Thursday, March 26, 2009

Mea culpa

Barack Obama's administration is going to be every bit as mealy-mouthed in the foreign policy department as I'd feared, and then some. Making the rounds in the news yesterday was Hillary Clinton's "mea culpa" to Mexico for the lawlessness and carnage taking place along the US-Mexico border, courtesy of Mexican drug cartels.

But that wasn't actually the worst of it, since there actually is an American drug problem contributing cash to the cause. But saying to Mexico "your problem is our problem" and saying "your problem is our fault" are two different things - especially in diplospeak - and is just the latest in a series of signals from Obama to the rest of the world that he somehow feels a need to atone for eight years of a president with whom he disagreed.

One of Obama's first orders of business when taking office was to issue an executive order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Lefty talking heads everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief, not so much over the detainees held there but over the message it would send to the international community.

More recently, we've seen Obama signal to the Iranian government that all those knuckle-draggers who occupied the White House since 1979 were wrong to isolate a terror-exporting extreme Islamist theocracy and drop the use of the term "enemy combatant" to refer to, uh, enemies who are combatting us.

And at about the same time our brilliant Secretary of State was groveling to Mexico, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration was dropping the term "War on Terror" in favor of "Overseas Contingency Operations". That report has been disputed, but that nobody was in the least surprised by it is telling in itself.

What's next...will satire become reality?
Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com) — Sensitive to accusations of profiling specific groups, the Justice Department today announced that the American Civil Liberties Union has taken over the lead role in the terrorism investigation, a shift in strategy that frees up the government to conduct a less prejudicial, more inclusive probe that should take, roughly, forever.

"Instead of un-Constitutionally targeting specific groups, our investigation will expand the pool of interviews by more fairly including people of every ethnicity, every religion, every gender, and every sexual persuasion," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Right now, we are interviewing Caucasian farmers in Iowa, legally blind Wal-Mart employees in California, and gay Latino package store customers in Florida to see if they had contact with, or were involved with, those from the Middle East who carried out these attacks."

"For some reason, we haven't learned a thing so far," Romero conceded. "But I should note that we have yet to speak to Chinese-American loggers in the Northwest."

Using the new approach, the ACLU estimated the investigation will cost $2 trillion and take 750 years to complete.

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