Euthanasia of Presidency by Obama

As we have predicted in the past the year 2013 clearly displayed all the fault lines and weaknesses of President Obama in both foreign and domestic affairs. From Libya to Egypt, from Syria to Iran, Obama has been leading from behind, as is his wont, and making a mess of things geopolitically. In the domestic front, his grand scheme of Medicare is exposed as a great deception of the American people, as the latter cannot "keep" their private insurance, as promised by Obama, but only that insurance that the government dictates and approves. It is for this reason that I'm republishing this paper that was written on August 2011.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

President Obama is placing the vibrant presidency of the most powerful nation in the world in the hands of the practitioners of euthanasia as if America were in the agony of its death throes. Cynical about America’s global political and military power, cynical about its ability to win the war against its deadly and irreconcilable enemy, cynical about its peoples’ steadfastness and determination to wage war against the fanatical hordes of Islam that threaten America’s heartland, cynical of its European allies’ resolution--under indomitable and sagacious US leadership--to fight the same war, and cynical of the capacity of the best professionally trained armed forces in the world, i.e., the American, to defeat an impromptu organized group of terrorists, who bereft of cool strategic nous in comparison to its ‘infidel’ opponents, are impulsively fighting the Great Satan and all the other little Satans of  the West  with the fanatical cry of Allahu Akbar,  President Obama has chosen, due to this inveterate cynicism and to his guileful and odious politics as we shall  see further down, most imprudently strategically and politically and sans amour propre to retreat from the battlefield, with macabre geopolitical consequences for America’s prestige as a superpower, and take cover behind a no longer fortress America.

As we predicted early in 2009, during the long gestation of the president’s ‘new strategy’ for Afghanistan which under the pretence of giving serious consideration to the request of his senior commander in Afghanistan General McChrystal to increase the troops by 40,000, he dithered his decision not however for the purpose of how to win the war but for the purpose of weighing the political costs that would accrue to him if he had accepted the advice of his general. And when finally he made his decision, he increased the troops by 30,000 while handing to his National Security team a memo setting the strict terms that this increase included the July 2011 start date for a US troop withdrawal. Hence, Obama as Commander-in-Chief, whilst his brave soldiers and astute generals were spilling their blood in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan fighting the Taliban with the aim of defeating them, all he was thinking about were the political costs that would bear upon him as a result of his apparent greater involvement in the unpopular war. So Obama’s ‘serious’ and long deliberations before he made his decision had nothing to do with a new strategy, emanating from his status as Commander-in-Chief, to defeat the Taliban but had everything to do with his status as political shyster who was only concerned about his polls.

The increase of troops by 30,000 was strategically meaningless as it had not the aim of defeating the enemy since it merely served Obama’s political rationale of not seeming to be weak on war while at the same time placating the anti-war crowd by announcing the withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan. What strategist of any substance would increase his forces in the field of battle only to withdraw them without inflicting upon his enemy a mortal blow? And what kind of leader would place an increased number of his soldiers in danger and continue a war that he thinks is unwinnable when his main purpose was to withdraw them from such war, why would he have increased them in the first place if he was planning to withdraw them if not for his concealed ill-design to dupe the American people, to present himself as both a war president and a peaceful one? In reality of course, Obama is neither of these but a political Shylock who demands his pound of flesh from his troops fighting in Afghanistan in order to play his despicable politics at home so he can placate both those Americans who support the war and those who are against it.

From Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Charles Martel, to Napoleon all strategies had a clear and unique goal, to defeat the foe. Only President Obama, who as the most repulsive of political manipulators is wantonly sacrificing the interests of the nation to his own narrow political interests, is disgracefully and timorously traducing this irreversible principle of war and turning himself into a cartoonist mockery as Commander-in-Chief of a great nation.

Afghanistan during Obama’s political campaign was a “war of necessity,” that presumably was neglected by President Bush, and a war that must be won. But according to Bob Woodward’s new book titled Obama’s Wars, this is no longer so. Obama is quoted as saying, “This needs to be a plan about how we are going to handed it off and get out of Afghanistan.” And the outcome of the policy review and its long deliberations was the offspring of “political considerations,” according to a State Department official. Obama himself reportedly said to Senator Lindsey Graham, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party” on the issue of Afghanistan. General Petraeus felt so affronted by White House demands for an exit strategy at all costs that he told his aids, “They are f...king with the wrong guy.” Another senior general said that the announcement of the withdrawal by President Obama, gave “sustenance to the Taliban.” Moreover, the policy review has engendered serious divisions within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Council, and the Defense Department and between American and Afghan officials. Jim Jones, the National Security adviser, calls the ‘bosom’ advisers of Obama, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel variously as the “mafia” the “campaign set” and the “politburo.” And General Petraeus has dubbed Axelrod as the spin artist in residence, and I would add the spin-master who can win elections and lose wars. 

