BARONE ON FOREIGN POLICY – AT 8:35 A.M. ET:  Michael Barone, one of the most astute observers of American politics writing today, adds to Steve Hayes's excellent piece (see just below), to point out that Obama's collapsing foreign policy consists of abusing our friends and appeasing our enemies.  How long will this disgrace last?

Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.

Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.

And...

Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama's two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.

And...

In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.

We haven't exactly gotten a big payback from Obama's lurch to the left in foreign policy:

And so Obama, the object of so much adulation in Western Europe, seems to have had only the coolest of relations with its leaders. The candidate who spoke in Berlin is now the president with no sympathy for the leaders of peoples freed when the wall fell. They are seen as impediments to his goal of propitiating Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Joseph Stalin is now an honored hero.

Obama's concessions to Russia have not prevented Russia from watering down sanctions against Iran. And Obama's display of scorning Netanyahu has not gotten the Palestinians to sit down face-to-face with the Israelis, as Netanyahu has promised to do.

Obama proclaims that through persistence he can make the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and the Palestinians see things our way. The evidence so far is that they are making him do things their way -- and that our friends are wondering whether it pays to be on America's side.

COMMENT:  But think of the joy in the faculty rooms of the Ivy League.

Obama is the most left-leaning president we've ever had, and is even to the left of the flabby George McGovern, whose ruination of the Democratic Party is legend. 

We hope that a dramatic increase in Republicans in Congress after November will help to turn the tide against this presidential impostor.  If the GOP takes control of just one house of Congress, it can initiate investigations into our disgraceful, and dangerous, foreign policy, and start putting some real heat on our Looney Tunes administration, including First Poodle Hillary Clinton.

March 29, 2010