Poor President Obama must be very Sad

ObamaCare is only one of His (and our) problems.

Much has already been written about the wonders of ObamaCare and there seems to be little worthwhile to add. Well, there’s this and of course this:

And this:

Maybe He should just move on and issue executive decrees to nationalize all facilities where medical services are offered and to draft all physicians and other health care providers into a domestic peace corpse.

He seems not to realize that His (and our) domestic problems are largely His own fault.

Continued low employment and increased incivility are problems but, of course, President Obama does a poor job (if He tries at all) of connecting problems with His own actions and policies. Many in the “legitimate” media take their cues from Him.

The extreme left, in an effort protect Obama from his own inexperience, classifies objection to Obama’s policies as racism. The sycophant media, largely led by MSNBC, can’t fathom a world where everyone doesn’t love Obama as much as they do. Therefore, they conclude, the opposition must be because he’s black. Turnabout is fair play. Mr. Obama, Harry Reid and many other left-wing extremists have hammered Senator Ted Crus, a Latino, with all manner of names and insults. If our criticism of Obama is racist, so too is theirs.

“Justice for me and not for thee,” it’s the Obama mantra. It’s apparent to any objective watcher that the current Occupier of the Oval Office is projecting his own ideological bigotry on those he perceives as his enemies. What’s not dawned on the campaigner-in-chief is that his opposition is largely of his own making. It will not occur to a man, who largely is in it for himself and his legacy, that Washington’s dysfunction is as a result of his polices and lack of governance. Obama decries the Tea Party, a movement that would not exist if not for his extreme leftist ideological polices. If Obama seeks to lay blame, he need only look in the mirror. There would be no Batman without a Joker. There would be no Tea Party without Obama.

I doubt the claim in the second paragraph that “there would be no Tea Party without Obama,” because even were there a Republican President — Governor Romney for example — the Tea Party movement would still be around and would still be seeking more conservative policies; as it should.

His other klusterdunks are irritating lots of foreigners.

Saudi Arabia seems to be getting disenchanted.

DOHA – Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief has said the kingdom will make a “major shift” in dealings with the United States in protest at its perceived inaction over the Syria war and its overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan told European diplomats that Washington had failed to act effectively on the Syria crisis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was growing closer to Tehran, and had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011, the source said.

It was not immediately clear if Prince Bandar’s reported statements had the full backing of King Abdullah.

Iran and Russia seem to be getting even closer.

In his four-day trip to Tehran, Russian Air Force Chief Gen. Viktor Bondarev and his hosts, Brig. Gen. Hassan Shasafi and other senior Iranian military chiefs, laid the groundwork for a series of agreements to upgrade their military ties to a level unprecedented in their past relations. debkafile’s military and Iranian sources report that Iran is deliberately accentuating those ties as a message to the Western powers that if they give the Islamic Republic a hard time over its nuclear program, it will go all the way to a full-dress defense pact with Russia.

Moscow has its own reasons for being keen to expand its military ties with Tehran:

1. Signing defense accords and arms transactions with Iran will give Russia its first serious military foothold in the Persian Gulf;

2. Moscow is not only seeking to compete with the US military presence in the Gulf but also displace America and China in the weapons markets of the Middle East.

3. Major Russian-Iranian arms deals will be a precedent for important weapons transactions brokered by Saudi Arabia with Egypt. Moscow sees the shape of a weapons-trading triangle that could be exploited in the future for Russia to serve in the role of mediator between Riyadh and Tehran.

These are long term strategic goals for the Kremlin.

Oh well. Compare and contrast Presidents Obama and Putin.

Egypt also seems to be turning more to Russia.

Egypt is looking to Russia to supply it with arms now that the US has frozen much of its military aid to the Egyptians, Israeli television reported Friday night.

The “historic achievement,” under which the US brought Egypt into its orbit in the years since the 1979 Camp David Israel-Egypt peace treaty, is about to “go down the drain,” the Channel 2 report said.

It referred to comments earlier this week by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, who said ties between Cairo and Washington were in “turmoil” and told CNN that Egypt would have to “find other sources” to meet its national security needs.

By “other sources,” said the TV report, Fahmy was referring to Russia, with whom Egypt was now looking to conclude a major arms deal.

This would represent a major change of orientation for Egypt, since its entire army had been built on US equipment for the past three decades.

The news came four days after reports that Israel had argued “directly and bluntly” with the Obama administration against US aid cuts to Egypt, telling Washington it was making “a strategic error” in reducing financial assistance to Cairo in the wake of the military’s ouster of president Mohammed Morsi.

France is irritated by U.S. snooping on French people.

The White House conceded on Monday that revelations about how its intelligence agencies have intercepted enormous amounts of French phone traffic raised “legitimate questions for our friends and allies”.

In a statement released after a phone call between Barack Obama and his counterpart, François Hollande, the White House made one of its strongest admissions yet about the diplomatic impact of the disclosures by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The French government had earlier summoned the US ambassador in Paris on Monday to demand an urgent explanation over claims that the National Security Agency had engaged in widespread phone and internet surveillance of French citizens.

The French daily Le Monde published details from the NSAwhistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting the NSA had been intercepting French phone traffic on what it termed “a massive scale”.

“The president and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press – some of which have distorted our activities, and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed,” the White House said in a statement.

“The president made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share. The two presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels.”

Will President Obama ever get around to rethinking the NSA’s spying in America?

Mexico is also irritated that the NSA snooped on its former President, Felipe Calderon, and others.

Der Spiegel said in May 2010, an NSA division known as “Tailored Access Operations” reported it had gained access to then-president Calderon’s email account, and turned his office into a “lucrative” source of information.

It said details of the alleged NSA hacking of Mr Calderon’s account were contained in a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Mr Snowden’s leaked information has prompted angry recriminations against Washington in Latin America, particularly Brazil.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA succeeded in hacking a central server in the network of the Mexican presidency that was also used by other members of Calderon’s cabinet, yielding a trove of information on diplomatic and economic matters.

Without citing by name the German report, which was picked up by a number of Mexican media, the Mexican foreign ministry condemned the latest allegations about “suspected acts of spying carried out by the National Security Agency.”

“This practice is unacceptable, illegal and against Mexican and international law,” the ministry said in a statement.

Brazil is similarly offended.

UNITED NATIONS — Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday delivered a stinging rebuke of electronic espionage by the National Security Agency, telling a gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly that American eavesdropping constitutes “a breach of international law and an affront” to Brazil’s sovereignty.

America’s spying efforts pose a threat to democracy throughout the world, Rousseff said, as she proposed that the United Nations establish legal guidelines to prevent “cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war.”

“Without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy,” Rousseff said. And “without respect for [a nation’s] sovereignty, there is no basis for proper relations among nations.”

Those are just a few of the foreign policy matters about which President Obama should be worried, at least to the extent that his brilliant advisers have told him about them. Notwithstanding all of His problems, He is still a nice little President because He tells us lots of happy stories. How could we ask for more? Wouldn’t that make us seem ungrateful and racist?

Please, Great One, tell us more stories

UPDATE

First Democrat asks that the ObamaCare individual mandate be postponed. Nah. Let’s keep it and let the ObamaPeople suffer. They wanted it.