Sound familiar?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to two cities where unrest has occurred and again condemned his detractors as “a handful of looters” and vandals.

In the southern city of Adana, where pro- and anti-government protesters clashed Saturday night, Erdogan greeted supporters from the top of a bus before lashing out at his opponents in the highly polarized country

If he wanted to defuse the situation, he might do well to acknowledge the protestor’s grievances rather than insult them.

Another nation’s leader said that Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, “is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “’friendships and the bonds of trust.’”

This article from Femen, the feminist protest group, just came across HotAir’s Headlines section:

For the past five years now, we here at the international women’s movement Femen have been waging an active campaign of resistance to the patriarchy in various corners of the world…

The most obvious illustration of the patriarchy is Islamic theocracy, a symbiosis of political and religious dictatorship…

At the heart of Islamism lies the enslavement of women based on control over their sexuality…

I hereby both promise and threaten to deploy an entire network of Femen activists in Arab countries. We will hound Islamic leaders across the globe, subjecting them to desolating criticism. We intend to hound spiritual leaders who are personally responsible for mistreating women…

Femen stands for “democracy, atheism, and sexuality” (per the article), and famously protested Vladimir Putin a couple of weeks ago (video here).

I do NOT endorse everything they believe or do[1], but what’s interesting here is the phenomenon of a left-wing protest group realizing that Islamism is a major threat to the freedom that they seek to live out, and declaring their intention to confront Islamism. We see that occasionally, but not often enough. Some other leftists go for safer targets (such as Christians who, in reality, pose no great threat to them).

These women may be in for some rough times, if they carry out their declaration. While not necessarily endorsing all that they do, let’s give them some credit for their new-found insight, and wish them health and safety! (more…)

I first became aware of Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP), in the spring of 2009 after the video of his speech attacking Gordon Brown went viral.  Over the past few years, he has continued to garner attention here, “across the pond,” for other speeches, and he has been a repeat guest on conservative talk radio and Fox News.

This past weekend, Anne Sorock at Legal Insurrection linked to his recent take down of the Occupy Movement from an appearance at the Oxford Union.

It is an impressive performance.  Hannan not only delivers a ringing endorsement of capitalism and an indictment of the bailouts, but he also explains the links between what the Occupy crowd says it wants and today’s economic woes, and he does so with a force and a clarity that is thrilling to witness.

Watching it, I was struck by how much Hannan reminded me of some of the clips I’ve seen of Margaret Thatcher’s appearances before the House of Commons during her time as Prime Minister, particularly this one from her last appearance.  I had to wonder if Hannan’s career might in time resemble Thatcher’s and if some day he will be the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

At the same time, though, I have to wonder: who are the Hannans here in the U.S.?   When Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate, I had hopes that he would provide such clear-spoken explanations of conservative economics on the campaign trail.  While it’s quite possible he did and the press did its best to muzzle them, I suspect that, in actuality, they were few and far between, as the Romney campaign seems to have been reluctant to hit the Obama administration too hard.  In the past few weeks, many conservatives have been talking about recent statements made by Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Rand Paul, and even the newly-minted Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.  So are any of these men likely to be our Hannans?  If not, then who might be?

For the past forty-eight hours or so, I have been printing and reading articles, saving links and collecting notes for a blog post on the Obama administration’s reaction to the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the murder of our ambassador there.  I had a basic notion of my general theme, then last night, reading Michael Barone’s excellent piece on Obama’s campaign from the past, found that he had nicely, succinctly summarized my argument:

Biden’s [denying "that the White House knew that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was attacked by terrorists rather than in a spontaneous demonstration prompted by an anti-Islam video"] statement was either an untruth or a confession of incompetence. If the State Department had the information, why didn’t the White House?

Emphasis added.  And that is the nub of the matter.  The State Department, the intelligence community knew that this was an act of terror  Moreover, State was aware that we needed to beef up security at our consulate in Tripoli.

