Obama Administration in Tatters

Tea Party protest, 2009

• Obama was supposed to bring peace between Muslims and U.S. His administration is hunkered down for a long siege of Arab unrest as Muslims riot against Obama and America, in Europe as well as North Africa. The New York Times reports: After days of anti-American violence across the Muslim world, the White House is girding itself for an extended period of turmoil that will test the security of American diplomatic missions and President Obama’s ability to shape the forces of change in the Middle East.

            More like his inability to shape positive change in the Arab world, we say. Sudan won’t allow Obama to send Marines in to bolster our embassy’s security.

• Obama's friendly left-stream media at CNN report: Three days before the deadly assault on the United States consulate in Libya, a local security official says he met with American diplomats in the city and warned them about deteriorating security.
• Haaretz, a media outlet in Jerusalem, reports: Senior figures in Jerusalem claimed that Washington was burying its head in the sand and ignoring the increasing radicalization in states such as Tunisia and Egypt. The Obama administration, which since the beginning of the Arab Spring has aided, directly or indirectly, the forces that brought down the dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Lybia, now finds itself in a position of helplessness. The attack on the consulate in Benghazi, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed, and the storming of the U.S. embassies in Tunis, Sanaa and Cairo, proved the great hostility to the United States and the unwillingness of these country's new leaders to challenge domestic public opinion.
• Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan said today: “American foreign policy needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose,” Mr. Ryan said early on in his speech. “That is how we keep problems abroad from becoming crises. That is what keeps the peace.”CNBC: Ratings firm Egan-Jones cut its credit rating on the U.S. government to "AA-" from "AA," citing its opinion that quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve would hurt the U.S. economy and the country's credit quality.
• Economist Larry Kudlow reports: This week, current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke embarked on an absolute reversal of Volcker’s policy. He is launching a monumental effort to buy bonds and inject new money into the economy in order to reignite economic growth and job creation. It’s like history is repeating itself, but in reverse. Gold is soaring, the dollar is falling. Something’s wrong with this picture. Bernanke’s QE3 is an unlimited Fed effort to buy mortgage bonds with new cash. The plan — which starts immediately — envisions $40 billion of bond purchases and money-creation per month, coming to $480 billion over the next year. And there are no limits to these purchases. These operations are open-ended. This could last for years — maybe in perpetuity — until job creation shoots way up and unemployment comes way down. Nothing like this has ever been used by our nation’s central bank. The Fed’s balance sheet, which has ballooned from around $800 billion to $2.5 trillion under Bernanke, will go to $3 trillion, or $4 trillion, or who knows how high. But here’s the rub: More money doesn’t necessarily mean more growth. More Fed money won’t increase after-tax rewards for risk, entrepreneurship, business hiring, and hard work. Keeping more of what you earn after-tax is the true spark of economic growth. Not the Fed.
• Poverty has risem 15 percent among African Americans since Obama became president.
• Charles Krauthammer, writing for National Review, exposes the failure of Obama on the Iranian crisis: What is incoherent is President Obama’s position. He declares the Iranian program intolerable — “I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” — yet stands by as Iran rapidly approaches nuclearization. A policy so incoherent, so knowingly and obviously contradictory, is a declaration of weakness and passivity. And this, as Anthony Cordesman, James Phillips, and others have argued, can increase the chance of war. It creates, writes Cordesman, “the same conditions that helped trigger World War II — years of negotiations and threats, where the threats failed to be taken seriously until war became all too real.” This has precipitated the current U.S.-Israeli crisis, sharpened by the president’s rebuff of the Israeli prime minister’s request for a meeting during his upcoming U.S. visit. Ominous new developments; no Obama response. Alarm bells going off everywhere; Obama plays deaf.
• Former Senator Rick Santorum described Obama’s misguided message to the Middle East: "If you are a friend of the United   States, you are on your own. If you are an enemy of the United States -- let's talk."
• Quin Hillyer writes on The American Spectator: Another downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. More bad economic news on other fronts. Inflation growing. Oil and gasoline prices rising. And our embassies burning all over creation. By any rational standard, this is one of the worst weeks any president has ever had. If this were GW Bush, the media would be frothing at the mouth, asking if he should resign in disgrace.  Barack Obama is a menace to American society.