Obama The Sphinx

What a puzzle this man Obama can be.

While reading a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute last week, the President of the United States quotes the Declaration of Independance, but -- avoids? refuses? forgets? -- to include three seconds-worth of text... the image above captures the pose he wore as a visual ellipsis rather than admit that his fellow Americans hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed BY THEIR CREATOR with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.





Is there nothing to the timing of this long pause? Did he simply lose his place while reading from the teleprompter? Or is there something about that particular part of the quote that Obama finds... troubling?

[Hat Tip to Guy Benson]

Jerusalem Day

Today, May 12, is celebrated in Israel as the anniversary of the moment, in 1967, when the IDF captured the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanian army. At a time when the world is being made to witness the spectacle of Obama playing a game he doesn't likely much understand, attempting to impose his will on Jerusalem building permits, in a pretense to be making a peace he cannot make given the fundamentalist desires in play...

"and [Obama] urged that President Abbas do everything he can to prevent acts of incitement or delegitimization of Israel."

This is interesting and could be encouraging. Obama is asking Abbas to do something and that was the right thing to say. But here's the problem: as Abbas engages in incitement, the PA incites, and the PA doesn't interfere with incitement, will Obama say or do something?

After all, we know that if an Israeli construction crew turns over some shovels of dirt for a construction project in east Jerusalem, the United States will scream out protest. But if the PA names squares for terrorists, produces broadcasts delegitimizing Israel, secretly lets terrorists out of jail, and so on, there will not be a peep.

But let's consider what's going on meanwhile in the real world. Palestinian Media Watch reports that on the PA's own television station this week the program "We Are Returning," shows a map in which all of Israel is erased and covered with a Palestinian flag.

The program explains that Israeli Jews should go to places like the Ukraine and Ethiopia: "Please, I ask of you, return to your original homeland, so that I can return to my original homeland. This is my homeland; go back to your homeland!"

This kind of thing goes on in PA-controlled mosques, classrooms, media, and in speeches by PA or Fatah officials on a daily basis. The U.S. government virtually ignores it. There are no programs, articles, classes, sermons, and speeches in which PA officials and employees urge their people to live peacefully side by side with Israel and accept that country's existence permanently.

... it might be useful to remind ourselves that the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is founded in a living history that goes back millennia and will not likely be given up short of some genocidal extermination, an event the likelihood of which Obama must have little capacity to imagine (after all, he is not the Messiah) even as many frightened Jews cannot but think that this must be his ultimate agenda given the way he acts (because if it isn't, he is foolish choosing holy Jerusalem as his key leveraging point).

So, here's an article featured in today's Jerusalem Post: In honor of Jerusalem Day, MKs get to dig into past:

In 1999, the Wakf Islamic trust, which is in charge of the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, requested permission from the government to construct emergency exits for a series of underground mosques that had been opened inside the compound during the late 1990s. Upon receiving permission, Wakf officials constructed an entrance to the underground el-Marwani mosque in the area known as Solomon’s Stables. During the exits’ construction, the Wakf removed some 10,000 tons, or 400 truckloads, of ancient debris, which was then dumped in the nearby Kidron Valley and the Jerusalem municipal dump – some of it lost forever among the trash and other rubble.

Enter Gabriel Barkay of Bar-Ilan University, who applied for and eventually received a license from the Israel Antiquities Authority to sort through the discarded piles in search of antiquities.

Joined by his former student Zachi Zweig, Barkay now oversees the sorting. Using a process known as “wet sifting,” which is similar to panning for gold, the efforts have turned up a rich bounty of First and Second Temple-era artifacts.

On Tuesday afternoon, Knesset members got a firsthand look at the site’s operations and were even given a chance to do some sifting of their own, as they paid a visit to the tent where Barkay, Zweig and a slew of volunteers were conducting their work.

“This could have part of a vessel one of my ancestors carried olive oil in to make sacrifices in the Beit Hamikdash [the Temple],” said MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union), as he held up a shard of pottery he discovered in a pile of the discarded debris.

