Obama Morals: The Selling Out of Hope

Check out this article in the NRO online by Mona Charen. It's short and to the point.

"[I]n the space of just nine months, the Obama administration has betrayed the cause of human rights around the globe.

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped set the tone in February by swatting away a question about human rights abuses in China. Those issues, she said, 'can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.' Political prisoners, Tibetans, and religious minorities may have been dejected by this stony dismissal, but the Chinese government was delighted. 'This type of realistic attitude could be followed by other Western leaders,' an official newspaper noted with satisfaction.

"Hundreds of thousands of Iranians endured tear gas, bullets, arrests, and torture in an attempt to topple one of the most vicious and dangerous regimes in the world. Yet day after day, President Obama, moral beacon to the world, dismissed and even denigrated them. He was not going to allow a bunch of democrats to interfere with his meticulously planned overture of friendship toward the mullahs. His condemnation of the violence and brutality of the regime was so tepid, tardy, and grudging that it amounted to tacit support for the government. Another blow to human rights and morality.

"The people of Honduras, who have struggled painfully to achieve a successful democracy, threw off a would-be dictator who threatened to plunge the nation back to autocracy. Rather than help to solidify Honduras’s devotion to its constitution, Obama (together with those well-known human rights avatars Hugo Chávez and the Castro brothers) sided with Manuel Zelaya and imposed sanctions on the legitimate government. Which side better represents human rights and morality?"

[...]

"On Monday, the Washington Post reported that that the U.S. 'will shift its policy toward Sudan to one based on working with the country’s government instead of isolating it.' Whereas he had once demanded that 'the international community must, over the Sudanese regime’s protests, deploy a large, capable U.N.-led and U.N.-funded force with a robust enforcement mandate to stop the killings,' the president now says that 'if the government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community.' Incentives? For Omar al-Bashir, the only head of state currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity? That threat of 'increased pressure' must really terrify him. It’s the fierce urgency of the kow tow."

It is amazing to me how the Obama Administration has so easily sold out any pretense of morality for the bank rolling their deficit-ridden domestic goals. This combined with Obama's narcissistic apology/appeasement policies (the US has changed now that I'm president) is proving to be disastrous combination... not just for the U.S. but for any seeking to resist terrorism and external aggression. Israel, Honduras, Iranian protesters, Thailand, the Philippines, Chinese protesters, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic have all been shuffled aside (if not simply betrayed) for little reason and with little political gain.