Boston, Benghazi, and Barack
Be careful what you wish for: being re-elected president of the United States is not all beer and skittles.
It's called the Second Term Curse. Watergate. Iran-Contra. Lewinsky. The economy. These events torpedoed the second terms of Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. No modern second-term president has gone unscathed. And now, two deadly Bs are aimed squarely at the presidency of a third B, Barack Obama: Boston and Benghazi.
Two of the cursed presidents, Nixon and Clinton, faced the genuine prospect of impeachment over the STC. Both avoided it narrowly, but Nixon was still forced from office. Boston and Benghazi offer the prospect of being far more serious than either Watergate or Lewinsky, because many human lives were forfeited. Can Obama survive his incompetence on both being exposed? Even the mainstream media is breathing down his neck now.
In recent days, Obama has been hammered on both issues simultaneously, as documentary proof was released that his administration failed, both at home and abroad, to adequately protect Americans from fanatical Islamic terrorism. Lives were lost at the U.S. mission in Libya and on the streets of Boston, and all signs point to the relaxed policy of appeasement of American enemies adopted by Obama, and Obama's lack of fundamental qualifications and competence, as being the most important cause. In both cases, there were clear warnings about looming terrorists threats that the administration ignored.
On Benghazi, documents uncovered by intrepid reporters at ABC news clearly show the Obama government allowing political considerations to shape its response to the Benghazi attack, resulting it what can only be fairly called a cover-up. And what did Obama have hide? The fact that his administration ignored the warning signs of danger in Libya, and for political reasons. Obama wanted to depict the Middle East as a land of partners his warm words could turn into bosom friends, not a land of seething hatred for America and all she stands for.
The same is true where Russia is concerned, but even more so. The Wall Street Journal reported that instead of offering trust for Russia with his now-infamous "reset" policy, Obama should have been far more suspicious. If he had been, he might have seen Russian actions facilitating the terror attack on the Boston Marathon coming. Only in the aftermath do we discover that critical communications between the members of the terror sect, who were well-known to the Russians, were withheld from U.S. law enforcement. It seems entirely possible that the Kremlin allowed the Boston attack to proceed so it could use the fruits to justify its support for dictatorship in Syria and its brutal domestic crackdown.
Only Obama's policy of appeasement could possibly have let Putin think he might get away with such a reckless gambit. Putin would have to believe that even if caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Obama would make no serious substantive response.
These events make what's looming on the horizon that much more terrifying: the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. As Sochi sits smack-dab in the middle of the hotbed of Russian separatist and terrorist activity that gave birth to the Boston bombers, Americans must ask themselves: can we trust Obama to keep our athletes safe? Will he receive all the information he needs from the Russians, and if so, will he be able to process, understand, and act on it in time should terror threats arise?
I've been warning for years now about the risks posed by the Sochi Olympiad, but I confess that I never considered the possibility that Americans could be directly targeted by the separatists, as they were in Boston, rather than being caught in the crossfire. Nor did I consider the possibility that the Russians might learn of a such an attack and let it go forward, as they may well have done in Boston.
The games in Sochi, which many of the separatists consider holy ground, make for both an incendiary provocation and an irresistible target. If Russia's separatists were willing to attack a school in Beslan and a theater in Moscow, why would they hesitate to target athletes while the whole world is watching? And if Obama couldn't put two and two together in his own backyard, how will he possibly be able to do it thousands of miles away, on the opposite side of the globe -- especially if the Russians are, as they were in Boston, more of a hindrance than a help?
From the beginning, Obama's "reset" policy has communicated to the Russians that they can literally get away with murder, as long as they are willing to pay lip service to Obama's twin and equally benighted foreign policy objectives, nuclear arms reduction and muzzling Iran. But well into Obama's second term, not a single Russian nuclear missile has been removed from the nation's arsenal, and Russia continues to provide all manner of support to Iran (to say nothing of Syria). Putin, in other words, is happily having his bloody cake and eating it, too.
In recent weeks, the "reset" policy has exploded right in Obama's face. As the U.S. ambassador to Russia was conducting a gab-fest on Twitter to promote good relations, Russia busted one of his employees on a spying charge and then, in an unheard-of provocation, burned the CIA station chief in Moscow. Just days later, a prominent American attorney who was previously a high-ranking Justice Department official, and had been a tough critic of Russian corruption, was booted out of the country.
Russia followed the American purge by announcing a whole new round of military shipments to the genocidal regime in Syria (Russia profits from such sales to the tune of $1.5 billion per year), directly flouting American policy in the region. And then Putin brutally humiliated the ambassador's boss, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, keeping him waiting at the door for hours like he was selling vacuum cleaners.
Russia has been convicted more times than one can count of state-sponsored kidnapping, torture, and murder throughout the Caucasus region. It continues to viciously crack down on all aspects of civil society, particularly the media. Obama has winked at all of it, claiming that said winking would induce Russia to cooperate on issues like Syria, but now we see that from Obama we get the worst of all possible worlds.
Putin would like to suggest that the U.S. and Russia are in the same boat where the tsunami of Islamic terrorism is concerned, but that's the mother of all red herrings. Russia has been persecuting Muslims in the Caucasus with a level of barbarism that matches the terrorists stride for stride, and it is this barbarism that drives the terrorist rage in Russia. If Obama allows him to get away with that tactic, the neo-Soviet results both inside and outside Russia will be both brutal and inevitable.