So my morning began with text messages from my father-in-law asking if we can trade in Obama for the real leader, Netanyahu; followed by more text messages about how the Democratic congressmen who skipped the speech are not only anti-Semitic, but that they need to “show up and do their job” (because their job clearly demands that they bob obediently up and down in their seats every time some warmongering foreign demagogue comes to sabotage our president’s foreign policy). Followed by the usual stuff about the Democrats being slaves to Dear Leader and how if Lincoln had known Obama was going to be president he would have saved Booth the trouble and killed himself, yadda yadda, etc. and etc.
I figured that this perspective of almost hallucinatory disconnection from reality came from the usual source of all that my father-in-law believes about the world, namely the NY Post, but even by their usual standards the writers over there have officially exited the building, the solar system, and the known universe in their distinct take on Netanyahu’s frankly execrable speech.
Hehe, au contraire, haricot vert. Likening Netanyahu to Moses is spectacularly over-the-top. The man is an opportunistic, chronic threat exaggerator who’s been so spectacularly wrong on matters of foreign policy it’s unbelievable that any member of congress should care what he has to say on such topics. Despite his rhetorical skill in delivering the speech–you know, the sort of qualities that right-wingers discount to zero when Barack Obama is the subject–he had the platform of a lifetime and instead offered no realistic alternative to the approach being taken. It was a transparently self-serving political stunt, and the editors of the Post and their readers are but his useful idiots.
But it was a great speech, well-delivered, and clear in its intent.
A notion foreign to Obama, of “the Islamic State is not Islamic” inanity, who dismissed it 'cause he’s butthurt about Congress not asking his permission.
I don’t usually take up for the NY Post but I don’t see anything wrong with their comments in this case at all. Most of it is obviously opinion but it isn’t baseless and it is hardly ‘over the top’.
Describing his speech as a triumph and as being of “surpassing importance” when it was a stump speech filled with no viable policy proposal: over the top
Describing Obama’s alleged hostility to Israel as unprecedented: over the top (at the very least there’s Eisenhower)
In short, lots of over the top nonsense as usual from the Post.
When someone has repeatedly declared their hate for you, have repeatedly said they wished you were dead, and have repeatedly said that it would be evil and wrong of them not to kill you the first chance they get, then why wouldn’t you take them at their word?
Naively scoffing at the “warmongers” was very fashionable in 1938 too.
Netanyahu needed an election hummer and the treasonous republicans dropped to their knees and deep-throated the shit out of him. American interests are irrelevant to these people.
