I Thought O's Nobel Speech Sucked Too ...

But then again; don't most of them ?

Bolton: Obama's 'Pedestrian, Turgid, and Uninspired' Address [Robert Costa]

Earlier today, Pres. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address in the Norwegian capital was “pedestrian, turgid, and uninspired.”

“It followed the standard international leftist line,” says Bolton. “He played to the crowd and filled the speech with clichés from the American and international left by saying ‘America cannot act alone’ and that he ‘prohibited torture.’ The speech was also typical of Obama in its self-centeredness and ‘something for everybody’ approach.”

“It was so diffuse that though I wouldn’t call it incoherent, it was getting close,” says Bolton. “It was a lot about him, again, especially with his comments about being at the ‘beginning, not end’ of his labors for the world.”

Obama made some “breathtakingly simpleminded statements in his section on humanity’s history of war and the ‘hard truth’ that war will not end in our lifetimes,” adds Bolton. “No kidding. I don’t know what that is supposed to prove.”


Sheikh Obama and His Two Wars [Daniel Pipes]

Obama’s Nobel “lecture” offers critics the usual cornucopia of opportunities, but I shall focus on just two statements:“I am the commander-in-chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.” And here I thought there were three wars. Obama’s two are Iraq and Afghanistan; missing is what George W. Bush termed the War on Terror and I call the “war on radical Islam.” Obama apparently reduces that third one to al-Qaeda and counts it as part of the Afghan war. His mistake has real consequences; long after American troops have left Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists will be attacking and subverting us. If we don’t see their efforts as a war, we lose.

“Religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam.” Here, Obama follows his predecessor in presenting himself as an interpreter of Islam. I ridiculed “Imam Bush” for telling Muslims about true Islam and its distortion, and now I must ridicule “Sheikh Obama” for the same. He’s a politician, not a theologian. He’s a Christian, not a Muslim. He should steer completely clear from the topic of who are good or bad Muslims.

— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.


Obama’s Bad War [Victor Davis Hanson]

The president said some good things, but unfortunately, his long academic lecture on the nature of war itself had all the characteristics of we have come to accept from a Barack Obama sermon:

1) Verbosity (4,000 words plus!) and extraneousness (he finally even referenced the world’s farmers); 2) I/me exhaustion (34 times) and the messianic cult of personality; 3) the 50/50, split-the-difference trope; 4) the straw man: on the one hand there are realists, on the other idealists, and I Obama singularly reject this either/or dichotomy (as if no one else does as well); 5) veiled attacks on the previous administration; 6) reference to his own unique personal story; 7) good-war/bad-war theory of Afghanistan and Iraq; 8) the hopey-changy rhetorical flourish.

Is there a Microsoft program somewhere that writes these things out?

Obama did not mention the word “Iraq” a single time, instead presenting his good-war/bad-war dichotomy thus: “One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 43 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.”

The president apparently does not realize that in Iraq too there was a coalition, that the Iraq War was approved by both houses of Congress on 23 grounds (only two dealing with WMD), and that more and more evidence is emerging concerning the terrorist ties between Saddam and radical Islam. And why, exactly, is it “winding down”?

Maybe a word of praise for the U.S. soldiers who took a genocidal thug out and later ensured that the war, whose name cannot be spoken, would be “winding down”?And why emphasize Afghanistan’s supposedly better coalition when later in the speech you plan to emphasize that unilateralism can be justified as well? “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

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Wrong about Past and Present [David B. Rivkin Jr. & Lee A. Casey]

President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech was disappointing on several key issues. At the most fundamental level, it distorted history and misstated the nature of the enemy we face in al-Qaeda and its allies. These rhetorical failures, coming in the middle of a protracted and difficult struggle, which are always taxing for democracy, have serious implications; they cause real harm.

As far as the re-writing of history is concerned, there was the predictable, and increasingly tiresome, criticism of the Bush administration — particularly unfortunate when speaking to a global audience in a foreign city. In this regard, in describing the need to use force legitimately — a key element of both the just-war theory and international law governing self-defense — President Obama identified the war in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War as examples. The 2003 Iraq War was conspicuously absent from this list. Indeed, in case his listeners somehow missed the point, the only thing that the president said about the Iraq War is that it “is winding down.”

Going beyond the events of the last few years, the president provided an erroneous, but very politically correct, version of how men have tried to leash the dogs of war. For example, he mentioned that “the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations — an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize,” implying that this rejection had something to do with the league’s profound failure to maintain the peace. However, few serious students of the league would argue that it would or could have fulfilled Wilson’s hopes even with American participation. Only if the Western powers has been willing to use force in the early in the 1930s could the Second World War have been averted; none were — including the United States. Let’s just say that, if Winston Churchill had perused this portion of the speech, his disdain would have been manifest.

Going back even farther in history, political correctness remained the president’s dominant leitmotif. In trying to provide some historical context for the current wave of Jihadist violence, Obama noted that “these extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” In fact, the Crusades were no more or less violent and cruel than any other form of medieval warfare and, in contrast to the naked aggression of al-Qaeda, the Crusaders’ stated goal was to recover areas that had been violently conquered during the first wave of Islamic Jihad, from the 7th to 11th centuries. Whether this effort was justified is a question for medievalists.

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