So, let’s say (for the sake or argument) that no one in the White House was aware of information that was in the hands of other members of the administration.  These members of the administration, at the State Department — and in various intelligence agencies — surely saw other administration officials offering incorrect information to the public.  Didn’t they have a system in place to alert White House officials to their errors?

In this case, to borrow Barone’s expression, Biden’s statement was an incredible “confession of incompetence.”  With his denial, he acknowledge then that officials in the Obama administration failed to communicate important national security information to the Obama White House.

If this is their story, why then haven’t they announced a shake-up in the way the intelligence community communicates with the White House?  Why aren’t they asking the individuals who failed to communicate the information to step down? (more…)

In his recent piece on Syria, Leon Wieselter of the left-of-Cneter New Republic writes that “Obama has exposed the timidity, the relinquishment of position, at the heart of the multilateralism fetish: when we cannot act with others, we will not act alone.”

Comparing the administration’s reaction to Syria to its reaction to the uprising last year in Libya, Wieseltier asks if the United States have a foreign policy:

Of course it does. It never doesn’t. But what is it, exactly? It cannot consist in the absurd peregrinations of Hillary Clinton’s plane. (According to the State Department’s website, where you can play “Where is the Secretary?,” the travel stats of the wandering icon as of this writing were these: Total Travel Time: 1,951 hours, or 81.3 days. Total Mileage: 897,951. Countries Visited: 110. Travel Days: 376.) Our foreign policy is doctrine-free, and maybe even concept-free. It seems to consist in a series of local and regional managerialisms, a lot of problem-solving in which not many problems are solved. It is thoroughly lacking in boldness and flair. I see mainly diffidence and drift.

Read the whole thing. “Even on the back burner,” the left-of-center pundit opines, “the world burns.”

“The notion that the United States can lead from behind is pitiful,” writes this pundit, “the sorry concoction of an Obama administration that mistakes dulcet passivity for a foreign policy.”

This sounds like something from Charles Krauthammer, but comes instead from his Washington Post colleague Richard Cohen, a man not noted for his conservative views, indeed, a man whose views often echo those of the Beltway establishment.

Is this an indication that others within that establishment are beginning to question President Obama’s foreign policy prowess?  It seems the American people are beginning to lose faith in his leadership.  Ace alerts us to a poll showing “Obama losing 5 points on foreign policy, despite the media running interference for him.”  That survey, the NBC/WSJ poll, otherwise favorable to the Democrats, finds that “only 41 percent of independents approve of Obama’s foreign-policy handling, versus 53 percent who did so last month.”

One wonders what those numbers would look like if our friends in the legacy media focused on Obama’s record in office instead of Mitt Romney’s supposed “gaffes”, particularly in regard to the warnings U.S. officials had received about imminent attacks on our embassies and consulates in the Middle East.

Taking a page from Glenn Reynolds‘s recent practice, I post herewith one of Drudge‘s telling headline juxtapositions:

Ed Morrissey provides the details:

UN Ambassador Susan Rice insisted on Fox News Sunday that the attack on the consulate on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 was a spontaneous demonstration that just “spun out of control.”  Rice also doubled down on the administration’s claim that the violence is all about the video

Her views, Morrissey adds, come

as news to the Libyan government, which has now arrested 50 people in connection to the murders and the attack on the consulate.  Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf told CBS’ Face the Nation that the attack was planned for months by people who had infiltrated Libya from other nations specifically for the attack

Seems that many in the Obama administration determine their worldview not by the facts of what is happening in the world, but instead define it by their sense of the way things ought to be.

Either Ms. Rice is tremendously ill-informed or she refuses to let recent reports out of Libya sway her view of events.

RELATED:  Obama’s alternative Middle East reality.

Back in 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that the day he was inaugurated, the world would look at America differently and the Muslim world would be less hostile to us:

[Because I could not find a way to embed the video without it going on autoplay, I removed it from the post and encourage you to follow the link above to watch it and hear another of Mr. Obama's lofty (and unrealized) promises.]

