Obama the “negotiator”
Marco Rubio, among others, thinks that Obama is a bad negotiator:
I don’t know what his intentions are. His foreign policy is at a minimum naive, and perhaps even truly counterproductive to the future of democracy in the region.
Just last week we imposed sanctions on human rights violators in Venezuela, but the people who are supporting the Venezuelans in conducting those violations — literally the Cubans have taken over the Venezuela government, we’re actually lifting sanctions on them.
How absurd is that? And it’s just par for the course, all of these tyrants around the world know the United States can be had. At a minimum I will say this, the president is the worst negotiator we’ve had as president since at least Jimmy Carter and perhaps in the modern era.
But Rubio is wrong; Obama is not a bad negotiator at all. He is a faux negotiator.
And perhaps Rubio even knows this (the hint being “at a minimum”) but feels he can’t say it or he will be labeled a kook.
But I can say it: Obama’s intentions here were to prop up the Castro government and concede to them, and the negotiations were an excuse to do that. There were no reluctant concessions on the part of Obama, there were eager concessions.
As Rich Lowry writes, it’s not so much about whether it was time to loosen economic sanctions or not (reasonable people differ on this), it’s about how it was done:
The rest of Obama’s sweeping revisions ”” diplomatic relations and the loosening of every economic sanction he can plausibly change on his own ”” are freely granted, no questions asked. It is quid with no pro quo. Even if you oppose the isolation of Cuba, this is not a good trade.
After waiting out 10 other U.S. presidents, the Castro regime finally hit the jackpot in Obama…
Every dictator around the world must be waiting anxiously for a call or a postcard from Obama. The leader of the free world comes bearing gifts and understanding. He is willing to overlook human-rights abuses. And his idea of burnishing his legacy is to clinch deals with his country’s enemies.
Anyone who has observed Obama over the years ought to know that. It is not subtle, it is obvious. Whether it be Iran, the Afghan Taliban (Bergdahl swap), or Cuba, this is his m.o. for “negotiating” (wink, wink) with tyrants.
I was saying to a friend the other day that comparing Obama to Carter is an insult to Carter, who was a liberal but a patriot with good intentions. Obama is not a patriot and does not have good intentions, unless your idea of what’s good for the world is to bring America down, hurt its allies, and help its enemies. There are many people on the left who believe exactly that.
What I want to know is this: what is Obama’s end game? What does he want from all this discourse with our enemies?
Its not that you can make a deal, its that you can get something in exchange for it… obama makes great deals if you dont want anything, while the others he deals with gets lots o stuff…
janetoo:
The transformation of America, just as he said. He wants to transform it by weakening it and its allies, and strengthening its enemies (particularly those on the left), and he wants to do it so thoroughly that there’s no turning back.
It’s easier to wreck than to build. A president whose attitude towards this country and its power is malignant, who has the support of the press (as Obama has most of the time), and who is immune from worrying about any election consequences (which he is now), can do a lot of damage in the two years he has remaining.
Yes. It is very scary. I just don’t understand how he/they can look at what the historical record of socialism and communism is and want that for this country. All while knowing he will rake in millions, possibly billions when he leaves office. I can’t understand it. But, after yesterday, what must be going on in secret sickens me.
Sometimes I think we give Obama too much credit. He wouldn’t be able to transform America if she hadn’t already been teetering on the edge. He was just the right guy at the right time. If he was as talented as people make him out to be, what he is doing wouldn’t be so obvious (to those not willfully blind).
“what is Obama’s end game?”
The end game is the establishment of conditions that prevent America from acting effectively on the world stage. Obama emphatically agrees with leftist financier George Soros; “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”
“What does he want from all this discourse with our enemies?”
The discourse is misdirection and political cover to obscure his goal; to strengthen our enemies. Obama considers all of Western Civilization to be oppressors of the rest of the world. Obama is a racist, Marxist demagogue who, along with most of the far left, especially hates America because it is Western Civilization’s foremost champion.
Pundit Monica Crowley covers some of it;
America’s Fundamental Transformation Under Obama Oct. 19, 2013
I forgot to add that he is also a dope smoking, cocaine snorting slacker that spends his mornings watching ESPN. But he’s pretty good at reading the prompter.
