For a long time I assumed Obama was a communist. How else to explain his support for the Honduran Chavista Manuel Zelaya? Ideological sympathy on Obama’s part seemed the simplest explanation.
However, documents from WikiLeaks suggest an even worse possibility, namely that the whole sorry affair was driven by incompetence at a level that’s astonishing even by the low standards of the Obama administration. Were they really so eager to appease Chavez? That’s crazy even if Obama is personally sympathetic to Chavez. It was easily predictable that Chavez would pocket any concessions and go for more and that’s what happened. And now an emboldened Chavez appears to have invited Iran to install ballistic missiles in Venezuela, and we do nothing. We are cruising toward another Cuban Missile Crisis but with weaker leadership on our side, adversaries who are less stable than the Soviets were, and erstwhile allies scared off by our fecklessness. How much trouble might have been prevented if we had taken a firm line in support of the elected Honduran government and warned Chavez to stay out?
If we’re lucky Obama will be out of office before the inevitable crisis occurs.
UPDATE: Jed Babbin on The Coming Venezuela Missile Crisis:
That crisis will consume much international attention next year, though a more important spread of Middle Eastern conflict to the Americas – the partnership between Iran and Venezuela – will likely be ignored until it is too late to resolve by any means short of war.
Is this the Onion or something? Some parody of totally silly delusional types? If so, then it is pretty good – I tend not to be a fan of such slap-sticky humor, but I recognize that that is how the genre works.
But I gotta say – there are so many real delusional types out there who make clowns of themselves, that seeing a parody of them is somehow more tiring than amusing.
“If we’re lucky Obama will be out of office before the inevitable crisis occurs.”
Unfortunately, we are already there.
There is a terrorist war going in Mexico literally a stones throw from major American cities, that is far bloodier and more dangerous than Afghanistan. Yet, the Administration is inert in the face of it.
Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Hounduas ”” all are ignored.
BO spends his time beating on our allies to surrender to our enemies.
It’s all about right hemispheric dysfunction. Under Obama, the U.S. is reduced to leftist, unnuanced literalness and uncontexualized “facts.”
To feel sorrier for Progressive America or Latin America is the question at hand, and one that surely will be answered at some unfortunate point post this (lack of) U.S. Presidency.
So it is delusional to note the incompetency diplayed in Wikileaks? Or are we just ignoring this response with no actual content?
I fear we are well into a period of political and economic adventurism around the world which recalls the upheavals of the 1930’s.
Misguided government policies which continuously deepen negative trends and blunt positive ones; crackpot dictators claiming various flavors of imaginary mandates from heaven, or history; a confused and frightened populace seeking the reassurance of strong leaders; proponents of authoritarian/totalitarian systems full of confidence and aggressiveness, while the alleged leaders of democratic systems cringe in confusion and self-doubt; a spectrum of irrational racial/religious/economic theories being used to justify increased state power and control over the lives of ordinary people.
We have just finished one of the most turbulent and deadly centuries in all of human history. All over the globe, disastrous experiments with variations on the collectivist schematic resulted in wars, famines, purges, pogroms of an unimaginable magnitude, and death on a scale that would leave Tamerlane, or any of the other great killers of history, green with envy.
I certainly do not wish to see my grandchildren living in some gruesome variation of “THX 1138” or “1984”, but I fear the current trends are leading that way.
It will require an enormous effort on the part of those who revere liberty to maintain and enlarge the precious gift we have been given.
As Lincoln once said of the Union, so it is with the world—a house divided against itself cannot stand, nor can civilization long endure half slave and half free.
It must become one or the other.