Once again, Obama’s words as candidate have little relation to his record as president.  The continuing riots in the Arab world, Michael Barone contends undermine

. . . perhaps fatally, one of the underlying premises of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and of his campaign now for reelection: that electing this man president will make the peoples of the world love America and Americans. I make a similar point in my as yet unpublished Sunday Examiner column, which should be accessible here when it goes online. The rioters in Cairo expressly reviled Obama and hailed Osama. They hate America and Americans. They hate our way of life and our freedoms. Obama’s election has made no difference; his campaign bragging about dispatching Osama bin Laden has perhaps got them hating us more. One powerful argument for reelecting him is being refuted by what we see on our television screens.

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.  ”Events in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere are not cooperating with Obama’s vision“, quips Barone’s Examiner colleague Byron York. “Must be the movie.”

* (more…)

“Imagine“, writes Richard Grenell

. . . if The New York Times and other media outlets had sent their foreign affairs reporters on Gov. Mitt Romney’s trip to England, Israel and Poland. Instead of sending political reporters who report on politics, the foreign affairs reporters might have given us serious reporting on the international issues raised when the Republican nominee for president traveled abroad.

No wonder these folks focused on Mr. Romney’s supposed gaffes.  Grenell offers some details of the legacy media’s focus on those gaffes:

Like a high school nerd not being invited to the rich kids’ party, Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker wrote a whole piece titled, “Romney bans media from Jerusalem fundraiser, violating pre-established protocol.”

Rucker later had to write a followup piece titled, “Romney opens Jerusalem fundraiser to press, reversing earlier decision.” His coverage of Romney’s trip was silly.  A review of Rucker’s writings on the Washington Post website did not show one stand-alone story on Romney’s Jerusalem announcement, but several stories highlighting what he called trip “gaffes.”

Read the whole thing.  Do wonder about the legacy media’s disinterest in actual Republican policies.  And their perpetual patrolling for Republican gaffes.

No wonder so many people dependent on such journals as the Washington Post and New York Times for their news have such a low opinion of Republicans.

A step in the right direction:

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is quitting as international peace envoy for Syria in the face of an armed rebellion against President Bashar Assad whose violence shows no sign of abating after 17 months of strife.

“For the correspondents covering Romney’s overseas trip,” write Jim Geraghty this morning in The Campaign Spot, “the big story of the day is likely to be one of Romney’s aides losing his cool and swearing at reporters. (It’s a good thing those reporters never covered Rahm Emanuel.)”  Yesterday, memeorandum dwelled not on how our Israeli allies warned to his speech, but how Palestinians who won’t commit to peace panned it.

Today, memeorandum leads with reports of the aide losing his cool, following that up by linking an article full of anonymous sources telling us how horrible, no good and very bad Mr. Romney’s trip was.  Yet, to those not beholden to Obama administration talking points, as John Hinderaker observes,

By any reasonable standard, Romney’s trip has been successful. Yet press coverage has been unrelentingly negative. This AP story sums up the press’s angle well: “Another hiccup? Romney’s foreign trip not smooth.” To hear the AP tell it, Romney has committed one blunder after another . . .

Let’s see, the presumptive Republican nominee delivered a well-received speech in Jerusalem, and another thoughtful address in Poland while receiving a warm welcome and quasi-endorsement by one of the great figures of the century just concluded.

Instead of focusing on the actual words Mr. Romney spoke and the ideas he conveyed, our friends in the legacy media have focused on one undiplomatic (but accurate) remark Romney made about the London Olympics and an angry outburst by a Romney aide.

And these same folks bemoan that Americans are paying less attention to the issues.

UPDATE:  Asking, “why exactly was Romney’s overseas trip such a ‘public relations disaster’?“, HotAir’s Erika Johnsen quotes Romney himself who opined that Obama’s friends in the legacy media would “try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.”

