OPINION:
Leave it to an original member of Public Enemy to speak the cold truth about the No. 1 global public enemy.
On Feb. 5, the rapper Flavor Flav took to Twitter to vent his frustration with the Obama administration’s unwillingness to decimate the Islamic State.
“United States shoulda wiped out Isis after the first American got his head cut off & it was only 30,000 then. How much more will it take U.S.?,” he fumed.
In another tweet, he roared: “Isis needs to be exterminated at once . All of nations that’s United [sic] should pitch in together and go in there and wipe them out.”
You know things in President Obama’s America are bad when a guy famous for wearing a gigantic clock around his neck articulates a better foreign policy than the president.
How did we get here?
During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama indulged in typical leftist, one-world, American reductionist gobbledygook that was so dangerous that two high-profile fellow Democrats worried aloud about his fitness to be commander in chief.
During the Democratic primary fight, Hillary Clinton ran “The 3 a.m. Phone Call” ad, which asked with whom would you feel more comfortable with as commander in chief, reaching for the phone in the event of a crisis? The junior senator from New York, whose national security experience was limited to whatever knowledge she absorbed through osmosis as first lady, or the junior senator from Illinois, whose foreign policy experience was limited to visits to Epcot Center with his daughters?
Neither, obviously, was palatable, but Mrs. Clinton made her point.
Making a similar point just two weeks before the election was Mr. Obama’s own vice presidential pick. “Mark my words,” Joe Biden said. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy . We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America . Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
He was basically telling the world that when we elect this sick antelope with one eye, one horn and one leg, he’s going to get thirsty and hobble down to the riverbank to get a drink. And waiting for him there will be a giant crocodile, submerged below the waterline, waiting to strike. And strike it did — in the form of Somali pirates, domestic terror attacks in Boston and at Fort Hood, rogue regimes such as Iran and Syria slaughtering their own people while developing and using weapons of mass destruction, the Islamic State and assorted other jihadis, and newly aggressive traditional adversaries such as Russia and China.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden were pointing to a disturbing lack of steeliness to deal with the world as it was — not, as Mr. Obama had often said, the world as he wished it to be. A good Alinskyite, Mr. Obama would act to turn the world into what he thought it should be. The “social and economic justice” he would force-feed America at home would be instituted abroad.
He would community organize the “international community.”
Never mind that the world is a brutal Darwinian jungle, where only the strongest thrive and the weakest get either trampled or consumed. And never mind that cold calculations of national interest dominate; the world is not a charitable place, where do-goodism is rewarded and noble intentions are respected. To the contrary: It’s a do-or-die environment, where it’s far better to be feared and respected than loved.
The virtue of America has always been that in addition to our genuine do-goodism, we have projected strength and power, which we were not afraid to use to defend our and our allies’ interests. As a result, we have been in the unique position of being feared and respected as well as being a true force for good. The United States has spent more blood and treasure liberating more people from tyranny and oppression than any other nation in world history. And no nation has asked for so little in return.
Leftists, however, see American power as a nefarious tool of global injustice, bursting into countries such as Vietnam and Iraq with all guns blazing, getting into bed with dark regimes such as Saudi Arabia for resources such as oil, exploiting poorer countries such as the Philippines for cheap labor and stuff, and siding with regional bullies such as Israel over the oppressed and occupied Palestinians.
To Mr. Obama and the left, this doesn’t make America exceptional. It makes her evil.
The leftists are far more comfortable sipping Beaujolais nouveau with the anti-American, anti-Israel United Nations set than they are with accepting the responsibilities that come with superpower status.
This is why Flavor Flav offers more common sense about how America should be smashing its enemies than does the president. Mr. Flav often bellows, “Do you know what time it is?” It’s time to fight the globe’s public enemies, and the hour is late.
• Monica Crowley is online opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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