, uhhhh, how about some perky porn!
Qu’est-ce que c’est que “nous”, baisegueule?
Franglo, the headline is “Obama warns of economic catastrophe if stimulus bill is not passed.” You either didn’t understand it or you think President Obama is just as mouth-breathingly moronic as whoever it was you were insulting. By your apparent interpretation, President Obama is warning of something that’s already happening. Which he obviously wasn’t. He was warning of an “economic catastrophe” above and beyond the economic crisis that… gosh… everyone in the world knows about. Those who think the stimulus bill is unnecessary have just as legitimate an argument as those (like you) who think Bush’s security measures were unnecessary. (I’m certainly not smart enough to know, but I would think the arguments against the efficacy of stimulating the economy (which the bill does very little of anyway) are much more legitimate than your argument that there was and is no realistic terrorist threat)
Franglo may be certain that the bill will pass. President Obama apparently is less sure – otherwise he would not have to sound the alarm.
Obama is trying to stampede the Congress because he knows that most of the stuffing of this piece of sausage would never be passed into law on their own merits. He’s yelling “FIRE” in the theatre. At this rate, he will have an 80 year catastrophe on his hand instead of a recession.
Maybe we’re past the point where one individual can wrap his head around the U.S. government. Or even 100 senators and 435 representatives and their legions of staffers:
” According to a recent study, not only is the number of federal civil servants on the rise, but so are the numbers of employees working for government-funded contractors and for organizations that receive government grants.
Roll all of those together — and mix in the numbers of postal workers and military personnel on the federal payroll — and the “true size” of the federal government stands at 14.6 million employees, said Paul C. Light, the study’s author and a government professor at New York University.” This is from a WaPo article in 2006.
Obama and the congress don’t know as much about how the post office works as an ordinary mail carrier. They know less about the Dept. of the Interior than a forest fire fighter. They don’t understand Health and Human Services any better than a single mother. Amtrak is part of their responsibility but none of them could schedule or operate a train. The whole thing is just too huge and complex for people whose primary concern is being re-elected.