Barack Obama got a global standing ovation long before he was elected president. But in a fickle and fast-moving world, the overseas reviews are already turning mixed. Find Wallace Hartley at once. Listing to port are we? There must be something he can play to calm these people! Now quickly, go back out and fix the deckchairs.
Though much of the world will party through the night Tuesday after Obama is sworn in as America's 44th president -- just as it did when he was elected -- there are signs the ardor is cooling as the sheer weight of his challenges sinks in.
A deepening global recession, new hostilities in the Middle East, complications in closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan -- an impatient world has a stake in all of them and is asking how much change Obama can deliver.
"Just two months ago, the future president seemed a cross between Superman and Merlin the magician," Massimo Gramellini wrote in a commentary for Italy's La Stampa newspaper. "Now he himself admits he won't be able to keep all his promises, and who knows? Maybe someone will ask for his impeachment by the end of next week."
"The idealism has diminished," said Samuel Solvit, who heads an Obama support network in France. "Everyone was dreaming a little. Now people are more realistic."
Muslims want to know why Obama hasn't joined the chorus of international criticism of Israel's Gaza offensive. Last week posters of him were set on fire in Tehran to shouts of "Death to Obama!" It's his non-Muslim dominate side coming out.
"By the time Obama takes office, hundreds or thousands more will be killed in Gaza and it will be too late for him to act," said Adel Fawzi, an Egyptian government clerk in Cairo. Yep, too late, never enough, impossible, more future bomb vest children will die, the juice did it.
Obama has expressed concern about Gaza, but says he's reluctant to say much more until his inauguration. It's the turtle on the fence post syndrone, he's got bloody nowhere to go. More at 8:00 and 10:00.
Meanwhile the global economic collapse is already closing in on him. Around the world, leaders and their publics are waiting to see what he does to calm roiled markets and restore confidence.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both say they're confident the Obama administration will succeed in working with Europe and China to build a stronger global economy. "He has a big vision of how America can contribute to the long-term prosperity of the world," Brown said. It's not a vision, it's history speaking. Take a long look at the last 100 years.
"The chances of us working this out are good," Merkel said in Berlin, where Madame Tussauds rolled out a wax likeness of Obama to great fanfare.
Sweden's prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, told parliament last week he empathizes with the monumental challenges facing Obama. "I think it's difficult to find an American president who is being met with such a number of expectations as Barack Obama," he said. Could Red State voters actually be your friends? We have very, very low expectations for this "presidency."
That's the problem, said Reginald Dale, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington: People everywhere simply expect too much, practically ensuring Obama will disappoint. Expectation management, why does it hate us?
"The United States can't solve all the world's problems," he said in an interview. "It doesn't have enough money or military power. And the president is constrained by Congress and the constitution. The founding fathers wanted to stop someone from being like a monarch." With the help of ACORN, feckless voters came as close as they could!
#4
The Big O played the Hope and ChangeĀ shuck and jive on the electorate, of whom, the LLL, mainstream dems, pi$$ed off trunks and pi$$ed off independents voted for him.
He cannot be everything to everyone, as he owes too many people too much across the political spectrum. Plus, IMHO, Prosecutor Fitzgerald knows a lot of what went on with Blago and co.
Because of the above all kinds of other convoluted sh*t, Hillary and co has machiavellied herself into the catbird seat, so the Big O is more of a figurehead than a real president.
And as everything goes further south, the Big O will be the Man who takes the fall. The Dems are in charge and so have the power to fix everything. So to speak. Enjoy Hope and Change---in the Twilight Zone.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
01/19/2009 16:29 Comments ||
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#5
The leftards are already pissed off that the rich big $$ donors get to sit up front in a heated tent and drink free Krystal Champagne while the regular rubes have to freeze their arses off and buy cans of coke for $5 apiece, standing so far back that you can't see his halo.
#7
Wel-l-l, despite CNN attempt to show "happy faces" [Black-, Asians] IMO there wasn't that much applause or cheers after the Bam-Man gave his pre-inaugural speech yesterday in Washington, DC.
#11
When he leaves office in 4 years the comparisons to Hoover will be resounding all over. This inauguration will be the death rattle of Rooseveltian liberalism and it will be in the ash can of history by then. What will succeed it, I do not know. But in 6 years, it will be hard to remember what 20th century liberalism was like.
Lashkar-e-Taiba spokesperson Abdullah Ghaznavi's offer to end jihad is a remarkable departure from the traditional Lashkar position, in which fighting a global jihad was cast as its central concern.
Qari Abdul Wahid, who is now claimed to head the Lashkar's operations in Jammu and Kashmir, wrote in the December, 1999, issue of Voice of Islam magazine that the organisation would "uphold the flag of freedom and Islam through jihad not only in Kashmir but in the whole world."
In the February 2000 issue of the magazine, the then-head of the Lashkar's publicity, Nazir Ahmad, declared that its jihad would continue until "Islam will be dominant all over the world." And, in an online pamphlet circulated around 1999, "Jihad in the Present Times," the Lashkar insisted that jihad must continue "until Islam, as a way of life, dominates the whole world and until Allah"s law is enforced everywhere in the world."
Lashkar leaders have reiterated this position in several recent speeches. Its overall chief, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, said in an interview in early December 2008: "God has ordained every Muslim to fight until His rule is established. We have no option but to follow God's order."
A tactical ruse?
Given these recent speeches, it is unclear if Ghaznavi spoke with the authorisation of the organisation's top leadership.
However, there have been signs that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Lashkar's parent political-religious organisation, has been seeking to distance itself from its armed wing in an effort to evade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council last month.
In a January 9 interview, Jamaat-ud-Dawa spokesperson Abdullah Muntazir said the two Lashkar commanders believed to have organised November attacks in Mumbai, Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah, were unconnected with his organisation.
Lakhvi's relationship with Saeed is believed to have been strained ever since 2004, after the 1950-born Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief married the wife of a Lashkar terrorist killed in Kashmir--a woman three decades his junior. Both men were also reported to have had bitter disputes over the use of funds. However, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate stepped in to heal their fissures.
Now, intelligence sources said, the Lashkar appears to be seeking to avoid international pressure by creating a firewall between its military and charitable operations -- a ruse used to effect in 2002, after President Pervez Musharraf's military government proscribed the Lashkar.
On that occasion, the Markaz Dawa wal'Irshad, Lashkar's parent organisation, renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and cast itself as a charitable organisation. The Lashkar notionally shifted its headquarters to Muzaffarabad, PoK, where the ban did not apply.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/19/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
READ THIS!
The Best mohammed T-shirt art is from Sweden. Watch and read the info at,
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And allah will help the muslims, HA HA HA HA
Posted by: mohammed allah ||
01/19/2009 8:45 Comments ||
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#2
War with India not such an attractive prospect any more, eh Abdullah?
#5
Lashkar may simply be implementing the trick of having a "charitable" subsidiary to deal with the moral idiots among the infidels (including accepting donations).
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
