THE BOY ON THE BEACH: OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY FAILURES GO VIRAL: At The Wilderness, Stephen Miller writes:
It wasn’t “the United States” that let Obama get away with declaring “I didn’t set that red line, the world did” only to have him to walk out the door like a dejected child needing an afternoon snack and media-induced nap. No, that was our media: rather than hold him accountable for his own declarations of removing Assad and setting a “red line,” they simply shrugged, muttered a word or two about how war Totally Sucks Anyway, and went back to writing think pieces on the cultural impact of the President’s NCAA tournament bracket.
Because of DC media’s nerd-prom infatuation at the thought of being a part, any part, of this socially cool West Wing Presidency, we have to turn to other sources in calling out this ridiculous clipboard hashtag foreign policy. Earlier this year in a brief appearance during Jon Stewart’s Night of Too Many Stars, and much to the horror of the crowd, stand up comedian Bill Burr tore into Michelle Obama over the White House’s penchant for doing nothing to stop these events except guilt-shaming us with puppydog eyes:
“She’s sitting there holding up those hashtags, Bring Back Our Girls. Remember that hashtag #BringBackOurGirls? That blew my mind, like, why are you showing me that? I’m a stand up comedian. Like what am I going to do to get back the girls? Why don’t you look across the dinner table — you see that guy? That is the Leader Of The Free World. Tell him to pick up a phone, call some Navy SEALs and solve it….what am I going to do? Show up with a sharpened mic stand? HEY EVERYONE MICHELLE TOLD ME TO BRING THEM BACK”
The whole routine is worth watching, if for no other reason than to see an overly-sensitive politically correct crowd, saturated with social media activism for the past seven years, pucker helplessly in their seats. And yet that’s where we’re at. Using Twitter to hold up signs — it’s exasperating precisely because the one “Red Line” that actually seems to still exist is the one forbidding the media from holding the one guy who can do anything about these foreign policy meltdowns and humanitarian crises responsible.
Our media collectively demands accountability for these conflicts from every single person…except the one person who has any real power to stop or mitigate it. This has always been the anecdote in Obama’s foreign policy: 1) show up 2) demand the world follow him 3) world leaders balk at his demands 4) he shrugs his shoulders and goes and plays with his selfie stick somewhere.
Miller juxtaposes two viral photos in his article: one of the Syrian “boy on the beach” being carried by Turkish rescue worker as AP photographers click away, and our man-child president posing with a selfie-stick in Alaska. (As actor James Woods deadpanned on Twitter, “Because what else is there to photograph in Alaska?”) Obama’s selfie photo is even more damning knowing it was taken while the president was narcissistically goofing in front of a phalanx of White House photographers documenting his every gesture for the history books. In the mid-‘90s, Rush Limbaugh frequently chided Bill Clinton for turning on the mock tears when he spotted a network minicam pointed his way at Ron Brown’s 1996 funeral, but whatever Clinton’s boundless narcissism, he at least he made more of an effort at attempting to give an aura of a penumbra of looking presidential than Obama can be bothered with in the YOLO twilight phase of his presidency.
And he really doesn’t give a damn how badly he looks juxtaposed against world events — I created this Photoshop back in February for a Victor Davis Hanson article that ran shortly after Buzzfeed talked Obama into posing with a selfie-stick even as ISIS were concurrently burning men alive in cages and uploading their snuff-films to the Web:
Exit quote: “Sarah Palin to Obama: Carry a ‘Big Stick Instead of a Selfie Stick.’” Why would he start manning-up now?
UPDATE: Squaring the circle: “Do people leaving a bombed out village in SYRIA usually take their selfie sticks with them?”