It’s official: Obamaism is dead. Hillary Clinton killed it.
It wasn’t so much a mercy killing as an expedient one, but that’s politics in the best sense. The important thing is that she broke the Democratic omertà code by stating the obvious: The president’s policy of having America sit on the sidelines of a burning world is a disaster that threatens our national security.
The power of her argument is confirmed by a report that a testy Obama called it “horses–t” to congressional leaders. Even guru David Axelrod blasted her, proving she scored a direct hit on the Chicago mafia’s central nervous system.
The panic is legitimate. Clinton’s comments to The Atlantic magazine give security-minded Democrats permission to break ranks with the White House. Good God, they are free at last.
Republicans John McCain, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Lindsey Graham, Pete King, Ted Cruz — they all said the same thing before her, with little impact. But Clinton, well, she’s not just any Democrat.
Timing matters, too. With an al Qaeda-like state being carved out of parts of Iraq and Syria, and with Russia, China and Iran taking advantage of our retreat, Clinton’s declaration of independence will get the attention of demoralized allies from Europe to the Middle East.
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said in demolishing Obama’s excuse for doing nothing.
As secretary of state, she wanted to arm Syrian rebels to help topple Bashar al-Assad, and now she says Obama’s refusal to agree was a “failure” that led to the creation of ISIS, the murderous Islamists building a terror state.
Yes, it’s all self-serving, but her logic is compelling and she extended it to other hot spots, even equating the fight against Islamists to the fight against communism. As she told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg:
“You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union but we made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism. That was our objective. We achieved it.”
She also defended Israel against Hamas, saying of the civilian deaths in Gaza, “Ultimately, the responsibility rests with Hamas.”
These truths are self-evident — except to the Obama wing of the Democratic Party, the United Nations and appeasers everywhere. The president’s thinly veiled belief that America has been more of a problem than a solution is the foundation of his do-nothingism.
He rejects American exceptionalism and substitutes “leading from behind,” a concept as wise as the flat-earth theory. The fact that he had to order military strikes against ISIS in Iraq proves the idiocy of his claim that the “tide of war is receding.”
Mosaic magazine features another smart autopsy of his mistakes, with Michael Doran describing Obama’s approach as a “roundtable” negotiation where good and evil reason together to create an “equilibrium that should replace the American-led order of yesteryear.”
Doran, a former security adviser for George W. Bush, calls the idea “a chimera . . . that instead of ending wars . . . has helped prolong and multiply them.” Obama will not change, he writes, because that “would be tantamount to renouncing his cherished legacy.”
Clinton renounced it for both of them.
As for the politics, she obviously sees a break with her former boss as a plus for her 2016 race, or she wouldn’t have done it. That she sounds like a neocon might provoke a primary challenge from the left, and so she could pay a price.
But in the short term, she changes the subject from her money-grubbing scandals and tries to move beyond her lackluster tenure at State and the biggest failure on her watch, the Benghazi attack, by making a serious point.
So the politics could cut both ways, but the merits are clear. Because she’s right that Obama’s policies threaten our national security, it is immoral to stay silent.
She spoke up, and I thank her.
Campbell stands up to the ED. thugs
If the attacks on Campbell Brown by union-inspired thugs aim to silence her, they failed. In fact, the smears give her more reason to persevere in the fight for better public schools.
“It isn’t pleasant to be the target of these sleazy attacks, but it proves that they have no argument,” she told me yesterday. Later, she added: “When they come after me this way and include my kids, there is no way I would back off now.”
Brown, a board member of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter network, is spearheading a lawsuit against New York’s teacher-tenure law. It is patterned on one in California that led a judge to declare that state’s law unconstitutional because, by protecting unqualified teachers, the law denies some students equal access to a quality education.
Brown’s aim is modest in that, even if the suit succeeds, it would have zero impact on the vast majority of teachers. Her goal is to force the state to rewrite tenure laws so that students would not be denied their right to a sound education because they got stuck with a bad teacher.
Yet the unions are so rattled that associated stooges, including the group once known as ACORN, launched a vicious attack on Brown. They created cartoonish Web sites calling the former CNN anchor “right-wing, elitist and wrong” and declared that “she should have no role in the debate over the future of education.”
Those are the left-wing politics of personal destruction, and they perfectly sum up the government-union cartel: keep your mouth shut, or we’ll come after you and your family.
It’s meant to scare critics, but Brown is unbowed.
“I’m the eternal optimist,” she said. “This feels like an inflection point, and not just in New York. People are waking up to the fact that these laws must be changed.”
Let’s hope so.
Liberal dose of crime
The bang, bang goes on.
A friend sends along the CompStat report from the NYPD, and it’s not a pretty picture. Although murder is down by 9 percent, shootings are up by 12 percent.
And the number of shooting victims is up by 10 percent, from 719 last year to 794 this year. The numbers are through Aug. 3.
My prediction: crime is making a comeback. And the blame belongs at City Hall.
You can’t keep undermining cops the way Mayor de Blasio does and expect a safer city. His anti-police agenda jeopardizes the gains of the last 20 years.
Driving gov buggy
So Gov. Cuomo and legislative leaders flew together to Israel Tuesday night. Did Manhattan prosecutor Preet Bharara bug the plane to see if they talked about his probe into Albany corruption? Inquiring minds . . .