These revelations of Bob Woodward are toxic to Obama’s presidency and threaten to unleash a spate of resignations of top echelons of the Administration. In short, the presidency at this critical moment of national security and war is in a state of disarray. And no matter how he is going to re-arrange the musical chairs of his sinking presidency after losing the better performers, the future ones that will occupy them will be the worst performers that he could get. No one of sterling qualities, of the best and the brightest, will have an inkling to join an intellectually, politically, morally, and strategically bankrupt administration and be branded everlastingly with such an ignominiously failed presidency. Obama by debasing the ‘political currency’ of a great nation will become the victim of Gresham’s Law. The bad and base currency of circulating officials that will bid for the positions of the Administration will drive the good and golden currency of officials out of circulation for these posts. Hence Obama’s future administration will be filled by political parvenus, professional opportunists, and Cagliostro like political impostors and all ‘playing their tunes’ under the master conductor of spin. Such an outcome will seriously undermine America’s prestige and éclat as a superpower. It will infernally endanger the vital interests of the nation and its security by enticing its mortal enemies to attack it, as they see that the rudder of America in the rough seas of the world is in the hands of an incompetent and weak president. The question is whether Americans will allow this to happen and whether they will have the intelligence and courage to use all means to halt him in his tracks and thus put an end to Obama’s ‘Directorate’ of social democracy which is ‘terrorizing’ America and to prevent at the eleventh hour the euthanasia of the presidency.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now     

Obama The Jilted Bride

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Obama’s diplomatic engagement with Iran is a jilted bride. The groom in the form of President Ahmadinejad or the Taliban, and the recalcitrant fanatical Muslims in general, will never walk the aisle of diplomacy and Obama will be the jilted bride, who will keep inviolate his immaculate political virginity. It would be highly dangerous for America and the rest of the free civilized world to have such a politically naive and weak president for another four years in the White House.

Prattling Guru Detaches from Iranian Turmoil

I'm republishing the following piece for the readers of this blog.

The Iranian Election is Their Issue, Not Ours By Steve Clemons The Washington Note June 16, 2009

A short reply: By Con George-Kotzabasis

For a political animal like Steve his Pontius Pilate stand that the Iranian election is “not our business” is astonishingly amusing. But I suppose saying this with a grin on his face in his TV interview is because he has no answer to the argument that Bush’s hard policies might have influenced the educated classes of Iran in their revolt against Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs, as Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary of George Bush stated.

Even if Ahmadinejad won the election fairly, the fact remains that now as a result of the election the extant split prior to the election between the modernist forces and the antediluvian ones is exacerbated. What is imponderable, and lingers in the province of Nostradamus, is whether this fissure of Iran’s society between these two forces will bring an internal ‘modernist’ change or an open dictatorship of the Mullahs and the military, as their only way to survive from this tsunami of dissent against them.

As for Dan Kervick, another luminary of The Washington Note, in his desire to present himself as an imaginative thinker he foolishly delves in ‘Rumsfeldian unknowns,’ which excellently illustrate the vaudevillian streak in him. His comment that there might be “anti-democratic” forces that would aim to “overturn” the democratic election is a laughable fiction. The forces that want to “overturn the result of the election” are doing so because of the perception that Ahmadinejad stole the election, not because they could be “anti-democratic.”

The Periclean Dimensions of Antonis Samaras as the Future Prime Minister of Greece

By Con George-Kotzabasis—December 10, 2011

We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring. Pericles

In the present storm-laden dark sky of Greece, a glittering new star has made its appearance which like a beacon of the sky is attempting to navigate the battered ship of Greece into calmer waters and save it from shipwreck. This new star is the leader of the Opposition of the New Democracy Party, Antonis Samaras, who since he has become its leader two years ago, has displayed unprecedented qualities of leadership and economic and political insight and daring, in this critical economic situation that Greece traverses, that only a statesman of Periclean dimensions could exhibit.

