Power and ego warp judgment — President Obama's belated temper tantrums with Israel and Russia

© 2016 Peter Free

 

29 December 2016

 

 

Silly?

 

President Obama had 8 years to meaningfully confront Israel's illegal settlement of Palestinian territories. Instead, he waited until his last figurative 5 minutes to do so. He had the United States abstain from a United Nations Security Council vote that criticized Israel's settlement policy. Then he directed Secretary of State John Kerry to give the Israelis a lecture about peace-making.

 

These gestures might have meant something (in a strategic sense) earlier in the Administration. And they certainly would have been more believable, had the President not months earlier approved the largest ever military aid package ever to the Zionist State.

 

Now, with rabidly pro-Israel President-elect Donald Trump just days away from taking office, President Obama's move is strategically meaningless. It is also displays childish rudeness toward the incoming Republican Party commander in chief.

 

Jackassery is probably the best way to term the President's belated nose-thumbing.

 

 

And short-sightedly sticking it to the Russians

 

Americans, being as strategically inept and hypocritically self-righteous as we characteristically are, love to blame the Russians for the Devil's reported appearance on Earth.

 

We have now officially blamed them for giving our 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump at Hillary Clinton's expense. Indeed, we have fingered President Vladimir Putin as the head miscreant in this allegedly unbearable interference with American sovereignty.

 

In retaliation, President Obama now wants to impose still more sanctions on the Russian Federation.

 

Apparently, the fact that all the Russians did (if they did it) was to expose American duplicity in domestic politics seems to have escaped everyone's attention. The real bad guys were our own politicians. The Russian Federation, even if it did hack American political emails, was doing nothing that the United States doesn't do every day.

 

 

Woefully skewed strategic priorities

 

The Obama Administration has said nothing meaningfully heated about China's uncontroverted physical capture of an American military water drone in international waters. The Chinese Navy physically pirated US military property on the high seas and skated without any receiving any payback whatsoever.

 

This is curiously back-ass-wards Obama Administration strategizing.

 

We pick on the economically and militarily much less threatening Russian competitor at the expense of letting the globe's most meaningful threat to American hegemony escape without so much as a metaphorical stick in the eye for its much more blatantly provocative act.

 

Do we think that the Eastern Hemisphere did not notice?

 

 

The moral? — One fool departs as another enters

 

With his last minutely silly shenanigans, President Obama seems only interested in tricking future historians into thinking that he was nobly admirable.

 

And incoming President Trump seems to think that scuttling republican democracy in exchange for his doctrines of Unpredictability and Unrestrained Inequity is a manifestation of wisdom.

 

Happy New Year.