Aside from the incumbent continuing to try taking personal credit for Ben Bernanke’s performance at the Fed, there really isn’t very much new going on. However, I guess the markets didn’t buy POTUS’s fabrication and must think Ben’s pretty important, because all three indexes slid hugely in the past two days, the Dow alone dropping about 500 points.
I think George Will summed up the sadness of the administration’s entire situation pretty succinctly the other day, when he wrote the following in his column in The Washington Post: “The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality?"
And that brings me to another example of how confusing things at the top have become, because here’s something I found in the same publication on-line.
According to Middle East coverage by The Washington Post, “Jordan’s prime minister says the country is hosting 900 U.S. military personnel to bolster its defense capabilities against potential threats from the Syrian civil war.”
The article goes on to report that: “The first Jordanian public official to speak publicly of the numbers of U.S. troops in the kingdom, Abdullah Ensour told reporters Saturday that 200 of the personnel were experts training for how to handle a chemical attack.
He said the remaining 700 are manning a Patriot missile defense system and F-16 fighter jets which Washington deployed this month in case the Syrian war worsens. And that, “Jordan’s premier says country's hosting 900 US troops to boost security against Syrian threats.”
So, if I understand this correctly, after making Middle East withdrawal a cornerstone of his campaigns and then pulling us out of "Bush’s wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq, its okay now to deploy our troops in Jordan, whose numbers will logically increase if the situation escalates further.
And what makes even less sense to me is that if the same had been done two years ago in Syria, we’d have accomplished a victory long before the Russians had time to react, and making those now uprising elsewhere, such as Turkey, Egypt and Bahrain, perhaps think twice before proceeding.
Consequently, these scenarios bring me back once again to my continual quandary. Because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to grasp the fact that a street-corner political hack can exert so much control over world events. Especially when he’s got no background, experience, or first-hand knowledge of any kind supporting his decisions. Which I guess, explains why everything he’s involved in either doesn’t work right or absolutely makes no sense.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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