Sunday, January 27, 2013

Richard Fernandez has an interesting article over at the Belmont Club about the brittle incompetence of the Obama administration.  It should be read in it's entirety.

A snippet:


   "Hackers have taken over the website of the sentencing commission of the Department of Justice and gleefully distributed confidential material found on it. Now they have posted it to servers and will release the encryption keys unless the administration yields to its demands.
Iran, a third rate power,  contemptuously assuming a tone that once only America could use, has just announced it “would consider any attack on Syria an attack on itself”. It is daring Washington to try to overthrow Syria, daring Obama to take it on almost as if it suspects he will never attempt it.
North Korea, not content with threatening to target the US with its ballistic missiles, is now threatening South Korea. If young Kim fears Obama he is not showing it.
The US government has gone months without catching a single individual linked to the attack on its North African diplomatic installations.  Hillary Clinton lamented that she could not even fire the State Department employees whose incompetence allowed the attacks to happen. The French have been left to largely fend for themselves in Mali, the Western alliance strangely absent from the fray. Algeria did not even bother to consult with the administration when it decided to launch an counterattack al Qaeda at a gas plant that cost dozens of Western lives. They ignored Washington — the once indispensable capital — probably because they could.
President Obama is anxious to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan, eager to end campaign he once called the war of necessity whether victorious or not. Indeed the word “victory” has been expunged from his lexicon. His aides have already hinted that the war against al-Qaeda is now essentially over whoever won. Lee Smith has summarized the situation cogently as follows: “the Obama administration has left [a vacuum] in the region, from Libya to Syria”.
It is a vacuum everywhere. The US government is being treated like a toothless, contemptible thing. It is easy to see why. The US government has been bankrupt for a long time. Obama’s home state of Illinois has had its credit rating trashed to the worst in the country.
But it is not just the regular screwups. What is different is that the foes are openly out in the field without apparent fear.Even judicial conservatives are finding the nerve to take him on. “The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today invalidated one of President Obama’s most despotic overreaches to date: his attempt to use the Constitution’s recess appointment power to make appointments despite the absence of a recess.”
All across the board a wide variety of people are beginning to suspect something similar to what Halsey found in 1944. That under the bombast and veneer of invincibility the Obama administration is a shambling, incompetent, hollow shell. It has self-admittedly lost control of its borders; it is unable to pass a budget and now for all the world to see it cannot even protect its own diplomatic missions."

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