Barack Obama is the most dangerous lame duck ever to haunt the marshes of post-election defeat. He’s angry at the American people, testy with Democrats who blame him for their electoral losses, and more determined that ever to finish “transforming America” with the time he has left. Malevolent and experienced foreign leaders have no trouble taking the measure of this arrogant, desperate, incompetent man and rolling him like dough.
Obama’s new, secretly-negotiated “climate change deal” with China is so ridiculously horrible that it’s difficult to interpret as anything less than an attack on the American economy, an effort by the President to punish the voters who massacred his party in the midterms. Blowing the kneecaps off our weak “recovery” today, in exchange for a vague promise that China will think about reaching its carbon-emissions “peak” in 25 years or so, is particularly absurd in light of China’s track record of failing to keep any such promise that conflicts with its industrial ambitions. This is the country that started thinking about cutting back on smog only after it became difficult to see the rest of Beijing from the Politburo windows on a bad day. It would be a ridiculous arrangement even if “climate change” and “greenhouse gases” were real problems. Obama’s deal is worse than Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football again; it’s like Charlie Brown giving Lucy his life savings in exchange for another chance to kick the football ten years from now.
Of course, the deal only looks foolish if you assume Obama was in Beijing to represent the interests of the American people. He’s willing to spend any amount of our money on a “win” for himself – something that puts him on the front pages, gives his minions something to natter about next Sunday, rallies a few dispirited Democrat voters, and – to the extent he can abuse executive power to implement this nonsense – continues the transformation of America to a weaker economy, with a less mobile populace more dependent on government benevolence for the necessities of life. Energy is motion; energy is freedom. A low-energy nation is more… tractable to its Ruling Class.
Then you’ve got the mullahs of Tehran taking Obama to the nuclear cleaners, one of several malevolent forces in the Middle East sharp enough to ruthlessly exploit a fading President’s need to make some headline news as a highly-relevant maker of peace. The Washington Examiner notices that the Iranian nuclear deal just keeps getting worse:
Nearly a year into the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, it becomes more and more apparent that the American people are watching a bad deal unfold as it gets hatched in their name. Several new and alarming hints have emerged in just the last few days that should make everyone suspicious.
One of them was the incredible and extremely provocative decision by Iranian officials to tweet out — as negotiations proceeded — a nine-point plan for annihilating Israel and making all of its Jews “return to their home countries.” In the world of international relations, this sort of plan is typically referred to as “ethnic cleansing.”
Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Saturday that Iran actually stepped up its nuclear enrichment activities while supposedly under an interim agreement not to do so. A leaked report from the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran has “been feeding natural uranium gas into a single so-called IR-5 centrifuge at a research facility” this year. This act does not signify an ebb in that nation’s nuclear ambitions — quite the contrary — and is almost certainly a violation of Iran’s interim agreement with Washington. Even so, the Obama administration has brushed it off, pointing out that the Iranians stopped doing it right after they were caught at it.
“We raised that issue with Iran as soon as the [International Atomic Energy Agency] reported it,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “The Iranians have confirmed that they will not continue that activity as cited in the IAEA report, so it’s been resolved.” This is reminiscent of the husband who ends his affair right after his wife discovers it.
Meanwhile, Olli Heinonen, a Finnish former deputy chief of the IAEA, has charged that Iran might have as many as 5,000 modern IR-2 centrifuges for enriching uranium — five times what Iranian leaders have admitted they have.
Despite having promised cooperation with international nuclear monitors, Iran has repeatedly dragged its feet on giving inspectors access to important sites, and has refused to admit one of the IAEA’s inspectors, believed to be an American national. The IAEA, as Heinonen said in a conference call Tuesday, “is the only authority that can verify compliance.”
Iran knows it can get away with all this because Obama can’t possibly back down from a process that involved muscling the Israelis into holding their fire until Iran’s nuclear program couldn’t be stopped with air strikes… and then calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “chickens**t” because he let them get away with it. It would be a catastrophic domestic political loss for Obama to admit Mitt Romney was right about Iran, too, so he’ll double down on his bad bets no matter how many nine-point genocide plans the mullahs pump into their Twitter feed.
And let’s not even get started on how Vladimir Putin of Russia has used Obama as a chew toy, everywhere from Ukraine (where NATO just confirmed Russian armor is rolling) to Syria, where Putin heaved a haplessly babbling Secretary of State John Kerry off the world stage like a sack of dirty laundry during the “red line on chemical weapons” debacle, and now gets to watch Obama provide a de facto air force for the very same Russian client he once vowed to topple. It’s a fire sale on American interest, in rough neighborhoods around the world, and every villain will want to grab a few bargains while Obama’s still minding the store.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.