KLSmith:
I completely agree that Obama took advantage of already-existing weaknesses, many of them the result of the left’s Gramscian march through our institutions (education, media, entertainment, religion, etc.).
But he is also politically brilliant, or at least very very smart. Politics is his focus and almost nothing else, and in that regard he has finessed his opposition nearly every time.
Even the 2014 election meant absolutely nothing to him in terms of his ability to wreak havoc. He has understood that a very audacious president can trump Congress every time unless they have the votes to override his veto. Most of the time when government is split and the president is one party and Congress another, Congress lacks a supermajority. Previous presidents in that position have been more interested than Obama in public opinion and catering to it, in part because of fear of impeachment, in part because they are patriots, in part because they care about the election prospects of fellow party members, in part because of fear of the press’s criticism. Obama has no such reservations, and thereby exposed a weakness in our entire system of government (a weakness the Founders realized was there, but which was unavoidable).
And by the way, what Obama is doing doesn’t seem to be obvious to the vast majority of people.
…yet.
It’s going to be a long two years…
Janetoo Says:
“the historical record of socialism and communism”
The evidence of which is immaterial, especially to scientific materialism.
Karl Marx (Fundamental Transformationist) said:
“Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.”
Whittaker Chambers observed that what the philosophers had wrought was “religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolution of the mind”. What communism sought to wreak was the overthrow of same and to torque the weakness and irresolution. What history has shown was not that communism had failed but had succeeded. Where it is still extent, for those over whom it still holds sway — Obama — it continues to do what Neo addresses — not build, but demolish. Obama acts on that principle – demolish; has he not done all he could to destroy “religion (Christianity), morality, truth, law, honor, and I’d throw in the family, and national comity.
No true communist had ever had a better world in mind; only a better pretext for destruction and murder.
Neo: we will have to continue to disagree on O’s brilliance. What ultimately matters is what he is doing, not his score on an IQ test.
I do think think some people need/want to see him as fiendishly brilliant – to help ease their pain at what they see happening to their country. It’s bad enough without acknowledging it is being done by a petty, juvenile, vindictive clown rather than an evil genius.
“I just don’t understand how he/they can look at what the historical record of socialism and communism is and want that for this country.” Janetoo
Once you’re willing to reject critical aspects of the reality within which we all exist, i.e. human nature and the operative and economic laws of reality, denial of the historical record of socialism and communism is easy. They see what they want to see and no amount of reason, logic and fact can persuade because their motivation is rooted in anger at reality itself (God).
“Sometimes I think we give Obama too much credit. He wouldn’t be able to transform America if she hadn’t already been teetering on the edge.” KLSmith
He’s the left’s frontman, so he gets the attention. The left with its “long march through the institutions” has been preparing the ground for more than a century.
Consider this Woodrow Wilson quote for confirmation; “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association 1909
Obama has a massive amount of help and the populace has certainly been prepared to welcome him. So much so that he still enjoys a 40% approval rate.
Much of what he’s doing isn’t obvious, for instance the exposure of his ‘memoranda’ just came to light. But certainly he’s assisted in that duplicity by a stupefying amount of willful blindness.
However, there is no front in which Obama is not moving to gravely damage America. A mere vindictive clown would not be so comprehensive in his mendacity. Obama’s mendacity has a strategic purpose.
I had written off Marco Rubio as another RINO but his leadership on this issue is impressive. If he runs for president, I’m willing to give Rubio another look. He speaks well and seems to have a well developed moral compass.
Many Americans are reluctant to accept the truth that the POTUS is our enemy. Thank-fully, Neo gets it.
KLSmith:
The brilliance I’m talking about is not general brilliance nor does it have anything to do with an IQ test (although I’m pretty sure Obama has a relatively high IQ, although not necessarily a brilliant one). It is political in nature. He is interested in politics and that is his special gift, not just in terms of winning but in terms of sensing what he can get away with and what he can’t. He’s brilliant like some of the characters in The Godfather are brilliant (or at least very very smart).
I think that is obvious at this point.
Obama also enjoyed some good luck in this — that luck being named Pope Francis:
“The support of Pope Francis and the support of the Vatican was important to us, given the esteem with which both the American and Cuban people hold the Catholic Church, and in particular Pope Francis who has a substantial history in Latin America and is the first pope to be chosen from Latin America,” a senior administration official said.
