Obama's bad ideas

John Podhoretz:

Give President Obama credit: You can’t trust his promises, but when it comes to his ideas, you can be certain he means what he says.

As a politician, he’s as dishonest and slippery as any we’ve ever seen, but as an ideological leader, he tells you the truth about what he really believes.

Thus, you can’t trust that the ObamaCare Web site will be fixed by Nov. 30, but you know he meant it when he said it is “doing what it was designed to do.” What it was designed to do is fundamentally reshape the relationship of the American citizen and the government.

You couldn’t trust his promise that he’d strike Syria for its use of chemical weapons because that evil regime crossed the “red line” he drew. But you know he meant it when he said earlier in 2013 that he hoped to have “the kind of constructive, cooperative relationship that moves us out of the Cold War mindset” with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

So far out of the Cold War mindset is Barack Obama that he allowed Putin to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. He did so on the implicit grounds that non-intervention is superior to intervention even after he vowed to intervene, and in a way that guarantees the ultimate triumph of the regime he had promised to punish for its unconscionable behavior.

The same is true of the Iran nuke deal — or pre-deal, or framework, or sellout, or Munich or whatever you want to call it.

The president has spent years talking tough on Iran, but his tough talk was often astoundingly disingenuous. For example, the administration has been taking credit for imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime that brought it to the negotiating table, but in fact he and his people opposed and fought the imposition of those sanctions.
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His duplicity on the sanctions shows just how bad his policy impulses are.   His instincts are liberal reactionary, but when he is forced to do it anyway, he acts like a guy leading a parade.  He opposes oil and gas development and has slowed drilling on federally controlled sites, but he is quick to take credit for development on private land.