Why Joe Biden Won't Make the Netanyahu Speech

Obama is no Friend of Israel

Obama took another giant step towards making sure our allies are treated worse than our enemies.
Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal

WASHINGTON — President Obama, seeking to capture a moment of epochal change in the Arab world, began a new effort on Thursday to break the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, setting out a new starting point for negotiations on the region’s most intractable problem.

...The Israeli government immediately protested, saying that for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders would leave it “indefensible.” Mr. Netanyahu held an angry phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning before the speech, officials said, in which he demanded that the president’s reference to 1967 borders be cut.

So many things wrong with this. First, it goes against long standing support for defensible borders for Israel. It gives away the high ground of the Golan Heights and bringing virtually all of the country into mortar and rocket range of its enemies.

Second, why 1967? What gives the president of the United States the right to demand what territories a sovereign and democratic state must cede to its neighbors and, truth be told, enemies based on a purely arbitrary determination? The claims of Israel on what has been called the Promised Land go back literally thousands of years. Why 1967?

It is interesting that for many years liberals accused conservatives of wanting to "turn back the clock" on any number of issues. Why does Obama want to "turn back the clock" on Israel? And compared to thousands of years of Israeli history, 44 years is but a tiny fraction. Why not add a couple of decades and take the borders back to the 1947 borders? What's that you say? The modern state of Israel did not come into existence until 1948? Reducing Israel to a country eight miles across will go far in returning Israel to its 1947 borders...

And just for giggles, what if the President of Mexico demanded that the US return to it's pre-1848 borders before it would negotiate any new treaties with us? If Obama can void the Six Day war, why can't Mexico void the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?

H/T Memeorandum

Cross posted at Left Coast Rebel, Say Anything

Is Obama the "Adult" Here?

One of the memes that Chris Wallace asked about in the interview below, was the attempt to cast Obama as an "adult", "above the fray", transcending petty politics, if you will.

I know that most of the electorate have short memories concerning politics, but a little stroll down memory lane might be in order. Consider how Obama treats our allies. Does this sound like an "adult" to you?

How about his childish snubbing of our ally Great Britain? Obama packed off Britain’s bust of Churchill, even after they insisted he could keep it, even if not in the Oval Office. The British ambassador brought
the US President a framed commissioning paper for HMS Resolute, that was rescued by an American whaler in 1856. The same HMS Resolute whose timbers were made into a desk, presented by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, still in use to this day. He also presented the President with a pen holder fashioned from the timber of HMS Gannet, a sister ship of the Resolute.
Priceless gifts, of historic importance and all Obama could come up with in return was a set of DVDs that most accounts say wouldn’t even play on British machines? Or giving the Queen an i-pad loaded with his speeches? Childish doesn’t even begin to describe Obama!

Or snubbing our ally Israel? Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the White House, one account:

The White House denied Netanyahu the red carpet treatment generally afforded to visiting heads of state. The Israeli prime minister and Obama didn’t pose for photos together, and Netanyahu was excluded from dinner with the president Tuesday night.
When Netanyahu wouldn’t agree to concessions, Obama left a meeting with him, though he invited Netanyahu to stay at the White House, talk to Obama advisers and “let me know if there is anything new,” a U.S. congressman who spoke to Netanyahu, told The Times of London. “It was awful,” the congressman said.
One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages,” conducted in such an adversarial environment that the Israeli delegation eventually left, worried that their White House phone conversations were being bugged. Another Israeli paper wrote that Netanyahu received “the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea”.

Walking out of meetings because you don't get your way doesn't sound very adult to me. Childishly refusing to sit down and eat with a visiting member of state, especially one of our allies, doesn't sound very adult to me.

Giving money to Brazil for deep water drilling while imposing a moratorium off our own coast isn't childish, it's just incomprehensible. Running up trillions in debt while claiming he will reduce the budget isn't childish, it's just dishonest and disingenuous. Claiming to be "transparent" while holding closed door meetings and moving White House meetings off the grounds where the public will have no records of the attendees is not childish, but rank hypocrisy.

Expecting you to ignore everything he has done in favor of what he has said?

That's childish.

The Hand of Friendship

Mark Steyn points out one of the more troubling idiosyncrasies of the current resident of the White House. I had remembered each instance individually, but hadn't really put together the pattern until Steyn laid them out side by side:

Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk ’n’ talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Anyone, anytime, anywhere? Anyone but our allies it seems! What is it about Obama that he will not sit down and simply break bread with the heads of state of our allies? Does he feel that he is too good for them? Or can't he see that whatever personal animosity he might have for them or personal aversion to dining in public, is not serving the best interest of the United States? I'm sure that if he asked, his hosts would prepare a halal meal! /sarcasm

Update: The frequency of Obama's refusing to dine with heads of state reminded me of a quote from Ian Fleming:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Note to Barack: These men are our friends!

An open letter to Benjamin Netanyahu

You don’t know me, Sir, and I’m hardly an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, but I couldn’t help but notice our President Obama’s interest in your West Bank settlements. And I noticed that some of the settlers there, in response to his speech are calling their new structures “Obama huts”.

This gave me a great idea! You may know that President Obama has a brother in Kenya, George Hussein Onyango Obama, who lives in a run down hut on less than $12 a year.

I’m sure the “Obama huts” are much nicer than the one George is currently living in, so in the spirit of international cooperation, I think it would be a nice gesture for you to invite George Hussein Onyango Obama to come and live in the West Bank settlement in one of the huts named after his brother. I think our President might take an even greater interest in your settlements after that!

I know that one small gesture will not ensure world peace, but perhaps if you were to extend more charity to Obama’s brother than he has ever considered doing, it might pay off in the long run. I’m sure there are those here in the states that would be willing to contribute to him to assist with the move.

In any event, I have more confidence in you doing the right thing than I do the current resident of the White House.

Please feel free to contact me if there’s anything I can do for you.

Sincerely,

“Proof”