Foreign policy follies
IT HAS BEEN A FASCINATINGLY FUNNY affair for me to watch Barack Obama’s once implacable interest in the Iraqi War to fade into a mere side show distraction at his new renovated BarryWorld theme park. After his recent overseas party junket to inflate the tires of his foreign policy Moped, Obama crashed his anti-war scooter into the didactical ditch since Gallup-ing headlong into some rather painful polls upon his return from Barack-a-Pallooza.
Wear a helmet next time, dude. All of us clingy, bitter voters who treasure our guns and commune with archaic sky gods have determined that the erstwhile “anti-war candidate” now finds himself without much of a war to whimper about. As he has routinely done with problematic people, places and possessions that no longer buttress his ascension into Messiah-ness, the foremost theme of his candidacy has been predictably pitched beneath the crowded under-carriage of a large Humvee.
Imagine Obama’s chagrin, after his blovi-ated op-ed piece in the NY Times touting his amended posture on ending the Surge, upon the discovery that Lame Duck Dubya had announced that the last of the brigades that inaugurated the Surge were already headed back to the U.S. the day before Obama’s piece published. Earth to “Big O”…the Surge is over.
Well, so much for that 3 a.m. moment! How’d that bogey slip in under Obama’s radar? Somebody from his staff should’ve sent him a text message.
And what of Obama’s subsequently amoral equivocations that the Surge has actually worked? While maintaining that it was still the “wrong thing to do” in a messy state of affairs bespeaks of a man clearly lacking not only tempo and authority on the matter but also dispossessed of a reasonably cogent clue concerning endeavors “above his pay grade.” Sometimes the remedy for broken eggs is to make an omelet.
At the beginning of the surge, Frequent Flyer mileage club member Condi Rice rolled over to Baghdad to eyeball the situation. She gamely showed up wearing a Nancy Reagan-esque scarlet power suit that screamed, “Shoot me! I dare you!” much to the horror of her hosts concerned with enemy sniper/RPG fire. After being acces-sorized with body armor in fetching digital camouflage and a Kevlar helmet squished down on her Betty Boop hairdo, she was further delimited by a phalanx of Army Rangers and expeditiously ushered to Petraeus’ HQ. She didn’t really need the helmet. She has enough VO5 hairspray in her hair that could probably stop a pick up truck.
You gotta hand it to Condi, though, the gal’s got brass.
Obama, conversely, showed up for a one day “grip and grin” after 931 days MIA. With the heavy lifting already done due to the efforts of folks like my son, Obama proceeded to safely trounce a female Army specialist in a game of HORSE after a quiet breakfast while casually attired in a Polo shirt, Benetton khakis and Cole Haan loafers. He says that “…[he] may be skinny, but [he’s] tough….”
Smells like Hillary Clinton in Bosnia all over again.
After his quasi-Homeric homecoming aboard O Farce One, limping from an aggravated basketball injury, he jetted off to Hawaii for some fun and sun. While on holiday, in order to fortify the indigence of his foreign policy bona fides, Obama then launched his own Surge by picking ol’ blue haired Joe Biden, as his CO-president. When you look up “Washington insider”in the dictionary, up pops Joe’s picture. Political triage seems to be the order of the day over at Camp Obama. Is it an inconvenient truth that many of Obama’s campers hadn’t even been born when Biden was sworn in at his first term of office?
Why vote for a ticket with a grouchy old white guy in the number two slot when you can vote for the grouchy old white guy at the head of the ticket? Among Democrats, only Teddy Kennedy has a lower number on his AARP card than Joe Biden.
I seem to recall, however, Democratopian catcalls in 2000 about Dubya’s lack of relevant foreign policy rudiments and his pick of Satan, a.k.a. Dick Cheney, as his running mate. Cheney actually picked himself but then Satan can do that.
If Dick Cheney were Dubya’s Svengali then Joe Biden would reasonably follow as Obama’s Rasputin. Folks, is it another inconvenient truth that Biden has been marinating in public office longer than Obama and McCain combined? Biden has been around since John Travolta pranced about in a white polyester disco suit. Joe Biden has outlived half of the Bee Gees, fer cryin’ out loud!
That’s “change” you can hardly believe in unless you’re changing into adult sized Pampers. But we shouldn’t hold his age against him now, should we?
STEVE BREEN is five years away from getting his own AARP card and is still “the best looking mailman at the U.S. Post Office.” He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 27, 2008. Read the original PDF.