(Scott Johnson)
The twisted mentality of the Obama administration is prominently on display in Jeffrey Goldberg’s summary of his conversations with senior officials posted
here. Anonymously describing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as “chickenshit,” one senior official serves up a pure case of projection, and another senior administration official seconds him (or her). It is as if Obama himself had dismissed someone as “arrogant,” or Joe Biden disparaged anyone as “stupid,” or John Kerry insulted someone as “haughty,” though in this case the official is projecting on behalf of the administration as a whole.
The whole thing is almost — almost — unbelievable. If you’ve been awake and alert, however, it makes sick sense. It figures. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair:/Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
On the substance of the issues, Danielle Pletka speaks for me in
her comments on Goldberg’s column. She renders this stinging judgment:
Let’s get this straight: Bibi et al, who have what most would agree is a legitimate and existential fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon, are “good” because they’re, er “chickenshit” about launching a strike on Iran; oh, and Bibi is also labeled a “coward” for having been “chickenshit” in that regard. But he’s “bad” because he won’t cave to a Palestinian Authority and Hamas so riven by terrorism, corruption and incompetence that they won’t “accommodate” with each other.
How can we read this as anything other than an appalling display of hypocrisy, hostility to Israel and warmth toward the very powers that have killed almost as many Americans (Iran, Hamas, et al) as al Qaeda? Did team Obama label Ahmadinejad as “chickenshit”? Have they labeled the Qataris, who arm and fund ISIS at the same time that they buy US weapons as “chickenshit”?
I’m sure that in defense of Obama, many will say that they expect more of the Israelis than they do of the Gulf or Turkey or NATO or … anyone. The question is, why? Coming back to the fons et origo of this whole relationship disaster, let us recall that it was Obama who ashcanned the George W. Bush commitment to Israel to oppose the return to 1967 lines; Obama who prayed at the altar of Jew-hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright; Obama who absorbed the scholarship of Israel-hating Rashid Khalidi; Obama, whose own settlement policy has been more extreme than that of the Palestinian Authority.
But let’s forget about Obama’s own ideological dislike of the State of Israel and its leaders, whoever they may be. Set aside the fact that it is not Bibi who is acting like a selfish political actor, but Barack Obama and the personal sycophants around him who are more interested in the whims and fortunes of the American Narcissus. Let us instead focus on the fact that an unnamed “senior American official” is waxing triumphant over the fact that it is now “too late” for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons complex. This is good news? The fact that American officials believe it is more advantageous to have a nuclear Iran than to have someone in power in Israel who will not kowtow to the US president says something about the fundamental rot at the core of the Obama administration, its contempt for the national security of the American people – who are at terrible risk from an Iranian nuclear bomb – and the vileness of the cowards and chickenshit officials who people the fiefdom of Barack Obama.
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