Other MKs echoed Ben-Ari’s observations, expressing the importance of the site’s offerings for “all Israelis, and all of the Jewish people.”

“This is a clear sign that Jerusalem is ours – that its beginnings belong to the Jewish people, and the basis of its holiness is rooted in Judaism,” said Kadima MK Otniel Schneller, who was also in attendance.

“And it’s not an issue of right-wing or left-wing, religious or secular,” he added. “Any Jew with even a basic knowledge of the Bible can relate to this place on a deep level. It is the tangible history of our people and a solid proof of our connection here that is impossible to argue with.”


Schneller said that for that reason, he would continue to work in the Knesset to halt the Wakf’s excavation activities on the Temple Mount, and hold them accountable for the damage done to antiquities at the holy site.

“We have to realize our sovereignty over the site,” he said.

Habayit Hayehudi MK Zevulun Orlev echoed Schneller’s comments, telling The Jerusalem Post, “Today I saw with my own eyes and felt with my own hands the very history of the Jewish people.”

He charged that “what the Wakf has done on the Temple Mount amounts to a horrible archeological crime and an affront to the deep connection Jews have with the Temple Mount.”

And this may be a good time to remember the famous "Letter to the World from Jerusalem" by Eliezer ben Yisrael (Stanley Goldfoot):

There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow, London and Paris were miasmal forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves – a humane moral code. Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightning. Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled themselves into the flames of their burning Temple rather than surrender; and when finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers and led away into captivity, swore that before they forgot Jerusalem, they would see their tongues cleave to their palates, their right arm wither.

For two pain filled millennia, while we were your unwelcome guests, we prayed daily to return to this city. Three times a day we petitioned the Almighty: “Gather us from the four corners of the world, bring us upright to our land; return in mercy to Jerusalem, Thy city, and dwell in it as Thou promised.”

On every Yom Kippur and Passover we fervently voiced the hope that next year would find us in Jerusalem. Your inquisitions, pogroms, expulsions, the ghettos into which you jammed us, your forced baptisms, your quota systems, your genteel anti-Semitism, and the final unspeakable horror, the Holocaust (and worse, your terrifying disinterest in it) – all these have not broken us. They may have sapped what little moral strength you still possessed, but they forged us into steel. Do you think that you can break us now after all we have been through? Do you really believe that after Dachau and Auschwitz we are frightened by your threats of blockades and sanctions? We have been to Hell and back – a Hell of your making. What more could you possibly have in your arsenal that could scare us?
[...]
I have watched this city bombarded twice by nations calling themselves civilized. In 1948, while you looked on apathetically, I saw women and children blown to smithereens, this after we had agreed to your request to internationalize the city. It was a deadly combination that did the job: British officers, Arab gunners and American-made cannon.

And then the savage sacking of the Old City: the willful slaughter, the wanton destruction of every synagogue and religious school; the desecration of Jewish cemeteries; the sale by a ghoulish government of tombstones for building materials for poultry runs, army camps – even latrines.

And you never said a word.

You never breathed the slightest protest when the Jordanians shut off the holiest of our holy places, the Western Wall, in violation of the pledges they had made after the war – a war they waged, incidentally, against a decision of the UN. Not a murmur came from you whenever the legionnaires in their spiked helmets casually opened fire upon our citizens from behind the walls.

Your hearts bled when Berlin came under siege. You rushed your airlift “to save the gallant Berliners.” But you did not send one ounce of food when Jews starved in besieged Jerusalem. You thundered against the wall which the East Germans ran through the middle of the German capital – but not one peep out of you about that other wall, the one that tore through the heart of Jerusalem.

And when the same thing happened 20 years later, and the Arabs unleashed a savage, unprovoked bombardment of the Holy City again, did any of you do anything? The only time you came to life was when the city was at last re-united. Then you wrung your hands and spoke loftily of “justice” and the need for the “Christian” quality of turning the other cheek.

