"How cool is this? It is spectacular."
I'm happy to know that you're having a swell time, Mr. President
On the other hand, Maureen Dowd, in her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Is It WWIII or Just Twitter?," seems less than thrilled with the Obama's excursion to this prehistoric monument. Alluding to the president's determination that the nightly news and the social media are responsible for the feeling that "the world is falling apart," Dowd writes:
"His 'bucket list' visit Friday to the alien-looking Stonehenge was the perfect backdrop for his strange pattern of detachment, and his adamantine belief that his Solomonic wisdom and Spocky calm help him resist the siren songs to disaster.
. . . .
In some situations, panic is a sign of clear thinking. Reality is reality, whether it’s tweeted or not. And the truth doesn’t always set you free. The mind and the will don’t always act in concert. You can know a lot of things and still not act. And as we saw with the Iraq invasion, you can not know a lot of things and still act.
Bill Clinton couldn’t stop biting his lip. Now we’d kill to see Obama baring his teeth."
Well, that's not entirely true, Maureen. Obama became furious when Netanyahu refused to accept the mediation of Qatar, the world's premier financier of terror, in Israel's war with Hamas.
On the other hand, Obama has been singularly incapable of bumping heads with Assad, Khamenei or Putin.
Complain about Obama's detachment and timidity? What good will it do? Obama is deeply ensconced in his comfort zone, which cannot be breached by beheadings or invasions.
According to Dowd, "Obama never complained about a frenzied social media when it served his political purposes." In fact, Obama is the progeny of the nightly news and the social media, and given his inability to accept responsibility or blame, it is hardly surprising that he is now turning against his progenitors.
Not all of that oil money finances terrorism. The recent $11B arms deal that the US signed with Qatar is pocket change compared with what the Al Thani dynasty is spending on buying influence at US based think tanks and universities.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LedeSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Yes, what's happened to the NYT? I glanced at the article and it seems to be normal, journalistic. Is there any chance it will stop being an organ/anti-Semitic rag and will become a paper?
ReplyDeleteI have my perspective and have seen the called "think tanks" as Institutes of Propaganda for a long time. Frankly, I don't know how they can be viewed differently.