OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The kids have a word for it: pwned.
Used in a sentence: Barack Obama got hard-core pwned by Vladimir Putin.
Pronounced: Powned. Definition: Completely dominated by an opponent.
Ugh. It was ugly. Vlad drove the lane and dunked in BO’s face — then dissed his mother.
If ESPN showed the whole thing on replay, they’d go to super slo-mo at the end and some jock announcer would say, “Boom! Right there! Watch the head fake — skadoosh! Someone go pick up Obama’s jockstrap!”
Let’s recap: The 44th president gets his undies all in a wad after someone fires off some chemical weapons in Syria and kills 1,400 — never mind that 100,000 have died in the
2½-year-long civil war there, BO was up in Martha’s Vineyard on the golf course when the gas hit, so that really ruined his game and wrecked his fun beach time. Someone must pay!
So the president announced he was going to fight a Democrat-style war, you know, lob a few bombs in, reduce an aspirin factory to rubble, but just for a few days, not so long it would push back next weekend’s tee time. Boots on the ground? Hell no. Maybe no boots in the air, either: Just some drones, bombing some rocks in the desert, enough to make us all feel good at next weekend’s cocktail party that someone somewhere was paying a hefty price for using those chemical weapons. For the children, darn it!
Then, seriously, the president went to play golf. Right after his urgent announcement. Urgency schmurgency.
Congress, meanwhile, wondered what all the urgent rhetoric was about.
Wait, it gets so much better. Then, days later, the president said, don’t worry: It’s not like, BOMBING bombing. It’s a limited action — we don’t want to, say, topple the guy responsible for gassing 500 children, we want to hit the three D’s: Degrade, Deter, Drive It 300 Yards: Wait, just two D’s.
The president said he had the mojo to go, but, just to be a total bro, he was gonna get the “all good” from his peeps in Congress. Unless they no go-ed. Then would he go? Wouldn’t say. So just be cool and get on board, eh?
But Congress balked (maybe it was the phone calls running 100-1 against going to war in, where again, Syria?). And while the mainstream media busied itself bashing the GOP for suddenly hating war, it was the Cocktail Party Left (CPL) that really didn’t want to muss its hair in Syria. Or ruin the weekend.
So, to the rescue, a warrior: swift boat cap’n John F. Kerry. During 1,259 hours of Senate hearings (over two days), the Vietnam vet who hated war (and, really, the American military as well, and, frankly, himself) said, no no, wait, whoa: This attack on Syria will be a pinprick, “unbelievably small.”
Meanwhile, the president was in Sweden. Why? Who knows. “I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line,” he said about the red line he set when he set the red line on Syrian chemical weapons. The next day, he was heading to Russia, but he wouldn’t be meeting with that ol’ meanie face Putin. That guy was being nice to an American who divulged an expansive U.S. program that, like the old USSR days, spies on all homeland citizens. Phooey to him.
So, despite the big “reset” of relations with Russia, Mr. Obama snubbed its president in his own country, called him a slouching schoolboy, then showed up late for dinner, miffing the host. Too soon, playtime in St. Petersburg was over and the president came home to D.C. and returned to — work, you’re thinking? No, the golf course.
Back to the rescue came Secretary of State Kerry. Asked whether Syrian President Bashar Assad could do anything to avert the coming pinprick, Lurch said: “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week.” Boom, another red line. But the State Department quickly said, “no red, no red.” Instead, their high school spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Mr. Kerry was merely making a “rhetorical argument.”
Too late. Mr. Putin jumped in and offered to help broker the deal. In fact, he’d lead the whole thing — and take credit for it, too. But the White House said, wait, it was really our idea from the get-go, and when we had a secret meeting in Russia with Pooty Poot, we brought it up — first!
In the end, Congress bailed (don’t expect a Syria vote), Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry embarrassed themselves again, and Mr. Putin ended up lecturing America — in The New York Times, no less — about the misguided notion of American exceptionalism. Oh, and then the Russian president headed to Iran for some talks on helping the rogue nation get its nuclear program up and running.
Still, who could’ve seen such a development? Um, Mitt Romney. “Russia is, without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors,” the Republican presidential candidate said six months before the 2012 election.
And how did Mr. Obama respond: “The 1980s,” he said in a debate, “are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Hardcore pwned.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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