Israel Matzav

How to re-set Obama

This has almost nothing to do with Israel (we're mentioned once - I'll include it in the excerpt), but it's too good not to share. Victor Davis Hanson has a ten-step regimen for resetting President Obama.

1) Impose a moratorium on all the racial talk. After the beer summit, the “stupidly,” the “stereotyping,” the “cowards,” the Van Jones rants, the “wise Latina,” the suing Arizona, the exempting the Black Panthers, the al-Qaeda-as-racists (e.g., nine years after 9/11 we at last have a reason to really hate these terrorists), etc., we get the message that race permeates the presidential worldview — and that all issues, from those of terrorism to policing to immigration to the environment, are seen largely through racial us/them lenses. This obsession has turned off an increasing multi-racial nation, and is reaching the point of caricature. Take a deep breath, Mr. President, and promise to go through one day without self-referencing yourself as black, without speaking to an identity-politics group, and without reviewing the American past in terms of race. Just one day …

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7) Please, no more “Bush did it.” Stop the daily two-minutes of hate against our new Emmanuel Goldstein. Bush is 19 months gone; no one forced President Obama to borrow $3 trillion, to nationalize health care, or to scare business with the neo-socialist talk of income-, FICA-, and health-tax increases, and government takeovers that helped send unemployment from 7% to 10%. Bush reacted to 9/11 by going into Afghanistan and passing the Patriot Act without daily blaming Clinton for his appeasing of radical Islam. Nothing so diminishes a president as the trait of scapegoating a predecessor; nothing so erodes his stature as the teenage habit of blaming someone else for one’s self-inflicted problems. Enough already. We’ve gotten to the point now that the audience cringes when Obama cites what he has done, as it mutters to itself: “Here comes the ‘Bush did it.’” And, of course, it always comes just as we feared.

8 ) No need either for more of the Muslim thing. We learned on day 1, 19 months ago, that the president would reference his Muslim heritage (e.g., “I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.”) to al Arabiya in a way that was taboo during the campaign. And after the Cairo mythmaking, the rantings of John Brennan, the new euphemisms, the “America is the problem” (e.g., “All too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved.” ), and the NASA lunacy, we understood that the problem is our purported not being nice to Islam rather than radical Islamists trying to kill us out of existential hatred. I would cut the Muslim therapeutics out; there is simply no need to cite your middle name as the real reason Israelis are not fond of you. None at all.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:14 AM