No, the trip wasn’t a public relations disaster; the legacy media just choose to portray it as much.  If they spent half the time on Obama’s gaffes as they do on Romney’s, that Democrat, like his Vice President, would be known as a “gaffe machine.”  And Biden has earned that honorific even with the legacy media all but ignoring his gaffes.

Yahoo! led its news this morning (PST) with this headline: Kofi Annan: Syria efforts are failing:

Special U.N. envoy Kofi Annan acknowledged in an interview published Saturday that the international community’s efforts to find a political solution to the escalating violence in Syria have failed.

Does it strike others as odd or just par for the course that the United Nations would designate its failed former Secretary General as peace envoy — and that he would fail to resolve a stalemate between warring parties?

Seems almost emblematic of what Annan’s beloved U.N. has become.

That thought came to my mind shortly after I read this:

At the tail end of his 90 minute meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev Monday, President Obama said that he would have “more flexibility” to deal with controversial issues such as missile defense, but incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to give him “space.”

It is good to see the legacy media give this story as much coverage as they have as it shows Obama for the showman that he is, masquerading as a moderate, yet governing in an entirely different direction on foreign as well as domestic policy.

I do hope that on January 20, 2013, Obama gets the flexibility he longs for, the flexibility ex-presidents enjoy.

More often that not, our friends in the legacy media are hesitant to report/investigate the president’s “gaffes” in front on open mikes as law professor William A. Jacobson reminds us of those the legacy “media won’t release, like CBS refusing to release the full audio of Obama’s comments about Paul Ryan, and the LA Times holding back the Khalidi tape.”

John McCain minces no words in taking the president to task for his remarks to Mr. Medvedev.

A couple of thoughts (which I’ll try to flesh out if I get a moment, but may not as one of my nephews and a cousin are visiting LA right now).  First, a question:  what does it say about Obama that he’s oblivious to the fact that his candid remarks could be picked up on an open mike (did he really think the media would cover for him?).  And a thought:  striking the leader of a democratic republic would tell the leader of a nation which has banned a number of political parties that he can act differently once he no longer needs concern himself with making his case to the people he supposedly serves.

UPDATE:  ”One message to the voters at home,” quips Jim Geraghty, “an entirely different message to leaders abroad… from a president who declared in 2008 that his true rival in the presidential race was cynicism itself.”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Benjamin in WeHo offers some insightful quips:

1. When a Russian politician admits to deceiving voters to win an election, it’s “managing democracy.” In the USA, it’s accidentally speaking into a live microphone.

2. Contrast Reagan walking out on Gorbachev over missile defense to Obama lying to American voters about it.

Read the rest.

UP-UPDATE:   Over at the National Review, Peter Kirsanow offers:

What, precisely, are “all these issues” (besides missile defense) that President Obama plans to solve in his second term? Why has he shared them with the Russian president but not the American people?

Why the reference to his “last election?” Would he not be able to do what he wants if he had to stand for reelection?

Emphasis added.

Just caught Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech tonight to AIPAC.  It was a powerful address when he reminded his listeners that Israel was the only nation in the Middle East where minorities, including Arabs, have civil rights.

When he defined the tyranny that reigns in Iran, he pointed out that Iran hangs gays.  We must always remember that gay men and lesbians can live openly, live freely in nations like Israel, but in such places like Iran, their freedom is not existent and their lives could readily become forfeit to a radical regime.

Earlier today, Bruce reported that one of the truly great liberators, a voice of  moral clarity on a confused continent, passed.

Just moments ago, on Facebook, Glenn Reynolds reported that on the other side of the Eurasian landmass, a man who was very much the opposite of Vaclev Havel met his reward:  ”Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s mercurial and enigmatic leader, has died.”

Havel was one of the first leaders of a nation that has long languished under communism.  Kim is a leader of one of the last nations still beholden to the communist ideology.  For the sake of the people on the northern half of the Korean peninsula, let us hope the regime he headed will suffer the fate of the regime Havel helped bring down.