Neo: you make very valid points, I just have a different point of view. When the man gives a speech explaining that the guy whose church he sat in for twenty years isn’ the guy he thought he knew and maybe he didn’t listen closely anyway and is then hailed as having given the next Gettysburg Address …… excuse me that doesn’t take any special political acumen to realize you have just been given a free pass from the media.
I think a truly brilliant politician would have been more subtle and persuasive and had a strong majority of the country with him beyond his first weeks in office.
Communism, socialism, National Socialism, and a number of other theories were developed to solve the problem set out by JJ Rouseau, the destruction of the bourgeoisie. That’s why Communism seeks to wreck. That’s the ultimate goal. That’s why they talk about the state eventually “withering away.”
It is also why the Left is so comfortable with Islam. They see, rightly, that Islam is, at base, unstable. Islamists do not believe in nation states. The caliphate that they seek would have ideological cohesion, but not political cohesion past the first few years. The first Caliphate worked out the same way. The desired ideological cohesion is fragile, at best, to wit the existence of Shia and Sunni Islam.There are plenty of other factions within Islam, all just waiting to start something. The very idea of agreeing to disagree is truly anathema, since tolerance is not just seen by opponents as weakness, but by all of them as a lack of conviction. We say that one who truly believes in something might willingly die for that something. Their measure of devotion is willingness to kill for their belief.
The attraction, for them, is the instability.
Hatred and imagined victim hood are powerful motivating factors. The messiah has those factors in spades.
Obama is not brilliant, he is evil. He is surrounded by equally evil people that have been planning for this destruction of our country, our global achievements, our unique spark of genius that created a Constitutional Democratic Republic that the rest of the world now views as a no-brainer and the only way to go, except for the Marxists and tyrants, who still play lip service to such a structure and such ideals to permit the Left to swoon endlessly over their myriad mass graves.
Obama did not conceive all of this on election night, nor on the launch of it. He is, by his birth, his upbringing, his grooming, and due to his own twisted hateful self-entitled soul, the most uniquely destructive nation-state leader to have ever lived. He has fellow travelers by the gross, nay, by the thousands and millions, but the hundreds of his close associates particularly are truly as mendacious, as morally blighted, and as traitorous as is he. Their goals are demonic and their plans are legion, no opportunity for power or destruction has escaped them. The final goal, of a great free nation blessing the earth with peace and prosperity and inspiration and refuge is being brought low to the dust and made to receive the wages of her sins against Elitist Utopias without number, to live lives of desperation and squalor with a terror-driven soul-less faux-faith in their betters in the hopes that their children will eat, will live, though never thrive, is almost upon us.
The Southern Gates of Hell have been thrown open and the parasitic hordes will eat out our substance and our security as locusts, bringing down governments and entitlement programs and entire economic classes of America, particularly the hated middle-class, so satisfied with their lives that the elites cannot use them, so must destroy them.
Terrorists are amongst us. As are Breeders of Terrorists by the millions. The inviolate manual of self-radicalization is ubiquitous, and a deadly hazard. Their support networks and apologists are well placed and well versed and well funded, much in part due to Obama. Islamist Moles exist at the highest levels of this Administration and the Intelligence Agencies tasked to address all levels of this existential risk. The true nature and understanding of Islam is verboten in the halls of every level of Government in this Land, all the way down to the smallest schoolhouse. Islam’s law of Taqiyya grants the Powers of the Prince of Lies Himself in dissembling to the slick hucksters that advise our feckless, and faithless, leaders, and therefore our betters command us to see no Evil, hear no Evil, Resist No Evil. The proliferating demographics and massive immigration of this Death Cult are alone cause for alarm, despair, and War. Obama wills this.
Iran has, in all practical terms, already been given the bomb by Obama, and they will be used. Blackmail or the elimination of key American Cities conveniently located along our East and West Coasts. With the cowards that populate Congress and Presidents that literally are Enemy Agents, be they flesh or atomic ash, will effectuate our surrender. In so many ways, we already have.
