THE DANGER WE FACE – AT 7:08 P.M. ET:  Anne Bayefsky, one of the best reporters around today – the UN recently tried to lift her credentials because some delegates griped that she wasn't following the party line – expands on the foreign-policy disgrace in last night's presidential address.  From NRO:

President Obama’s message in the State of the Union address confirmed that he is tone-deaf to the grievous threats that exist to American national security and incapable of changing course before those dangers become a terrible reality.

The catastrophe of nuclear proliferation had finally made it to the top of the agenda by the time he took office. But over the past year, this president added disarmament to the same platform. He put the retention of U.S. nuclear weaponry on the U.N. negotiating table alongside Iranian acquisition of such arms. In this State of the Union address he wasn’t shy about reasserting this world view: “We are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people — the threat of nuclear weapons.” By which he meant, in American hands too. The president did not first and foremost promise never to let the genocidal Iranian regime acquire these weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the first national-security priority he articulated was to seek “to reduce our stockpiles and launchers.”

According to President Obama, only by weakening America can we hope to convince our enemies to stand down.

Ouch.  Big ouch.  Anne is right.  This president follows the standard leftist line that we are all to blame.  That's why he went around the world apologizing for us early in his term. 

President Obama announced that in April he will hold another hand-shaking, hot-air-generating “nuclear security summit” — to control American and Russian arms. As for dealing with Iran, he could not manage to muster a single concrete move, just an empty “they too will face growing consequences.”

From whom?  From the UN, where China has a veto?  The president doesn't say.

This is an administration that has turned its back on inconvenient victims from Tehran to Tibet to Israel. An administration that has climbed on board the U.N. Human Rights Council, despite its being a tool of Islamic states for defeating rights. And yet the president disingenuously lectured: “America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity.”

We have asked regularly at Urgent Agenda whether Obama wants to be Kennedy or Carter.  I'm afraid we got our answer last night.  Welcome to the peanut farm.  Jumbos available at slight extra cost.

January 28, 2010