Of Obama and Obeisance

Guest Commentary by Edward Cline:

More disgusting than former President George W. Bush holding the hand of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (when the latter was but a “crown prince”) on Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch years ago, was the signature demonstration of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy when he bowed before the king at the G20 meeting in London and presumably kissed that same hand. This was an uncalled-for gesture on the part of a man who poses as a friend of the “unwashed masses” but who apparently experiences a “high” when hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

And as a politician who likes to place himself on the same historical plane with Abraham Lincoln and FDR, surely he must have known that Saudi Arabia and the Koran condone slavery, that Abdullah very likely owns a dozen or more slaves himself, and that Saudi Arabia is a repressive theocracy with designs to convert the U.S. to Islam with stealth jihad through CAIR and other Saudi “civil rights” organizations in this country.

Not that he cares. There is King Abdullah, and there is Prince Barack. A very tenuous excuse might be made for Bush; he was an unlikable and unliked man, who knew he was mocked by Congress, the news media, and the public. He wanted to be liked by everyone, even if it meant rubbing shoulders with Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah and other unsavory creatures in hopes of teasing a grin from them.

No excuse can be made for Obama. His contempt for the United States in his every action since taking office in January is so apparent that it would have been surprising had he not emphasized it by bowing to a relic of medievalism. It was his way of proving that he is not a product of what he claimed in Germany was American “arrogance,” a euphemism for the United States asserting its right to exist and for being the freest, most prosperous country in history (for the time being). I do not think that contempt for the U.S. has been lost on this country’s enemies. Obama has more or less telegraphed his willingness to damage this country with his domestic and foreign policies as much as they would were they in his shoes. He’s their man.

George Stephanopoulos, his unofficial press secretary on ABC (who does a better job of shilling for Obama‘s policies than the official press secretary, the Elmer Fuddish Robert Gibbs), last Sunday gave Obama high marks for “stagecraft” on his European tour. The term means a series of orchestrated hale-fellow-well-met magic moments in domestic and exotic locales, but apparently those high marks do not include preserving the dignity of the office of president. It is doubtful that Abdullah even expected a president of the United States to be so extraordinarily obsequious.

The American Thinker site, in reporting and discussing this shameful episode on April 3, poses the question in answer to any possible White House or State Department denial that bowing to Abdullah was not an act of subservient inferiority:

If it was not a gesture of subordination, why did the Saudi king fail to respond with a similar bow?

Because potentates do not bow to their subjects or inferiors. When I learned of this “stagecraft” on the Internet (it certainly wasn’t through the news media, not for them to report such a disquieting event), the final scene of “The Godfather” flashed in my memory, in which Michael Corleone, acknowledged head of a crime family, receives the hand-kissing fealty of his underlings.

At a time when rogue governments such as Iran’s and North Korea’s are working to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems, Obama has reached a tentative agreement with another rogue government, Vladimir Putin’s, to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles. Which means the emasculation of this country’s defense capabilities -- not Russia’s or Iran’s or China’s or North Korea’s offensive capabilities. No totalitarian government or other brand of dictatorship has ever felt morally bound or constrained by any weapons reduction treaty signed between it and another statist regime or between it and any coalition of Western “democracies.” Read the history and consequences of such agreements and treaties from long before World War One up through the twentieth century. One might then ask how such a self-proclaimed student of history could make such a concession when the overwhelming evidence points to a guarantee of aggression and war.

There are two possible answers to this question. The first is that Obama knows that history but is confident his wishes will overcome reality. He wants it to be so; ergo, it will be so. One might call it the King Canute syndrome. The tides will cease on command; dictators and enemies of this country will be nice enough to refrain from arming themselves and their proxies.

The more likely answer is that defenseless is how Obama imagines the U.S. should be against regimes that wish to harm or destroy this country, or at least compel it to submit under the threat of destruction. It would be fit punishment for its past “transgressions” and “arrogance.”