Remember back in the early years of this century how many on the left — and in the Democratic Party– faulted then-President George W. Bush for going it alone on foreign policy. Despite the fact that this good man had developed strong relationships with the leaders of a great variety of nations, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain (until 2004), Australia, Poland and Denmark to name but a few, his critics all focused on the opposition generated by the then-President of France.

That man, a Monsieur J. Chirac famously rebuked European nations working with Bush on liberating Iraq for losing a “good opportunity to keep quiet”.  The problem was not that Bush did not forge strong relationships with our allies, but that Chirac (and members of his government) actively sought to frustrate them.

Seems like the Frenchman has gotten his comeuppance. According to Glenn Reynolds, the immediate past president of the Fifth Republic has been

CONVICTED OF CORRUPTION CHARGES. “Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995, is the first former French head of state to be convicted since Marshal Philippe Petain, the leader of the wartime Vichy regime, was found guilty in 1945 of collaborating with the Nazis.”

George W Bush could not be reached for comment.

Even the Huffington Post is taking note of the failures of Obama’s foreign policy:

Russia threatened on Wednesday to deploy missiles to target the U.S. missile shield in Europe if Washington fails to assuage Moscow’s concerns about its plans, a harsh warning that reflected deep cracks in U.S.-Russian ties despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to “reset” relations with the Kremlin.

Seems the more we watch this president and his team stumble, the greater appreciation we have for his predecessor and his team.  It looks like the challenges we faced abroad were not so much due to that man’s alleged incompetence, but instead to the particular nature of those very challenges, the complex situations and the particular players.

We face, as one blogger noted, a world of trouble out there, problems that a purportedly tongued-tied Republican did not create, problems that a supposedly smart silver-tongued Democrat cannot fix.

No wonder our media are so eager to downplay the Spanish election:

Voters vented their rage on the Socialists, who led the country from boom to bust in seven years in charge. With 5 million people out of work, the European Union’s highest jobless rate, Spain is heading into its second recession in four years.

. . . .

The PP won the biggest majority for any party in three decades, taking 186 seats in the 350-seat lower house, according to official results with 98 percent of the vote counted.

Emphasis added.  Boom to bust seems to be the story of what happens when governments increase their meddling in the economy.

Seems Instapundit is a better source for news than either AOL or Yahoo!  Glenn reports that “SPAIN’S SOCIALISTS lose in a landslide. Spanish voters, tired of war, got rid of Aznar and brought in people promising hope and change. Now they’re broke, and the Socialists are out.”

Now, this seems to be pretty big news.  A major European industrial nation where the Socialists won big back in ’04, seen then by some as harbinger of George W. Bush’s coming fall, especially as it followed on the heels of terrorist attacks in the nation’s capital.

Caught that news after having scanned the home pages of AOL and Yahoo!  Went back to double check as that is something I would have caught.  And wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t miss anything. It was they who missed the story.  Guess it doesn’t fit the narrative:

AOL:

Didn’t even make their rotating headlines.

Yahoo!: (more…)

“The most underreported story in the Middle East“, writes Jennifer Rubin

. . . is the suffering inflicted on Christians in Arab lands. “So while Christians are thriving in Israel they are under intense pressure in many neighboring Muslim countries. Europeans, and American enemies of Israel like the famous professors Walt and Mearsheimer, most often attribute American support for Israel to the ‘Jewish lobby.’ But American Christians know more about the Middle East than these supposedly sophisticated critics, and are aware of the fate of their coreligionists. They see Christianity free to grow in Israel, and faced with violence and suppression nearby. They see Christians free to worship in Israel but fleeing all too many Arab lands. There’s no need for complicated political science analyses here, much less bigotry: those seeking to understand why American Christians overwhelmingly support Israel should study the treatment and the fate of Christianity in the Middle East.”

Wonder when all those concerned for the victims of what they deem Israeli apartheid will stand up for the Christians suffering under tyrannical non-Jewish regimes.