Quote of the Day

The Legacy of "Smart Diplomacy":

"Only a few days ago Russia threatened to quit the START talks as the U.S. deployed an Aegis anti-ballistic missile ship to Spain. All on the back pages, yet taken together one can adventure the thought that a comprehensive failure has overtaken the foreign policy of Barack Obama. The irony is that Obama campaigned on the platform of “smart diplomacy.” But as things have turned out, he was smart only in his own mind.

Under his watch the 70-year-old Pax Americana has fallen apart. Al-Qaeda has flourished. President Benigno Aquino of the Philippines caught the tone of rising concern when he warned, in an interview with the New York Times, that China was doing to Southeast Asia what Nazi Germany did to Central Europe in the late 1930s. “At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’? Well, the world has to say it — remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II.”

But you wouldn’t know it for the panegyrics still being sung by the mainstream media. To read some papers you would think the world’s biggest problem was gay rights at the Sochi Olympics.

The Sudetenland? Things are not as bad as that yet. But the operative word is “yet.” Someone — perhaps the elders of the Democratic Party — have got to put some competence back in the White House. Someone needs to stop the rot. An administration too inept to roll out a website; too obtuse to do much more than watch a US consulate burned by — dare we say it? — video protesters — such an administration may be overmatched in a contest of brinksmanship with a rival nuclear power.

Barack Obama is in trouble and so are we all."

To be fair, Obama is very good at numerous long, expensive vacations and golf.