Groveler-in-Chief

Groveler-in-Chief 

©2012 Ross Williams

For a superpower, the United States is acting as timid as a church mouse.

Scratch that; let’s make that a mosque mouse.

It’s well-established that no one in the Obama Administration has the first clue about foreign policy and international politics. Of the entire cabal of incompetents, Hillary Clinton is the most knowledgeable and accomplished. In a distant second is the Democrats’ Dan Quayle, Tweedle-Dummer to Hillary’s Tweedle-Dum: Joe Biden.

It is shameful for US foreign affairs to be nearly as neophytic as a freshman Poli-Sci class, where the pair bending the bell curve to the right, sporting gold stars on their homework, makes Neville Chamberlain look like a hard-assed prick. At least the clown prince of post-Versaillean pseudo-diplomacy can make the excuse that he was up against a charismatic megalomaniac when he gave Czechoslovakia away; the US isn’t up against anybody worth noting, mainly mobs of vandals, and yet we’re ceding our interests in the entire Middle East to all claimants and takers.

...unless their name is Israel.

Of course. The Religion of Peace® has gone on another bender recently because some Jewish-American flack in California, who may instead be a disgruntled Coptic christian, but who calls himself an Israeli, made a short [and reportedly bad] film portraying Mohammed as a “fraud, womanizer and madman” in the words of the Associated Press. Close on the heels of the womanizer claim is child sex-abuser.

In all fairness, having multiple wives is common in many cultures even today and certainly was among Arabs of Mohammed’s day, and marrying women who were barely menstruating was standard practice in virtually all cultures 1,400 years ago, up to and including Dark Age Europe. It is only by today’s Western standards that “womanizer” and “child sex-abuser” has any resonance at all ... and then it is only among the cultural and historical illiterates whose opinions on the subject have less than no relevance.

The assertion that Mohammed was a fraud is – or should be – nearly as easily dismissible. A fraud is someone who isn’t what he claims to be. And that criticism applies to every single person ever, including the “Jewish”-American “filmmaker” who made the now-notorious “film” exposing Islam. He’s not a filmmaker any more than Hillary Clinton is a diplomat or Barry Hussein is a statesman. They’re all frauds. Mohammed is too? Color me shocked.

The label “madman”, however, is not so readily discharged.

Mohammed was a guy with a chip on his shoulder roughly the size of the Arabian Peninsula who got into a pissing contest with the city elders of his hometown of Mecca over idol worshippers making pilgrimage – essentially, Mohammed, like every xenophobe ever, didn’t want tourists or their money sullying his city if those tourists were different from him. Because he was not in the city elders’ clan, his criticisms of their administration were ignored ... until he started a rebellion, of course. Rebellions tend to attract attention. Mohammed and his clan lost their rebellion against Mecca’s rulers.

Many of Mohammed’s relatives were rewarded by being kicked out of town, exiled to “Ethiopia” – which is the ancient term for any place in Africa that wasn’t Egypt. Mohammed himself was placed under house arrest, and there he stayed until he escaped and [to make a long, megalomaniacal story short] enlisted the help of two tribal groups squabbling for control over Mecca’s rival trade-hub city, Medina, to come help him conquer Mecca. This time Mohammed was successful. And until his death he continued to conquer city after city in the Arabian Peninsula until he controlled all the major trade hubs – and the money they brought in.

Once in control, he could impose any travel restrictions on idol-worshippers he wished – and he did. ...by killing idol-worshippers who refused to accept forcible conversion to his own strident religious philosophy, thus making everyone like him.

The lengths to which Mohammed went in order to make his xenophobic and intolerant point upon Mecca’s city council were not the actions of a reasoned and articulate academic; they were dogmatic, autocratic ... in the vernacular, the actions of a madman.

The fraud of a filmmaker has a legitimate point here, but not one that hasn’t been made countless times before and, frankly, better.

The apologists for the Religion of Peace® continue to not have a point in their mopish excuse-making of islamic hooliganism, though. The US Embassy in Cairo was attacked by islamists denouncing Israel over the existence of this “film”; the US Consulate in Benghazi Libya was attacked by same, and the US Ambassador and three of his staff were killed. It was and is, in IntLaw-speak, an act of war.

It has been 33 years since a US Ambassador has been killed in anything other than a traffic accident. One was killed during the Johnson Administration, one during Nixon, one during Ford and two during Carter – all by what are considered “terrorists”, before “The War Against Terrorism” was conceived, and when actual terrorism against the US was significantly more likely to occur. While it is not necessarily best, or even wise, to respond to the act-of-war assassinations of US diplomats with F-18s, battleships and cruise missiles, the appropriate response is not to say – as the US Embassy in Egypt did – that the US condemns “misguided individuals” trying to “hurt the feelings of Muslims.”

In our culture, hurting others’ feelings is called Free Speech, and is what our nation was founded upon. The misguided individual is himself called a Free Citizen. Feelings be damned. The US government has no business taking sides among US interests full of free citizens jawing at each other until one of them throws a punch, and when non-Americans take issue with what free American citizens say to them or about them, the business of the US government is to side with the Americans in the dispute, regardless of how rude they may have been in their free speechifying.

The Obama Administration, through its diplomatic mealy-mouthpiece in Egypt, has essentially gone on record as saying that US political rights are wrong when they annoy foreigners to the point they can no longer control themselves. Their murderous rampage becomes understandable, veritably forgivable; our rudeness becomes damnable.

Not to pick at scabs, here, but isn’t this President the same guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize, just for being black? [Or was it just because he wasn’t Dubya? I forget] Isn’t he the same guy who bows and scrapes to leaders of muslim nations as a subordinate would, while giving the diplomatic finger to Israel? who refers to muslim leaders – religious, political, and in between – by the titles required for use by subordinates, and not by the terms diplomatic protocol sets aside for use among heads of state? ...while not doing the same to, say, the Queen of England?

Yes, it’s the same guy. Curious.

I have steadfastly refused to play into the “Barry Hussein is a muslim” game of easy denunciation, being content to let his gross ineptitude speak for itself in shouts of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance; I’ve even pointed it out from time to time when others were disinclined to ...which, noting most of the US medias’ own bowing and scraping to him, is just about always.

A President who refuses to meaningfully challenge those who malign the US, its values, its character, its people, and its diplomats, is a President refusing to do his job. He is effectively assisting those who take potshots at us with the stated intention of taking us down.

There’s a good argument to be made that foreign policy as enacted by Dubya was ham-fisted and awkward, making the US look ungainly and slightly unhinged, but in baseball terms that can be seen as being “effectively wild”. A batter facing such a pitcher is more likely to bail out on a grooved fastball as he is to stand in the box and swing.

Barry Hussein isn’t wild, he’s mild; he sure isn’t effectively wild, and to be effectively mild requires carrying a big stick – which he certainly has at his disposal, but he wants nothing much to do with it ...even in an election year.

Needless to say, in foreign affairs, he isn’t effective. All his groveling and prostration does is make the US look insipid and weak, an easy mark for hooligans. He’s either doing this because he is inept, because he is overmatched, because he is incompetent, all as Carter was ... or it’s because he has certain personal philosophies which interfere with him accomplishing his secular duties as President of the United States to first and foremost protect the interests of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The only relevant distinction lies in whether he should be voted out by We The People in an election, or by the US Senate in an impeachment.