"Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become.” Brooke Foss Westcott, British Bishop
March 19, 2014
Linda Case Gibbons
It’s not just the president who looks foolish.
It’s not just our country that Obama has made to look foolish.
It’s also the media in the United States. They’ve looked ridiculous for more than eight years, ever since they met Obama.
And the world is watching.
There are stats, what the "journalists” at CBS, NBC, ABC and The New York Times cover and what they don’t.
If it’s anything about Obama except where he’s vacationing or his TV talk show appearances, they don’t cover it. They are united in making sure his feelings are never hurt.
If it’s someone on Obama’s enemy list, then that’s a different story.
In the first 24 hours, the big three networks ran 34 minutes 28 seconds for Christ Christie’s BridgeGate. The IRS targeting Tea Party groups? Two minutes and eight seconds from July 1 of last year to the present.
If you’re an investigative reporter today who insists on investigating, what can you expect? You get your computer hacked and less air time on CBS. Eventually you do all you can to just get out of your contract.
Forget presidential briefings, this president learns what’s going on in his own administration from his media. He’s said so, usually when confronted with questions about one of his scandals: He didn’t know. He read about it when you read about it.
So as naturally as night follows day, it all starts to make sense. If it isn’t reported in the mainstream media, to Obama, it hasn’t happened, especially if it’s reported on FOX News.
Unfortunately what Obama doesn’t realize is that the rest of the world gets the real news.
This is journalism in Obama’s America. This is what the world sees as America’s "free press.”
It allows Obama to claim he does not know how bad things are. His responses are always consistent: It’s all manufactured. It’s because he’s black. Obamacare horror stories are all Republican lies and all his administration’s scandals are phony.
And Putin’s lovin’ it!
He knows a state-controlled media when he sees it.
He knows what it means when a government is curtailing the gun rights of its citizens.
He knows the implications of cut-backs on American military funding especially when there are cut backs on the people’s militia, the National Guard.
He knows what it means when government spies on its citizens and its journalists, when government will not prosecute those they favor and persecutes those they feel threaten their political agenda.
These are tactics familiar to Putin. He’s used them all his life, except he does it bare-chested, wrestling a bear.
Obama does it, during a photo op on the phone in the Oval Office while wearing mom jeans, to quote Sarah Palin.
Unlike Obama, Putin has a fierce national pride. He also knows Obama’s not that much "into” America. He had only to read Obama’s Cairo speech to know. He had only to watch when Benghazi went down and this president did nothing to know. To know that whatever threatens America, Obama will do nothing.
That gives the Russian president the advantage.
How do you think Obama measured up as a world leader when he won the Politifacts Lie of the Year Award and the biggest Pinocchio of 2013 for lying to the American people – you know "if you like your coverage…”?
How do you think Hillary Clinton’s performance as secretary of state went down around the world when she ignored four dead Americans in Benghazi and accomplished little more than logging millions of miles while in office?
What do you think the world thinks of her replacement?
Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry cut loose the Monroe Doctrine! During a speech before the Organization of American States, Kerry declared that "The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
The Doctrine? It states that efforts by European nations to colonize or interfere with states in North or South American would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention.
It’s been in effect for 170 years.
So this is what the world sees when it looks at Obama’s America:
The American people busy trying to keep up with their president’s antics, not able to be as careful as they should be about their rights, not balancing their nation’s budget, not reigning in a president who leads from behind, but power grabs in violation of the U.S. Constitution and American laws whenever he can.
For Putin, the perfect president is in office and he recognizes it for the opportunity it is.
While the Ukraine exploded and masked soldiers in unmarked uniforms patrolled the streets of Cremia, Obama decided it was the perfect time to hawk Obamacare to the young ‘uns on "Between Two Ferns,” and let Zach Galifianakis humiliate him on a second rate internet comedy show. It wasn’t funny at all.
Obama’s appearance was as bad as laughing at a funeral. Oh, that’s right, he’s already done that.
While this president admonishes Putin for violating international law, the world knows Obama violates federal and his country’s Constitution every day of the week.
So while Obama is filling out his March Madness brackets and getting ready for his next stint on the Ellen Show to dance and plug Obamacare, Putin has plenty of time to plan what he’ll do next. He knows America’s president is playing, not paying attention.
This week while Putin was annexing Cremia, Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to Poland to reassure our allies.
He sent the only other man who can top Obama in terms of public gaffes at important occasions -- to Poland to reassure our allies.
While there, Biden told the audience how proud he was to be chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time when Poland was admitted to NATO.
But he wasn’t chairman.
It didn’t make America look good. Just like Hillary’s RESET button. Just like Obama’s empty threats. We look like a country run by sloppy, indifferent leaders.
Putin did not like nor respect Obama from the get-go. Photos of them together make that painfully clear. From the outset, Putin had Obama pegged as a lightweight not worth spending time on.
And it will only get worse.
Sadly, since Obama has been at the helm, America has declined and become a far cry from the country Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke about in 2011 in her address before the United States Congress.
"For my parents’ generation the defining image of America was the landing at Normandy. Your "boys of Pointe-du-Hoc” risking everything to help free the world. For my own generation, the defining image of America was the landing on the moon…I’ll always remember thinking that day: Americans can do anything.
"Americans helped free the world of my parents’ generation. Americans inspired the world of my own youth. I stand here and I see the same brave and free people today. I believe you can do anything still. There is a reason the world always looks to America.”
Hold the line, America.