The criticism of Samaras from early on as leader of the Opposition of the Papandreou government, which he has depicted as amateurish and inept, has been totally justified. His early warnings that the policies of the socialist government of Papandreou were wrong and the torrent of taxes that the latter rained upon the middle classes would be disastrous for the economy. In October 2009, when Papandreou began his premiership, public debt was 298 billion euros, 125% of GDP. Today it has reached the whopping amount of 360 billion euros, 165% of GDP. Gross National Product in 2009 was 238 billion and presently has shrunk to 218 billion. According to OECD estimates it will decrease even more by 6% in the near future and unemployment will increase to 18.55%, affecting tragically younger people.

Further, Samaras predicted that the first EU Memorandum that imposed draconian austerity measures on Greece would neither decrease the budget nor would it put the economy on a track of recovery. As an economist he cogently argued that in conditions of deep recession austerity measures would exacerbate the economic crisis not dampen it. He was severely criticized and reprimanded when the New Democracy Party voted in parliament against the extreme austerity measures. Moreover, he had the moral strength and political insight not to be tempted to fall to the seductive calls of Papandreou to participate in a unity government to deal with the national crisis. Samaras gave as his strong reasons that since the PASOK Government was refusing to change its economic policies, that followed the blueprint formulated in the European Memorandum without attempting to modify it in certain crucial parts that could deter the further weakening of the economy, and which had failed the country, he, and his party, would not take part in a coalition government merely for the purpose of being an “accomplice” to these flagrantly wrong policies.

Samaras made a series of proposals that he encapsulated in his “Restart of Greece” by which the country could avoid the shoals that would cause its economic sinking. Last May in his Zappeio II Proposal the Leader of the Opposition presented a number of policies that could put Greece on the road of economic recovery and its corollary, the ability to pay off its debts. His restart programme would necessitate a “shock treatment” but with positive results. (a) A severe cut in public spending and on pensions, only above the level 700 euros. (b) A reduction of taxes on household income and businesses and a decrease in VAT in all sectors of the economy particularly in tourism which is pivotal to the Greek economy. (c) The abolition of all means test for the acquisition of a house and on capital repatriation so to inject money in the financial system. (d) The legalization of all buildings constructed without permits-there are more than a million-which will bring substantial increases in state revenue. (e) The state is to pay off all its debts to private individuals thus increasing market liquidity. And banks to commit to the real economy 20% to 30% of the guarantees they receive. This will further increase liquidity in the market and be an incentive to stop capital flight. (f) The state must not make any cuts to the Public Investment Programme with its high multiplier effect that is a powerful instrument to combat recession. (g) The acceleration of denationalization of public owned entities, which the Papandreou government was slow to implement, and the stimulation of the development of property which is the economic engine of the country. All these relief measures will increase state revenue and the Restart programme will balance the budget within just over three years, and start paying off Greece’s debt.

This daring Restart programme is not an abstraction and Samaras is quite aware that to concretize it he has to convince the lenders of Greece, i.e. the EU, of the urgent necessity of making changes to the present economic policies that clearly have failed, if the goals of the Memorandum of 26^th of October, to which he is irrevocably committed, are to be achieved. This task of convincing Greece’s European partners of a change in tack has been eased, as High German officials admit now that the initial programme was wrong.

Finally, Samaras warns (not exactly in the following words) that this contagion that is threatening to engulf the European continent is not only economic and political but also social, and could lead to an explosion of European Spring protests that could not be contained and could transform radically the political landscape of the continent by the reappearance of the infernal star of the swastika in the political constellation of Europe.

But History has shown repeatedly nations at moments of great dangers, produce great and illustrious leaders that saves them at the eleventh hour from destruction and obliteration. From Themistocles to Charles Martel to Winston Churchill, the invasions of barbarians and dictators were defeated by the sagacity, imagination, and moral strength of exceptional leadership. Antonis Samaras from his words and deeds without any doubt belongs to this lineage of leadership. Greece facing the abyss of economic bankruptcy, poverty, and mob rule with the dangers that are historically inherent in such combination, i.e. the resurgence of fascism, has a unique leader in Antonis Samaras that could prevent this stupendous threat from consummating which would consign the country into the doleful state of penury and into the captivity of dictatorial regimes.            

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