Obama's
Alternative Foreign Policy Universe
There are definitely two Americas, but not the two that fallen former presidential candidate John Edwards had in mind. There's the real America, and there's the imaginary America President Barack Obama has boasted of creating.
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, tells us on the White House's alternative universe blog that "President Obama inherited unprecedented challenges at home and abroad," including "diminished American standing in the world. ... A year later, America is stronger because of the President's leadership."
How has Obama been able to perform this miraculous feat in such a short time?
Well, Obama's "steady diplomacy" has made America stronger and renewed its moral authority. In his superior wisdom, he realized that our real enemy isn't all Islamic extremists dedicated to world conquest, the annihilation of all infidels, and jihad, but the sole branch of that larger group, al-Qaida. So he's smartly and efficiently recalibrated our war effort against this solitary group of jihadists -- though I could have sworn his people have told us it's not exactly a war.
Through his myopic lenses, Obama apparently can't understand that terrorists would be virtually impotent against us without nation-state sponsors. Without that perspective, how can he possibly lead this nation in this "overseas contingency operation"?
Simple. He's not trifling so much with the prosecution of war details, but addressing the root causes of the man-caused disaster that occurred on American soil Sept. 11, 2001.
On that score, Rhodes brags that Obama has embarked on a path to restore our alliances, renew our moral leadership, and reinvigorate our efforts to address the challenges of nuclear proliferation and "climate change."
How has he done all this? His unique gift of gab. Reaching out. Apologizing. Torquing the teleprompter. Just being himself.
He's making the world more comfortable for terrorists, being careful not to alienate them or provoke them to attack us again. He's making amends for our dastardly misdeeds of holding their brethren in detention facilities, treating them like prisoners in our finest federal "country club" penal institutions, and according them constitutional rights they could never dream of in their own cultures.
Even though he's convinced that we're not really at war -- and that the enemy we are not at war with does not comprise all Islamic extremists, and certainly not the entire Muslim world -- he felt compelled to apologize to the entire Muslim world anyway.
Last year, he told millions of Muslims in an interview with Al-Arabiya that America must re-establish with the Muslim world "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."
Obama's perspective was notably one-sided -- in favor not of the United States, but the Muslim world. As others observed at the time, our track record for the previous 20 years had been one of continually coming to the aid of Muslims all over the world, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq.
As part of his worldwide tour to apologize for the shameful America that predated his inauguration, he went to Cairo, where he reached out to the people in the Muslim world to make sure they understood that he understood their extraordinary contribution to America and his acute sensitivity and remorse for America's past colonialism and imperialism.
As for his progress in addressing "the challenges of nuclear proliferation," he set a year-end deadline for Iran to start behaving. The deadline passed with no Iranian concessions -- just more insults and defiance from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Obama's denying he'd ever set a deadline in the first place. Now that's leadership.
Not only that but China has just announced that it would not support another round of sanctions against Iran. Guess that deep bow in Shanghai didn't quite do the trick.
But never mind those details. Obama has already accomplished what needed to be accomplished on this front. Rhodes tells us how: "In April, the President delivered a landmark speech in Prague where he stated America's commitment to seek the security of a world without nuclear weapons." We can rest easy now.
Besides, why should Obama unduly agonize over this "contingency operations" thingy when he has much bigger fish to fry, such as cataclysmic, catastrophic, apocalyptic anthropogenic global warming, which is going to incinerate us all, including al-Qaida, anyway -- unless he transfers all this nation's wealth to "underdeveloped nations" and sends us back to the Stone Age?
And he plans on doing just that, as he has made clear with his efforts to pass cap-and-trade legislation, his trip to Copenhagen, and his Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory edict outlawing CO2 emissions.
Meanwhile, in the real world, terrorists still hate us just the same and feel
they've been given the green light to prove it, while ours remains fixed on
yellow.