Bam's daze of the weak

By MICHAEL GOODWIN

May 23, 2010

President Obama is the backward man. Teddy Roosevelt's advice to "speak softly and carry a big stick" was meant as a guide to successful foreign relations.

Obama has completely muddled the message. He speaks softly to foreign adversaries and uses the big stick on American dissenters.

Iran and Syria are wooed endlessly with carrots, apologies and promises of grand bargains. They respond with taunts and threats and pay no penalty.

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship, and our secretary of state says it means no more business as usual. That's an admission it has been business as usual even after the loony kingdom tested nukes.

The Mexican president comes to Washington and berates American citizens for expressing their views through the democratic process, and Obama shamefully nods in agreement. A State Department aide apologizes to China -- to China! -- about our treatment of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, American "fat-cat bankers" and "greedy" doctors and sundry opponents are demonized as enemies of the state. They respond by sullenly surrendering the health-care and financial industries to Big Government.

Welcome to a double disaster. America now has a foreign policy that is a dangerous flop and a homeland as bitterly divided as ever.

And don't forget 10 percent unemployment and skyrocketing deficits and debt.

Heckuva job, Mr. President.

That's the Obama record. Just because he won't face it -- or even answer questions about it -- doesn't mean the rest of us must ignore it.

America is in trouble, and Obama can't be counted on to save her.

For the dead-enders who held out hope he would moderate his drive to neuter America in the image of European welfare states, it's give-up time. The error of his ways are so abundant and obvious that Obama's determination to plunge ahead must be seen as a fully informed choice.

He's not going to change. He is who he is, and what you see is what you are going to get for as long as he is president.

Obama has made two fundamental decisions, and both are making us weaker. He is putting America on bended knee around the world, and he is centralizing in the political class more and more power over the domestic economy.

His goal of trading America's old friends and allies for new ones threatens to leave us more isolated than before. The old ones are mad and suspicious, and the new ones don't want to be our friends.

How exactly have Russia and China reciprocated our self-abasement? They haven't, but we have managed to cause angst and anger in Britain, Israel and Eastern Europe.

If George W. Bush's "cowboy diplomacy" was to blame for the predicament Obama inherited, who is to blame for this new world order? It's not Bush's fault that Turkey and Brazil are taking Iran's side and giving it cover to get nukes. It happened on Obama's watch because of his policies.

That was a defining moment, as was the visit of Mexican President Felipe Calderon. He blasted Arizona's anti-illegal immigrant bill as "discriminatory" and demanded Obama do something about it.

Did our president defend his fellow Americans? Nah. He simply offered that he'd like to do what Calderon demanded, but "I don't have 60 votes in the Senate."

The outrage was compounded when Democrats in Congress gave Calderon a standing ovation after he repeated his denunciation at the Capitol. It was a shocking display of anti-Americanism of the kind routine in Mexico City, but wholly inappropriate in the halls of Washington.

I'm surprised nobody thought to burn an American flag.