Noah Rothman: A Whitman's Sampler of MSNBC's Most Embarrassingly Ill-Informed Mockery of Romney's "Russian Geopolitical Foe" Observation

I wanted to post this yesterday but I figured too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

At NRO, Alec Torres lists the eight most naïve Administration statements about Russia.

Here's four of them, and we don't even get to Kerry yet:

1. President Obama, March 2012: “This is my last election. After my election I will have more flexibility.”

2. Hillary Clinton March, 2009: “We want to reset our relationship, so we will do it together.”

3. Joe Biden, July 2009: “They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them, and they‘re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”

4. Obama, October 2012: (Responding to Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as our greatest “geo-political foe”) “You said Russia. Not al-Qaeda. . . . The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because . . . the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Biden's statement strikes me as curious. You could replace every "they" in his statement with "we, under Obama." Our population is declining (or soon will); our economy is withered and not recovering; our banking system is more of a mess than it was when Obama came into office. And of course Obama and Biden are clinging to a fantasy, the Blue Social Model, which is unsustainable.

Nice Sentence: Instapundit blind-links a quote from the Anchoress.

On Obama's foreign policy, she says: "The man's sense of himself has been over-indulged to a reckless point."

She writes:

The Obama White House is learning the hard way that presidential power requires something more substantial than an eternal marketing campaign and an endless spin-cycle, because no matter what a utopian president thinks the world should be like, the reality is this: in human life, peace is a transient thing, and in geopolitics, it is more often than not an illusion that quickly reveals itself as one. If Europe has been “at peace” these last 60 years, it’s a profound aberration in the scheme of history. Obama (and his Secretary of State) seem to believe that humanity has — by virtue of nothing at all, except perhaps his say-so — transcended itself and entered into a we-are-stardust-we-are-golden happy place, where (in Europe, at least) nobody wants war, because everyone is loving peace.

That is a rather terrifying demonstration of naivete. Even a so-so student of human history and behavior (like me) knows that someone always wants war. Someone always wants more power. Someone is always looking for a way to avenge what they believe are past insults.

posted by Ace at 11:59 AM

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