Obama Shows His True Colors as He Leaves Office
by CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
With no reason to suppress his more radical instincts any longer, the president embraced them on his way out the door. Barack Obama did not go out quietly. His unquiet final acts were overshadowed, in part by a successor who refused to come in quietly, and in part by Obama’s own endless, sentimental farewell tour. But there was nothing nostalgic or sentimental about Obama’s last acts. Two of them were simply shocking. Perhaps we should have known. At the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he joked about whether he had a bucket list: “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.” Turns out, he wasn’t kidding. Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports plus another quarter-million State Department documents. The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree” (according to intelligence sources quoted by Fox News) of those who fit the description of individuals working with the United States. Moreover, we will be involved in many shadowy conflicts throughout the world. Locals will have to choose between us and our enemies. Would you choose a side that is so forgiving of a leaker who betrays her country — and you? Even the word “leaker” is misleading. Leak makes it sound like a piece of information a whistleblower gives Woodward and Bernstein to expose misdeeds in high office. This was nothing of the sort. It was the indiscriminate dumping of a mountain of national-security secrets certain to bring harm to American troops, allies, and interests. Obama considered Manning’s 35-year sentence excessive. On the contrary. It was lenient. Manning could have been — and in previous ages, might well have been — hanged for such treason. Now she walks after seven years. What makes this commutation so spectacularly in-your-face is its hypocrisy. Here is a president who spent weeks banging the drums over the harm inflicted by WikiLeaks with its release of stolen materials and e-mails during the election campaign. He demanded a report immediately. He imposed sanctions on Russia. He preened about the sanctity of the American political process. Over what? What exactly was released? A campaign chairman’s private e-mails and Democratic National Committee chatter, i.e. campaign gossip, backbiting, indiscretions, and cynicism. The usual stuff, embarrassing but not dangerous. No national-security secrets, no classified material, no exposure of anyone to harm, just to ridicule and opprobrium. . . .
Why? To curry favor with the international Left? After all, Obama leaves office as a relatively young man of 55. His next chapter could very well be as a leader on the international stage, perhaps at the U.N. (secretary-general?) or some transnational (ostensibly) human-rights organization. What better demonstration of bona fides than a gratuitous attack on Israel? Or the about-face on Manning and WikiLeaks? Or the freeing of a still-unrepentant Puerto Rican terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera, also pulled off with three days remaining in his presidency? A more likely explanation, however, is that these are acts not of calculation but of authenticity. This is Obama being Obama. He leaves office as he came in: a man of the Left, but possessing the intelligence and discipline to suppress his more radical instincts. As of November 9, 2016, suppression was no longer necessary. We’ve just gotten a glimpse of his real self. From now on, we shall see much more of it.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/
Posts
9 comments:
If you consider Obama radical, that just shines a light on who is the actual extremist. That would be you, Kraut.
If he thinks that anything that Obama did was egregious, I can only imagine what he thinks of the illegal doings of the current so-called President.
The Right's on-going attempt to equate what happened with Wikileaks during the election with the leaks by Manning are -- well, I was going to say sad, but really, they're desperate.
Obama is a radical leftist because, on a scale of zero to one hundred where zero is William F. Buckley humping Ayn Rand while Ronald Reagan watches, and one hundred is two lesbians kissing while simultaneously having abortions, on that scale Obama is calculated to score 75, which is three quarters of the way from true blue awesome conservative and one quarter of the way from damned commie/liberal/socialist/homo.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Why does RWD even care what Obama does anymore? He's not the president.
They keep squealing about Obama because if they stop squealing about Obama they might have to start looking at the disaster they have elected to run our country -- which is the inevitable result of the tactics* they have practiced for the past 40 years.
*Tactics like whipping up racism and xenophobia among their base; and tactics like encouraging their base to distrust any form of mainstream media; and tactics like encouraging anti-intellectualism among that base. Trump is the obvious result of all their efforts, and not just the USA but the world will be lucky to survive him.
Let's keep it real, though. Obama was a pushover snowflake. He didn't di much for his African-American base. That's why Hillary lost; African-Americans did bot turn out in high numbers at the polls for her.
Snowflake is alt-right talk, you alt-right delgado?
"This is Obama being Obama. He leaves office as he came in: a man of the Left, but possessing the intelligence and discipline to suppress his more radical instincts."
"Intelligence and discipline." I'll take that.
Meanwhile his successor's supporters are having severe voter's remorse, in particular, conservative commentator Peter Wehner:
“We have as president a man who is erratic, vindictive, volatile, obsessive, a chronic liar, and prone to believe in conspiracy theories. And you can count on the fact that there will be more to come, since when people like Donald Trump gain power they become less, not more, restrained.” (March 2017.)
Now, shut up, Krauthammer.
Over the past 30 years, weasels like you made "the base" just like President Orange Demagogue. You and the Evangelical Reich. And the paranoid gun-huggers, and anti-science climate liars. And Fox News. And Hate Radio. And Regnery Press. Together your endless lies created the tens of millions of reprogrammable meatheads who make up the base of your gawd-awful Party. Every single major political opinion and decision of your adult life has been completely dead wrong.
So please, shut up.
Post a Comment