QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 7:24 A.M. ET:  Mr. Obama, set to meet Britain's prime minister (see post just below) brings with him a wealth of foreign policy wisdom and experience...not.  From Rick Richman at Contentions:

In the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Walter Russell Mead reviews David Remnick’s biography of Barack Obama and notes that “students of foreign policy will be bemused and somewhat alarmed by the near-total absence of evidence in Remnick’s book that Obama ever showed any interest in foreign policy before running for president.” Mead writes that “to judge from this book, Obama spent little time dealing with foreign policy until he failed to get the Senate committee assignment he really wanted and was forced to make the best of an appointment to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.”

That's certainly reassuring in the nuclear age.  And...

The “ill-conceived war” was effectively won by virtue of the surge that Obama opposed. His “diplomacy, and strategy, and foresight” produced an outstretched hand to Iran and sanctions no one thinks will work, a “peace process” that cannot even get direct talks to start, and a Nobel Peace Prize he had insufficient modesty to reject. And it is all Bush’s fault, or the Republicans’, or the public’s expectations.

Students of foreign policy may be bemused and somewhat alarmed. But the American public, if the current polls are accurate, does not appear to be amused.

COMMENT:  Oh dear, oh dear, we do hope the visiting British PM doesn't read this.  We American hicks do want to make a good impression. 

The hilarity here is that Obama was presented to us by his sales department as a consummate whiz in foreign policy, a man who would reshape America's image in the world and usher in an age of everyone singing together while holding up Coke bottles.

Hasn't happened, has it?

July 20, 2010