Morning Joe: Syria was Obama’s ‘Defining Moment’ and ‘History Going to be Rough’
When even Mike Barnicle admits that Obama’s inaction on Syria was a “serious mistake”
Surprising consensus on today’s Morning Joe that Barack Obama blew it bigly in Syria by punting on his redline. Even Obama fan Mike Barnicle admitted, “Syria was a serious mistake that the Obama administration made.” Foreign policy honcho Richard Haass said “history’s going to be rough on this. This is going to be the defining moment for the Obama presidency.”
It wasn’t just the panel that trashed Obama’s mishandling of Syria. Joe Scarborough noted that not only did leading Dems like John Kerry and Hillary quickly come out in support of Trump’s strikes, but that Dems were saying things that were “almost disloyal to Barack Obama, saying we could have never moved this quickly.”
Note: Joe and Haass painted a picture of a President Obama who shut out most of his senior foreign policy advisors, relying instead on the likes of Ben Rhodes.
RICHARD HAASS: The Democratic response was in some ways more interesting than the Republican response to the use of force against Syria. All these people essentially who worked for President Obama distancing themselves from their former boss.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: From President Obama.
HAASS: Yeah. Exactly. You are beginning to see things. I think the next big thing —
JOE: Can you tell me quickly. Becasue that was so fast. John Kerry came out immediately in support of what Donald Trump did.
HAASS: Hillary Clinton.
JOE: Yeah, Hillary Clinton did. You had other people saying some things that were almost disloyal to Barack Obama, saying we could have never moved this quickly. He would have never moved. Why were they doing that? Why did they all come out in force and do that?
HAASS: Well, there was a lot of frustration. There was a sense that the Obama presidency was a bit of paralysis by analysis. And in some ways, it was such a tight center. It was the president, Ben Rhodes and a few others who then afterwards tried to make the case that what they did was a solution to the chemical problem in Syria when everybody knows it wasn’t.
History’s going to be rough on this. This is going to be the defining moment for the Obama presidency. And what is so interesting about it, it’s going to be a moment of inaction. And it proves the point that what you don’t do can matter every bit as much what you do, when you govern. And I think all these people, one, disagreed at the time, and they’re probably thinking about their futures but essentially it showed also that President Obama was something of a departure from the Democratic foreign policy national security mainstream, which are tougher.
JOE: And Mike, we can say this now that they are out of office. We had people close to John Kerry, people close to Joe Biden, people close to a lot of the foreign policy leaders extraordinarily frustrated and expressing the frustration of those principals: of John Kerry, of Joe Biden, of all the president’s men and women. And I think even Susan Rice, who wanted to respond to the first chemical weapon attack.
MIKE BARNICLE: Yeah. Look, I’m a huge fan of thoughtfulness in presidencies. And President Obama was quite thoughtful about everything. Syria was a serious mistake that the Obama administration made, in retrospect.
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Comments
And Joe states, ‘we can say this now that they’re out of office….’ That is the fundamental problem with those that make a regular appearance on Morning Joe.
Hell, that’s the problem with Joe. And that’s why I’m a former viewer of that program after 10 years of daily viewing.
You beat me to it. I read that and thought, “You could have said this while they were in office, too. You didn’t, because you were more worried about displeasing Master than you were about reporting the truth.”
Professional “authorized journalists” (a.k.a. “Journ-o-lists”), who make their living under First Amendment protections, have zero understanding of First Amendment protections.
This is my shocked face.
It was a running joke among freedom-loving Americans during and right after the election, but it appears a side effect of Trump’s presidency really will be to “Make Journalism Great Again”. 😉
#softpower
#bringbackourgirls
#leadingfrombehind
#WeArSo****ed
Well maybe Obama was afraid of this getting out:
From 28 April 2016 – Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin to Syrian Rebels
==
Donald Trump asserts his authority over his allies
Notice how the “Trump Colluded with Russia!!!” storyline died this weekend? Nobody will talk about it, of course, but that’s just it – it was the biggest story on every MSM outlet for the last 90 days, and suddenly, no one is ever going to mention it again.
obama had his secret weapons and they were Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice. Whenever he vacillated on a tough issue he would ask Rhodes to create a story that the naive msm would buy and then the trained parrot, Rice, would go out to babble it all over the world. With Rice and the complicit msm, it worked well for a while.
Responsibility to Protect, R2P was nothing more than nothing. Nothing meant by it, nothing promised by it.
Ruwanda and Syria are two terrible human catastrophes tolerated by the Left. In both cases hundreds of thousands lost their lives with many more left homeless by tribal genocide.
Bill Clinton didn’t cause Ruwanda, but Obama has co-ownership on the Syria Civil war.
As if this is the only screw up from that political coward obama.
The only thing he was interested in was trying to wipe out the tea party folks, Christians and other like minded law respecting people.
The one thing an American President can’t do is draw a red line and not act when the line is crossed. China and Russia acted as though the US didn’t exist because Obama was a paper Tiger and nobody respected him. His weakness is why he felt he had to spy on everyone. He acted as a coward acts. He is a disgrace.
Unlike a broken clock, Moron Joe is right – once.
Kind of like that rino rat McConnell, who finally showed up for work the other day.
The ‘serious mistakes, in retrospect’ are going to start piling up like car wrecks in the fog on an interstate highway.
Obamacare was Obama’s defining moment. Everything since then (and in fact leading up to it) simply underscores the fact that he is an incompetent racist blowhard in over his head.