What's a columnist to do? It's getting a little old to blame Bush for the horrors of the Bush presidency. So why not blame Bush for the horrors of the Obama presidency? As a sympathetic Jacob Weisberg sees it, the understandable urge to be the unBush has sent the Obama pendulum swinging way off the charts:Everything must be Bush's fault. Nothing can be Obama's fault. That must be line one in their official journalist's stylebook.Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach around his predecessor's errors. Bush's naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama's realism and multilateralism. Bush's boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama's eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies...
In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama's instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad.
So Bush is to blame for Obama kissing up to the mullahs? Brilliant! Who knew such a sober foreign-policy "realist" surrounded by the brightest minds of his generation could be so easily unhinged?
Sunday, August 02, 2009
They'll Never Stop Blaming Bush
Mark Steyn has the details on an article which blames Bush because Obama's foreign policy is being so badly handled:
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From what I have seen first hand of Obama's first 6 months in office, there will be plenty of blame to heap on Obama's shoulders once he steps out of the presidential office. It seems like almost every day he gives us something new to batter him with. Yes, in due time will give us plenty of things to talk about, and not in a very good vein.
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