Whenever you don’t see eye to eye with President Obama, he knows it’s because of some hand-up on your part.
You may, for example, cling bitterly to God and guns because of a sad, uneducated “antipathy to people who aren’t [like you].”
Small-town America, move over.
President Obama has a new bitter clinger: Vladimir Putin.
Here is what POTUS said of Putin last night on the Jay Leno show, as reported in The Daily Bezos:
Obama said that Russian President Vladimir Putin can “slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality;” he also criticized Russia’s controversial new law banning “gay propaganda.” He dodged a question on whether he would meet with Putin at the upcoming G20 summit.
Got that? Putin is just confused. Poor guy thinks the Cold War is still going on! But President Obama says, “There, there, Vladimir, you silly old Cold Warrior, you.”
President Obama's remark about Putin was just as condescending to Putin as–well–President Obama's remark about his fellow Americans.
But then condescension is the main tool in the president's arsenal. It may frighten Republicans. But it doesn't scare Putin. Who cares if Barack Obama condescends to you if you can do something really damaging to the United States (e.g., asylum for Eddie Snowden)?
Oh, and this just in: President Obama today cancelled his private meeting with Putin at the upcoming G20 summit, after all. Sounds like–feels like…Cold War!
Commentary’s Seth Mandel, who was also amused by POTUS’ “Cold War” comments, observes:
Much of the initial reaction to the announcement that President Obama will cancel his planned meeting with Vladimir Putin has cast the move as an acknowledgement by the president that his beloved “reset” had failed. That may or may not be the case; even leftists long ago stopped pretending the reset existed, so it’s more likely that Obama waited until Putin danced in the end zone to finally respond publicly.
As for the president’s pooh-poohing the Cold War, Mandel comments:
he left’s insistence on ignoring the lessons of the Cold War was always a dangerous mentality for the president to embrace. It’s one thing for the professional left, who were so wrong so often during the ideological conflict, to pretend the entire second half of the 20th century never happened. But what the president says actually matters. Adopting historical amnesia as his foreign policy doctrine has resulted in fairly predictable confusion about America’s role in the world.
This disinterest in Cold War history is characteristic of the intellectual milieu from which the president emerged. You would think that in an age of yet another global ideological conflict–the Arab Spring has done for pan-Islamism what Nasser could never do for pan-Arabism–understanding how the West won the last one would be useful. But there is evident impatience for it on the left.
Let me be the party pooper: I doubt if President Obama has learned anything at all from this. He likely cancelled the personal meet and greet with Putin because it has belatedly dawned on Mr. Obama that Vlady just isn’t that into him.