The Week in Review

An interesting five days have we just witnessed, noteworthy not only for the events of those days but for the response  (or curious lack of response) to those events. Two such responses, in particular, stand out.

First, on Tuesday we awaken to learn that Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen regime change as an Israeli strategy for its self-defense though in this instance it is not the regime of its enemies that he seeks to change but that of the government of the United States. Bibi, it seems, has grown tired of the Obama administration’s prudent and cautious approach to Iran and saw fit to use the opportunity of a fairly ordinary news conference to castigate the Obama administration for not providing him carte blanche authority to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran in an unquestionably fruitless attempt to end the Iranian nuclear program. That the statement, made to an Israeli audience, was spoken in Bib’s nearly accentless English left no doubt about his intended audience – the American Jewish community and its renegade sponsors like Sheldon Adelson. In so doing, Mr. Netanyahu has clearly dropped any pretense of sitting on the sidelines waiting for the Adelson/Koch/Rove strategy to place a Republican in the White House and decided to take matters into his own hands by making a point that he knows will clearly stir the pot of conservative Jewish anxiety about a Black president with a Muslim-sounding name seeming to hold Israel’s fate in his hands.

Plainly stated, Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts are an outrage and an affront to this country, no less than the willingness of the Eqyptian and Lybian governments to remain mute while American interests are attacked to deadly affect.

And then there is Mitt Romney who somehow   has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Putting aside the impropriety of his having commented upon a highly sensitive and explosive international crisis by criticizing the policy of the United States when a united front is needed, he offered those comments without having the facts and thus offered a critique that had no basis in reality. It is indeed remarkable that he finds it appropriate to make inappropriate comments upon issues he knows nothing about while offering the American people not a word about what his government would do to solve the problems which he claims have so damaged the nation. That he would think it appropriate to politicize the death of four Americans for his own political gain can only be viewed as a desperate attempt to reverse a course in his campaign for the White House that has gone astray. If nothing else, Mr. Romney’s performance either in or commenting upon the international stage has revealed one of his strengths…alienating our allies and undermining the interests of the United States.  Unfit to govern is the only way to describe Mr. Romney’s performance to date. The only thing more frightening about Mr. Romney’s performance is that it has had so little effect upon his standing in the polls.