And in Turkey, he proclaimed that the U.S. “is not and will never be at war with Islam.” Maybe not. But Islam is certainly at war with the U.S. Surely he must know that, as well. It is fairly common knowledge in the Muslim world. If he doesn’t know it, then he’s not reading his intelligence reports, or their authors are not mentioning it for fear of offending his sense of “diversity” and risking their immediate redundancy. But, like Bush, he will not blame Islam for the attacks on the U.S. and the West, only its kamikaze pilots. Thus his grandstanding about “defeating” Al-Qada in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Addressing the Turkish parliament on April 6, Obama asserted:

We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.

Excuse me? Were Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Madison secret Muslims? Or Lincoln? Stating that Islam helped to “shape” the United States is as specious an assertion as the claim that a confederation of American Indian tribes served as a model for the U.S. government before ratification of the Constitution. In attempting to establish a détente with Islam, Obama either dismisses or is ignorant of the totalitarian nature of the Islamic faith and its record of destruction, massacre, rape, genocide and enslavement over the centuries, one that rivals only the Catholic Church’s and its wars with dissenting sects. In that sense, yes, the Islamic faith has done much to shape the world -- but not for the better.

One might even hypothesize that Obama envies the Islamic faith, because it requires immediate and unquestioning submission to its ideology, something he would like to see happen in this country at the snap his fingers.

Obama has his own notion of submission. A power-luster will respect a power-holder; this would also help to explain his toady-ish behavior upon meeting the Saudi king. But, back home, submission is what he expects of American business executives. When he met with banking CEO’s for an hour and a half on April 2, he was in his Michael Corleone mode. He stopped the friendly chitchat and attempts by the bankers to explain why they and their employees needed bonuses, and went to the point, reports the Politico site:

“My administration,” the president said, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Corleone couldn’t have said it better.

After ranting on about how he saw the economic crisis and why people were outraged over Wall Street’s executive bonuses (and the only people who seem to be outraged are the news media and the “man-in-the-street” dimwits they pick to emote angrily about the bonuses), he invited the bankers to talk.

They were true to their record of moral cowardice.

JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon complimented Obama on the economic team he’d assembled…Dimon also insisted that he’d like to give the government’s TARP Troubled Asset Relief Program] money back as soon as practical and asked the president to ’streamline’ that process.

Nix to that, replied Obama. Returning the money might “send a bad signal,” or create the wrong impression. Appearances trump reality. Appearances will become the reality. Reality is what he wishes it to be. Obama regards himself the master illusionist.

Several CEO’s disagreed, arguing instead that returning the TARP money was their patriotic duty, that they didn’t need it anymore, and that publicity surrounding the return would send a positive signal of confidence to the markets.

No dice. Apparently, career bankers know nothing about finance, markets or banking. Or perhaps Obama would concede that they do know those things, and that he and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their economic advisors do not. None of that mattered. Barack Obama, who has never worked a productive, wealth-creating day in his life but spent years in unproductive “public service,” knows better, because he has a personal line to a higher authority. Call it the Kant-Hegel-Marx triumvirate.

Besides, it was more “patriotic” and safer to be his yes-men. And accepting the TARP money back from the banks might cause people to suspect that perhaps the government is the chief culprit behind the crisis and that it is attempting to paper over its responsibility by literally printing more paper money and granting itself more credit so that impoverished Americans can pay it off in about six generations.

Provided, of course, there are still an economy and an America. In fact, the debt Obama and his predecessors in the Oval Office and in Congress have rung up can never be paid off, not without the government garnishing and attaching the full incomes of every American and granting everyone an “allowance.” The catch is that such an economy is not productive and if it exists at all it is because there is a freer economy elsewhere propping it up. If there are no free economies, then the world is in another Dark Age.

If one ever sought proof that Obama and his gang do not want the economy to recover, there it was, in that meeting with the banking CEO‘s, the willing whipping boys for the government‘s policy failures. If the road to perdition is paved with good intentions, there is only one verdict to reach about a man and his clique whose intentions are not good.

Crossposted at The Dougout