Pakistan’s ISI that couldn’t well shepard their Frankenstein Monster the Taliban in Afghanistan have nevertheless been using them within the very Capitals of Pakistan in a vast power play in which these very clever very power-hungry Intelligence agents have lost all control and Obama’s special friends the Pakistanis are at risk of falling to the enemy that Obama, and Clinton, want to be friends with and forge peace with even as they murder children by the hundreds. Friends that may soon have as many as one-hundred nuclear war heads at their disposal, with many many suitors for the opportunity to destroy one, or both, of the Satans that so afflict their tender souls.
It isn’t just Obama. It’s a massive enemy action after a century of infiltration and gestation. He is simply the Malicious Prince of Lies required to finally cut the throat of our beloved but weary and bruised and diseased Republic. Every wrong, malicious, destructive, suicidal, murderous act that the hand of man can perform, will be performed by this man to the fullest extent of his powers in his reign, and I would not be surprised to see him extend his stay in his current position beyond 2017, I put nothing past this Spawn of Hell.
Obama has earned many titles and diagnoses as pundits sought to ferret out his true political colors. He is clearly a Narcissist, a Marxist, an Alinskyite, an Anti-Colonialist, a Racist, a huge Get-Even-With-‘Em-ist, an Islamist, a Hater of the First Order, but what I have not seen written nor heard said is something that I believe rises to the top of the list of his malignant -isms and -ists and pathologies, that explains his success and his glee and contentment in his predations; Obama is first and foremost an Anarchist.
Chaos and misery is his goal. It’s for our own good. Only then will we realize just how much we need him and his cohort. If we don’t Bill Ayers will be waiting for us at his Gulags.
Our blog discussion of Cuba escalated into a discussion of the most fundamental, deeply entrenched threat confronting our world, which is Obama and the thousands of key players and the millions of low-information supporters. Many of the comments to this post are espectially insightful and forceful. To summarize, and with my own comments in {brackets}:
Obama the “negotiator”
But Rubio is wrong; Obama is not a bad negotiator at all. He is a faux negotiator.
And perhaps Rubio even knows this (the hint being “at a minimum”)… {Leave to Neo to see the significance of this subtle clue.}
…what’s good for the world is to bring America down, hurt its allies, and help its enemies. There are many people on the left who believe exactly that. {- and many more low-info liberals who will go along}
It’s easier to wreck than to build. …can do a lot of damage in the two years he has remaining.
Geoffrey Britain Says:
George Soros; “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” 
{See how Soros funds the enemies of Western prosperity: http://humanevents.com/2011/04/02/top-10-reasons-george-soros-is-dangerous/ }
Monica Crowley:
The objective was always to move America away from a nation built on individual liberty and economic freedom and toward a government welfare and dependency state. {They are moving successfully toward this objective. I hope the new Republican majority can reverse this, but am fearful they won’t do much.}
…granting amnesty to tens of millions of illegals, locking them into government dependency, and creating a permanent Democrat voting majority is the final, missing piece of the “fundamental transformation of the nation.”
{Will Republican politicians be able to stop this destruction of themselves?
neo-neocon Says: KLSmith:
I completely agree that Obama took advantage of already-existing weaknesses, many of them the result of the left’s Gramscian march through our institutions (education, media, entertainment, religion, etc.). 
{the five decade march}
what Obama is doing doesn’t seem to be obvious to the vast majority of people. {which includes vast numbers of educated, accomplished elites}
Geoffrey Britain Says:
Once you’re willing to reject critical aspects of the reality within which we all exist, i.e. human nature and the operative and economic laws of reality {and visualize a fantastic, peaceful utopia}
…their motivation is rooted in anger at reality itself … . {The objects of that anger are the designated evil men and institutions, e.g., Halliburton, the Koch brothers, George W. Bush, the police}
…there is no front in which Obama is not moving to gravely damage America.
Illuminati Says: 

I had written off Marco Rubio as another RINO but his leadership on this issue is impressive. If he runs for president, I’m willing to give Rubio another look. He speaks well … {And might be successful at attracting the many Hispanic voters the Republicans desperately need. I am a hawk on the immigration issue, but the anti-Democrats have to win to be able to do anything.}
Maquis Says: 

He is, by his birth, his upbringing, his grooming, and due to his own twisted hateful self-entitled soul, the most uniquely destructive nation-state leader to have ever lived. {I fear that this prediction won’t be proven wrong.}