Empty Suit, Empty Head–Another Obama Moment of Shame
By Larry Johnson on December 21, 2009 at 9:15 AM in Current Affairs
* Bumped Up *
Let’s assume for a minute that Barack Obama actually believes the Al Gore nonsense about global warming. Let’s also assume that Al Gore’s vision is correct and that we stand on the precipice of peril unless there is immediate action to reduce human created carbon dioxide. If this really was true then the leader of the free world would not give a damn about public opinion. A real leader would lead the people and act immediately.
So what did Barack Obama do in Copenhagen?
He shucked, he jived, he blew smoke and failed to deliver anything of note to save the planet. Here is what the Financial Times of London observed:
An empty deal would be worse than no deal at all, said the White House before Mr Obama travelled to the Copenhagen summit. As the meeting ended, Barack Obama was calling the Copenhagen accord – the emptiest deal one could imagine, short of a fist fight – an “important breakthrough”. Mr Obama’s credibility at home and abroad is one casualty of this farcical outcome. . . .
One wonders how a conference to conclude two years of detailed negotiations, building on more than a decade of previous talks, could have collapsed into such a shambles. It is as though no preparatory work had been done. Consensus on the most basic issues was lacking. Were countries there to negotiate binding limits on emissions or not? Nobody seemed to know.
From the start, the disarray was total. In this, at least, the attention to detail was impressive. The organisers invited more people to the event than could be accommodated, and were puzzled when they arrived. Delegates queued in the freezing cold for hours, a scene that summed it all up. The organisers had planned a celebration of a grand new global pact – but the party was a disaster and they forgot to bring the agreement.
In case you did not realize how the real world works, international treaties and agreements are always negotiated in advance by experts led by State Department diplomats. They work behind the scenes to craft an agreement that the White House wants or approves. President’s don’t commit to going overseas to appear at international hootenannies like the Global Warming Summit unless the deal is in the bag. Apparently Obama never learned about this during his time at Columbia University. America and the world are seeing time and time again a White House so astonishingly incompetent in doing the spade work required for successful international agreements that Obama stands alone in terms of being clueless and weak. We do not have a President in recent memory we can use as a comparison. Obama is uniquely over matched. Like a toddler eager to take off his plastic pants Barack Obama insists he is ready to wear “Big Boy” drawers but continues to piss himself in public every time we let him do his thing. He is doing the equivalent of wearning droopy, wet nappies.
The debacle at Copenhagen is the latest indignity. Barack seems to have bought into his own self-inflated bio and swaggered around with a puffed out chest but at the end of the sad affair reveled in an agreement to do nothing concrete. He understands nothing about preserving his credibility nor, apparently, does anyone on his staff. They let this clown wander around pandering the most absurd nonsense and, in the process, demeaning and debasing the Office of the President. This is not a return of Jimmy Carter. This is worse. This is Billy Carter with a smooth baritone voice and beautiful chocolate skin. But underneath that shiny exterior is a level of amateurism and naivete that are increasingly shocking folks who closed their eyes in the voting booths in November 2008 and gave this child his chance to play at being a man.
Honestly, if global warming were as real and as dire as Obama claims then his failure to act with clarity and force is a form of treason and a violation of his oath of office as President. A real danger lurks and he essentially decides to do nothing to protect the nation.
The reality is that perhaps Barack really does understand that the threat of global warming is not so grave. But even if that is true Barack Obama still demonstrated a complete lack of common sense about the gravitas and weight of the Office of the President. He once again ventured to Copenhagen, convinced that his magnetic personality would suffice to wow the foreigners and secure for him a watershed agreement to stop global warming. But just like his failure to snag the Olympics for Chicago, Obama’s personal magnetism wowed no one and produced no results other than to remind the world leaders that Barack is the anti-Teddy Roosevelt–he talks alot but swings a tiny stick. He ain’t big where it counts. He’s a tiny, tiny man.
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