When it comes to mocking a sitting president, the world’s most dangerous leaders have apparently taken up the traditional role played by late-night comics.
It started last August when the 11-year-old son of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad took to Facebook with this message for President Obama: “I just want them to attack sooo much, because I want them to make the mistake of beginning something that they don’t know the end of it.” A few days later, Papa Assad tells Charlie Rose that Obama runs a “social media administration.”
Next came Vladimir Putin. It wasn’t enough to annex Crimea. In an address to Russia’s Security Council, he said that though he didn’t have an account at the bank targeted by Obama for sanctions, he now planned to get one. In a tweet addressed to “Comrade @BarackObama,” his deputy foreign minister asked “if some prankster” had drawn up the president’s sanctions plan.
Now Iran’s getting in on the act: Tehran just appointed as its new ambassador to the UN a man who was a member of the radical group that seized the US embassy there in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage. This means he will be coming to Manhattan — unless he is denied a visa. Anyone want to bet the Obama administration will make such a move against Iran while it’s in the middle of nuclear negotiations with Iran?
However weak Jimmy Carter may have been, even he didn’t suffer from the outright mockery and contempt the world’s thugs now show for Obama. We report this with no joy. For when an American president’s credibility is so low his threats become a source of amusement, our world becomes a far more dangerous place.