Acquit

As the Obama administration bumbles toward its last year, one is reminded of the macabre joke about the evil young man who murders both his parents and then demands that the jury be lenient in its judgement because he is an orphan.

The Obama administration's MO is oddly similar. Obama and his foreign policy Team of 2s makes a series of very bad decisions, followed by a series of weak or ineffective actions. These decisions and actions result not in resolving or even adequately managing problems they encounter, but rather exacerbating them to the extent that they become insoluble and unmanageable. But here's the kicker. Once this happens, the administration then claims that there were no good options left or that they were forced into the decisions or actions by "critics" and it's the critics who are to blame for the mess. This outrageous denial and deflection has gone unchallenged by Obama's trained hamsters in the media until quite recently, but even Obama-friendly media outlets like The New York Times are beginning to comment:

WASHINGTON — By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.

Either way, it underscored White House sensitivities about the widening Syrian catastrophe. With more than 200,000 killed in the civil war, a wave of refugees flooding into Europe, and Russia now flying in arms and troops, the president finds himself with a geopolitical and humanitarian mess that will most likely not be settled before he leaves office in 16 months.

What is even more problematic is that Democrats in Congress have surely noticed all of this and with the exception of true believers (who are also truly delusional) surely recognize that bad decisions and half-baked actions have become a hallmark of this administration.

Given this, why then did the Dems acquiesce to the Iran treaty. The Obama administration used their MO—the treaty was the best they could do; their critics were war mongers; this was a "good" deal. Just like al Qaeda was on the run, ISIS was a JV team, Assad would be out of power in 2013, Putin would be reasonable ...

It's interesting. The Dems are analogous to members of the jury for the trial of the evil young man who murdered his parents. They listen to his plea for leniency, and they vote to acquit.

I hope they will be held accountable in 2016.