American Hegemony

Former Democratic Presidential candidate Howard Dean remarked in 2003's New Hampshire primary, that America "should be planning for a time when it is not the world's greatest superpower : 'We have to take a different approach [to diplomacy]. We won't always have the strongest military.' "

I was remined of that famous quote the moment I watched this ominous scene:



For all his faults, and despite all the disagreements I have with his policies, I don't get any pleasure out of seeing this done to the President of the United States. It's a sight to sadden the soul. All America is being humiliated in this video, not just its President.


The genius of the American system of government is that it perceived the truth about the people it governs: that Man is a fallen being, with a capacity for evil, and certainly a propensity for error. The checks and balances, the struggle that is involved in getting anything done, is meant to test ideas and the mettle of the mind's they spring from. The notion that Man can become so wise as to not need advice, as to not benefit from the judgment that comes with scrutiny, must surely, almost by definition, be un-American.


Yet when balance and judgment and humility were most needed, where were they? How to keep faith in democracy if its implementation seems to weaken the very system it's meant to uphold? How to keep faith in America?

Why are these modern-day commissars not shaking the democratically-elected President's hand as he moves down this line-up? Are they not supposed to, according to the protocol of the event? If not, why doesn't President Obama know that? If they are deliberately snubbing him, why do they think they can get away with that? What faith do they have in America, and in Americans?


God help the Republic.

Friday Fare

As the gate swings shut on another week, we pause for some news before strolling into a pleasant weekend.

Unaware: Jonah Goldberg on President Obama's "shortcuts" comment from this week's press conference, about Churchill not using torture. "Churchill and Great Britain didn't quite take the firm stand against 'torture' that Obama and [Andrew] Sullivan suggest."

Unwelcome: Polish minister plans to extend law prohibiting the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.

"The proposal, which could see the faces of some of the leading lights of communist history such as Lenin and Trotsky removed from t-shirts and flags, reflects a Polish view on communism far different from the rose-tinted and romantic images often found in the West.
After experiencing 40 hard years of communism, as well as the horrors of Nazi occupation, few Poles have qualms equating under law the inequities of Nazism and communism.
"Communism was a terrible, murderous system that claimed millions of lives," said Professor Wojciech Roszkowski, a leading Polish historian and member of the European parliament.
"It was very similar to National Socialism, and there is no reason to treat those two systems, and their symbols, differently. Their glorification should be prohibited.' "

Uncivilized: Media reform, taliban-style. "Any media personnel engaged in ‘anti-Taliban’ and ‘pro-western’ agendas will face dire consequences, according to the militants. After bombing schools, barbershops and CD stores — not to mention flogging and killing civilians — the Taliban have now announced their intention to ‘reform’ the media and make it ‘mend its ways’...
‘It is the duty of the media to give space and time to statements which have a positive impact on society.’ "

Unshackled: Students in 3 Washington state schools raise tens of thousands of dollars to free 120 slaves from bondage, through the International Justice Mission.

The teens in this well-to-do suburban area have learned about families working in brick kilns in India and brothels in Cambodia where children their own age — and even younger — are sold into slavery.
"I count my blessings, because they're in such a bad place," said eighth-grader Nellie Hoehl, one of Ensey's students at Pine Lake Middle School.
...
For 10 weeks this spring, about 50 students arrived at school early each Wednesday to paint signs, write letters, sell concert tickets and plan collection dates to raise money for the IJM. That work is going on right now, and ends May 14.
"Everybody talks about it, even when it's not fundraising time," said eighth-grader Angela Moran.
...
It's even changed the way they think about money when they go shopping.
"Every time I go to buy something," said eighth-grader Casey Kovarik, "I think there's something better I could do with the money."

The Perfect Gift

It's been a sad couple of months for US-UK diplomatic relations. Between the unnecessarily rude return of a valuable (and venerated) bust of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill donated to the White House by former Prime Minister Tony Blair as a gesture of friendship, to last week's "amateur reception" of current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, political satirists can no longer complain that there is nothing to parody about Barack Obama.

