Maybe You Will Have Marco Rubio to Kick Around Anymore

Over at Hot Air, some are taking a second look at Rubio.

I liked his speech calling out Tom Harkin and the useful idiots on Cuba and Venezuela, but this does seem like too quick a bout of forgiveness. There might be some Cheap Date-ism going on in the party.

Meanwhile, a New Republic writer admits that Romney's much-media-derided "geopolitical foe" statement about Russia "seems exactly right."

Bonfire of the Vanities: Mead has a column up at The American Interest about how Crimea weakens Obama.

Facts destroy theory, every time.

Washington’s flat-footed, deer-in-the-headlights incomprehension about Russia’s Crimean adventure undermines President Obama’s broader credibility in a deeply damaging way. If he could be this blind and misguided about Vladimir Putin, how smart is he about the Ayatollah Khameni, a much more difficult figure to read? President Obama is about to have a difficult meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he will tell Netanyahu essentially that Israel should ground its national security policy on the wisdom of President Obama and his profound grasp of the forces of history. The effect will be somewhat undermined by President Obama’s failure to understand the most elementary things about Vladimir Putin.

With Hitler-style lies blasting from the well-tuned Russia propaganda machine (attacks on ethnic Russians! mass flight of refugees! fascism!) and armed soldiers backing up thugs in Crimea and elsewhere, President Putin is not exactly looking like a partner for peace at the moment—and Obama’s decision to work with him isn’t making President Obama look like a foreign policy genius.

Prime Minister Netanyahu—and many other world leaders—will be looking at President Obama with cold and calculating eyes. They can see that he turned to Russia for help when his Syrian red line policy collapsed; they can see that he is betting heavily that Russia will help him with Iran, both in the negotiations and at the UN Security Council. They observe how Washington was flabbergasted and stunned by the events in Ukraine, and they are likely to conclude that President Obama’s Middle East policy is in much worse shape than he thinks.

Both friends and foes are also probably thinking today that President Obama is going to have less control over the future of American foreign policy than he might like.

posted by Ace at 03:41 PM

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