Thread: Cut the dumb analysis of Obama: Old ways of dealing with foes don't make sense

Cut the dumb analysis of Obama: Old ways of dealing with foes don't make sense

Monday, April 20th 2009, 4:00 AM

Barack Obama moves up now on 100 days in office, and is still like some baseball pitcher whose performance is analyzed pitch by pitch. It generally makes for a political discourse in this country dumber than socks.

So it was this past week with the Summit of the Americas. Now we are supposed to believe that the President doesn't really understand how dangerous the world is - only Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh really do - because he shook hands with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

"We had this debate throughout the campaign," the President said before leaving Trinidad Sunday. "This whole notion that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments previously hostile that we were soft. Only the American people didn't buy it. And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it. Because it didn't make sense."

It makes sense to all those who think Obama can't do anything right, who decided he was the enemy of all things virtuous and patriotic long before he took the oath of office. To them, the handshake with Chavez is just the latest sign that Obama is more of an appeaser than Neville Chamberlain.

And it wasn't just Chavez. It was also Obama opening himself to a dialogue with Cuba now that Raul Castro seems to have gotten the memo that the Cold War ended a long time ago.

"Me shaking hands or having a polite conversation [isn't] endangering the interests of the United States," Obama said.

Obama doesn't need to turn on the radio or watch Fox News to understand that it's his job to protect us from bad people whose only mission is to do us great harm. But it is also his job to identify who is a real threat to us and who isn't.

He wasn't weak in Trinidad any more than he was when he went to Europe. He wasn't weak with the pirates who took Capt. Richard Phillips. When negotiation failed, it became like a hostage situation anywhere, and he authorized the Navy SEALs to take the shots. It wasn't the Normandy invasion, just the appropriate response.

This is a very smart guy, getting on-the-job training with the biggest job there is. The idea that somebody soft could get the job coming from where he came from has always been sillier than Alex Rodriguez's love life. Here is another thing he said before leaving the Summit of the Americas:

"We showed that you can make progress when we don't engage in old debates."

More than anything he's done so far - whether you agree with him or not - Obama has shown that he is willing to listen. And for the past eight years, our foreign policy has been the complete opposite of that, even our allies being told to just shut up and take notes.

It doesn't mean he has all the answers in Iran, where their idea of justice is throwing Iranian-American journalists in jail, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan. But while Hugo Chavez may be a danger to his own people, he is no danger to the United States any more than Saddam Hussein was. Neither is Cuba, what is left of the Castro & Castro family business. If we learned one thing from Obama this past week, it is that this country's official policy toward Cuba is no longer being shaped by old anti-Castro guys now living in Dade County, Fla. Another break from the old way of doing things.

"I am not dug in on policies formulated before I was born," Obama said Sunday.

He does not throw down with the distant past or the recent past. The epic mistake of John F. Kennedy, to whom Obama is so frequently compared, was the Bay of Pigs. At a time when Kennedy spoke eloquently of change in this country the way Obama does now, he reached back for a plan formulated during the Eisenhower era, and it blew up in his face.

And Obama clearly doesn't plan to make the same mistakes, just as way of looking tough, George W. Bush made. But then this President doesn't seem to think he is on some kind of mission from God, trying to do an extreme makeover on the world one bad place at a time.

Continuing Bush's old schoolyard beef with Venezuela doesn't help us or make us safer. Neither do old rules and old grudges with Cuba. Obama shook a guy's hand this week. Only idiots think he should have left the guy hanging. Or greeted him with a clenched fist instead.

Agreed.