There was speculation that Obama's dissatisfaction with the Churchill bust was due to tough actions taken by Britain against the extremely violent Mau-Mau uprising in early-1950s Kenya, during Churchill's second and final tenure in office, and the suffering endured by Obama's Kenyan grandfather during that rebellion.

It's been a while, so it's understandable if we've all forgotten this, but President Bush's father, former President and former pilot George H. W. Bush, had his plane shot out of the sky by the Japanese during WWII; yet I don't recall him bearing a grudge against Japan for his near-death experience while he was in office. (Unless that televised act of vomiting all over their embarrassed Prime Minister was a staged retribution...) He put the war behind him. Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower were veterans of the Second World War, and seemed able to put aside their experiences with the Japanese and German people who had tried so hard to kill them and the men in their commands not so long before... yet Obama still bears a grudge against Churchill?

Barack Obama may be the most powerful man in the world, but increasingly he appears as also the most pathetic. For all that he has at his fingertips, this week's telling exchange of gifts between President Obama and Prime Minister Brown reveals Obama as poor indeed, a naked emperor exposed as lacking the greatest gift we can give to ourselves: the blessing of humility.

When it comes to giving a gift to a friend, you are supposed to think less of yourself, and more of your friend. Ideally the search is for something the friend would have dearly loved to have gotten for themselves, but might have held off doing, usually out of self-deferential humility ("I don't deserve this, you shouldn't have done it"), or for not having the time to devote to such self-satisfying searches themselves. The more you value the friendship, the more readily you can summon the imagination, and the patient perseverance, to perceive what would make "the perfect gift" to give that friend. Such gifts are an investment of time as well as treasure, so that when the friend's eyes meet yours, you both know the unspoken truth: with your gift you gave some of yourself, to me.

Gordon Brown seems to have had experience giving gifts, judging by the thought that must have gone into the selection of one particular item he presented to President Obama: an ornamental pen holder made from wood taken from the HMS Gannet, a British sloop which cruised the Mediterranean and Red Seas in the latter half of the 19th century as part of Britain's expensive commitment to rid the world of Islamist slave ships carrying black Africans into a life of bondage in the Middle East:

In the Red Sea, the Africans it saved would have come, among other places, from Kenya. ... It is quite possible that grandfather’s ancestors would, had it not been for the Royal Navy, have been carried away to slavery in Arabia.

What thoughtful gift does Obama offer, in return? 25 classic American movies on dvd. The Daily Mail prints an unofficial list:

1- Citizen Kane
2- The Godfather
3- Casablanca
4- Raging Bull
5- Singin' In The Rain
6- Gone With The Wind
7- Lawrence Of Arabia
8- Schindler's List
9- Vertigo
10- The Wizard Of Oz
11- City Lights
12- The Searchers
13- Star Wars
14- Psycho
15- 2001: A Space Odyssey
16- Sunset Boulevard
17- The Graduate
18- The General
19- On The Waterfront
20- It's A Wonderful Life
21- Chinatown
22- Some Like It Hot
23- The Grapes Of Wrath
24- ET
25- To Kill A Mockingbird

Presuming that he did bestir himself to pay attention to the films on this list, it seems that Obama knows as little about American movies as he does everything else: offering #7, Lawrence of Arabia, isn't even an American movie, it's British.

An article in the Telegraph offering background on Prime Minister Brown's visit gets to the root of the cause of the diplomatic black eye delivered to the Anglo-American bond of friendship; an appalling inexperience fuels Obama's lack of perspective and monumental ingratitude. It also explains why, unlike the other wartime Presidents before him, Obama may not be willing to see a nation's big picture, good and bad, its acts of atonement as well as its sins; that would require the gift of humility, to admit that none of us are perfect.

British officials [admit] that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama's inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to "even fake an interest in foreign policy". A British official conceded that the furore surrounding the apparent snub to Mr Brown had come as a shock to the White House. ...

