RUSH: Der Spiegel. I never get that first word pronounced right. Every time I think I say it right, I get e-mails: ‘No, Rush, it’s ‘durr’.’ Then I say ‘durr. ‘No, Rush it’s ‘derr.” Then I say ‘derr.’ ‘It’s Der Spiegel!’ Okay. Der Spiegel: ‘Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage — When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it’s not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming. There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip. Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. … The mood in Obama’s foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The ‘first Pacific president,’ as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.’
Obama’s new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere. They cite Israel and a number of other places, and then they say he’s a lot like Jimmy Carter, Der Spiegel. ‘There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama’s advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. ‘Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations — the CFR (wink, wink) — says Obama’s China trip was ‘amateur hour.’ Chris Matthews takes a cue from Dick Cheney and said, ‘Obama is dithering over Afghanistan.’ Yep. Yep. He also said some other things about Obama. I think he caught onto this Jimmy Carter routine. He’s starting to look like Jimmy Carter. Even the New York Times is getting a tad troubled by Obama’s trillions upon trillions of spending. I have to ask: Are these people nuts? They don’t get it? Don’t they know why Obama was elected? Obama was elected to smile and to act cool, which he still does. He still smiles, still acts cool. He can deliver a well-phrased speech on any subject. That’s what the media wanted. They wanted somebody ‘smart,’ they wanted somebody elegant, they wanted somebody like them — and that’s what they got: A basic empty suit. Well, not quite empty suit.
So what’s the fuss? See, those of us who are honest are not surprised by anything that has happened here. We said he was going to be a repeat of Carter only worse, because Carter wasn’t trying to do this. He was just inept. Obama is trying to do this. It’s his objective. We knew he was going to sell the country out on foreign policy. We knew it. What did these guys think? Did they really buy that drivel that the world hated us because of Bush and was going to love us because of Obama? If they really bought that, then they’re dumber than even I consider them to be. Dumb has nothing to do with IQ. Some of the smartest, highest-IQ people around us are the most idiotic, stupid, uninformed people you could ever run into because their arrogance and conceit tells them that they don’t need to learn anything. They already know it.