President Barack Obama showed why the world perceives him as being weak with his comments on climate change during his appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes” show Sunday night, GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie said Monday.
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Kroft asked a string of long questions, with lengthy prologues, but grew exasperated when Obama was just as long-winded in his answers, at one point exclaiming, ‘I feel like I’ve been filibustered, Mr. President’.
President Barack Obama: We knew that he was planning to provide the military assistance that Assad was needing because they were nervous about a potential imminent collapse of the regime.
“If you think leadership is running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in to prop up your only ally, then we have different definitions of leadership”, Obama shot back. “But by the time I’m finished, I think it will be time for me to go”, he says, adding that new blood in the White House is essential for a healthy democracy.
These steps, however, are deemed woefully inadequate within broad sections of the state and political establishment, including layers of the Democratic Party. Powerful factions are pushing for the deployment of thousands of United States troops to take out Assad, regardless the risks of war with Russian Federation and the possibility of a Third World War. And there are Middle East conflicts that don’t affect our access to oil at all – despite the nightmare in Syria, you can fill up your tank for around two bucks a gallon right now. He repeatedly interrupted Obama and bluntly listed the failures of his policy.
STEVE KROFT: Did you know he was going to do all this when you met with him in New York? The U.S.is always looking for ways to diminish the violence there, she added: “This is not in any way a substitute or change in our longstanding policy of pressing for a political transition in Syria”.
Obama: No, I, I, I’m happy to talk about it. I mean, they [ISIS] are still occupying big chunks of Iraq. “Remember when they were the good guys?”
Kroft: Do you think the world’s a safer place? It seems very hard to identify… Because he thinks if you do nothing you can’t get in trouble. Kroft continued pressing Obama about the timetable and successes of the administration against ISIS and even said that the Pentagon’s plan to train and equip anti-Islamic forces fighters was an embarrassment.
Obama: No. Steve, we have an enormous presence in the Middle East. We have bases and we have aircraft carriers. He turned to the administration’s $500-million program to train and equip 5,000 of the so-called moderate Syrian rebels-which, according to a top commander, did so for only 50.
Mr. Obama’s claim that Russian Federation meddled in Ukraine out of weakness was ridiculous. The only significant forces fighting to overthrow Assad are and always have been Islamist elements linked to Al Qaeda. Obama can barely hide his contempt at the idea that we’re in a few kind of zero-sum belligerence contest with Vladimir Putin, and whichever one of us drops more bombs or puts more boots on the ground gets the manliness trophy.
On Russia’s intervention in Syria, Kroft was no less adversarial.
PETERBOROUGH, N.H. Republican Jeb Bush vowed on Tuesday to take a more aggressive approach to countering Russian Federation if he is elected president next year, calling Vladimir Putin an “agile adversary” who is exploiting a vacuum of USA leadership in Syria and elsewhere.
So far the Russian military operation in Syria is much smaller than the Soviet expedition in Afghanistan, which at its peak involved 115,000 troops. When Mr. Obama cut off military ties with the new Egyptian regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Russians swiftly stepped in to reverse a generation of American statecraft.
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Speaking with fill-in host Shannon Bream, Stirewalt kicked off his critique by pointing out that Obama’s poor performance was “made more awkward by the fact that the sort of number one Obama-nuzzler in the whole stable of Obama-nuzzlers” in Kroft was the very person who seemed to give him a hard time. The territory now held by Isis contains important oil assets and Putin will be eager to bring these under his control. “Bet on the people who have been tested”.