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.
...
The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."
...
The Sunday Telegraph understands that one of Mr Obama's most prominent African American backers, whose endorsement he spent two years cultivating, has told friends that he detects a weakness in Mr Obama's character.

"The one real serious flaw I see in Barack Obama is that he thinks he can manage all this," the well-known figure told a Washington official, who spoke to this newspaper. "He's underestimating the flood of things that will hit his desk." A Democratic strategist, who is friends with several senior White House aides, revealed that the president has regularly appeared worn out and drawn during evening work sessions with senior staff in the West Wing and has been forced to make decisions more quickly than he is comfortable.

Helpfully, in the spirit of friendship, the Telegraph article leaves some clues for the next head of state scheduled to visit the White House, as they puzzle over what might constitute the Perfect Gift for President Obama..:

"People say he looks tired more often than they're used to," the strategist said. "He's still calm, but there have been flashes of irritation when he thinks he's being pushed to make a decision sooner than he wants to make it. He looks like he needs a cigarette."

When Love Is Blind

To update an observation first made by veteran war correspondent Quentin Reynolds about General Douglas MacArthur, President Barack Obama seems to need more protection from his friends than from his enemies.

Case in point: ABC journalist Terry Moran was interviewed last week about his experiences reporting on President Obama, and the ongoing media coverage in general. If you missed the 15-minute conversation, you can listen to it here, (transcript here) but meanwhile here's the highlight:

"I like to say that, in some ways, Barack Obama is the first President since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office. I mean, from visionary leader of a giant movement, now he's got an executive position that he has to perform in, in a way, and I think the coverage reflects that."

True faith embraces doubt, it doesn't reject it, just as true love needs an embrace that can grow large enough to somehow include both the bad and the good parts of the soul it reaches for... it doesn't pretend that the bad does not, cannot, exist, in that which it admires.

What kind of love is that?

So Obama doesn't have much experience; why not just admit the truth, why is it necessary to concoct this preposterous fable of historical equivalency? Moran's fantasy world does Obama no favors, for how could uncritical praise, buttressed with wishful thinking rather than rueful reality, be of more service to Obama than attempts to help him see the error of his ways when he inevitably makes his mistakes. When a lover sees the bad as well as the good within the other soul it embraces, it opens up an opportunity for one of the greatest gifts that love can offer: forgiveness.

For all their professed adoration of the man, this is the one treasure his followers have so far denied him, because they can't bring themselves to admit he's not the mighty man with the perfect resume they insist that he must be. A soul that never makes mistakes, never gets to be shown mercy. So far, Obama's fan base gives him excuses, not mercy.

There's a difference between forgiveness and making excuses. We may forgive someone for their willful acts, but excuses seek to deny the free will that souls surely have, no matter their experiences. If right and wrong, good and bad, better and worse, are to mean anything, then excuses are no excuse.

Can those smitten by this love affair with Obama be motivated by feeling an inability to forgive themselves their own faults? Are The One's followers continually elevating their image of Obama upon ever higher pedestals so that eventually he will be placed at Olympian heights of such distance that his adoring public would no longer be able to perceive who they are looking at..? Is Obama cursed to be forever placed outside of the reach of a merciful embrace, so that those who love him can keep themselves from having to admit they've made an error of judgment?

If that's the case, is Obama truly the leader of a movement, as Moran says, or has he become instead, its prisoner...?

No Room For Winston Churchill In Obama's White House

Housecleaning, or symbolic act? (or symbolic housecleaning?)

A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back.

The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure. But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: "Thanks, but no thanks."

Diplomats were at first reluctant to discuss the whereabouts of the Churchill bronze, after its ejection from the seat of American power. But the British Embassy in Washington has now confirmed that it sits in the palatial residence of ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald, just down the road from Vice President Joe Biden's official residence. It is not clear whether the ambassador plans to keep it in Washington or send it back to London.