Years ago, Saturday Night Live used to have a feature called "Deep Thoughts" by Jack Handy. It was a short and normally inane bit of commentary that was so stupid as to be funny (hopefully).
I was reminded of Deep Thoughts when I heard the commentary of Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times about the Trump foreign policy. According to this "expert" pundit of the Times, the main motivation behind the President's foreign policy is to undo whatever president Obama did. Kristof calls it more "vandalism" than a foreign policy. For example, he says that Trump pulled out of the Iran agreement just because it was an important achievement by Obama.
Hearing these comments, one has to wonder if anyone at the Times is actually paying attention to reality. Take a moment and think about these points:
1. Obama's policy of "Strategic Patience" towards North Korea was reversed by President Trump to a policy of maximum pressure. As a result, we are now less than a month away from a summit with Kim Jung Un at which the North Korean leader is supposedly going to agree to give up all nuclear weapons. But all that happened just to spite Obama.
2. The Obama policy of applying maximum pressure on Israel to force a peace agreement with the Palestinians accomplished nothing except to strain the relationship between the USA and Israel to close to the breaking point. There was no peace and no movement towards peace. Under Trump, the US relationship with the Israelis has been repaired; the US relationship with the Saudis, the Egyptians and the other Sunni Arab states has been greatly improved as well. There is still no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the Palestinians now know that they don't get to dictate the terms of any deal to a subservient USA.
3. Under Obama, there was an "agreement" to end use by Syria of chemical weapons. While the agreement existed, the Syrians did not bother to comply with it. Trump ignored the agreement and has struck the Syrians twice for using chemical weapons. Since the last US strike, the Syrians have refrained from deploying the chemical weapons again.
4. Under Obama the economy stagnated. We never had any year in which economic growth topped 3%, a figure below the average growth since World War II. President Trump jettisoned the over regulated methods of the Obama years. He also approved the biggest tax cut of the recent past, something that Obama fought against. Now, the economy is growing much more quickly that was the case in the Obama era.
There's more, but this is enough to consider the ridiculous hypothesis of the "expert" from the NY Times. Trump is being successful; America is winning. It's not vandalism to get rid of losing and improper theories of governance. Sure, Obama's legacy is being erased. It's a sad and dangerous legacy that ought to go sooner rather than later. For the first time in a long time, we have a president who understands that what one does is much more important than what one says.
I was reminded of Deep Thoughts when I heard the commentary of Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times about the Trump foreign policy. According to this "expert" pundit of the Times, the main motivation behind the President's foreign policy is to undo whatever president Obama did. Kristof calls it more "vandalism" than a foreign policy. For example, he says that Trump pulled out of the Iran agreement just because it was an important achievement by Obama.
Hearing these comments, one has to wonder if anyone at the Times is actually paying attention to reality. Take a moment and think about these points:
1. Obama's policy of "Strategic Patience" towards North Korea was reversed by President Trump to a policy of maximum pressure. As a result, we are now less than a month away from a summit with Kim Jung Un at which the North Korean leader is supposedly going to agree to give up all nuclear weapons. But all that happened just to spite Obama.
2. The Obama policy of applying maximum pressure on Israel to force a peace agreement with the Palestinians accomplished nothing except to strain the relationship between the USA and Israel to close to the breaking point. There was no peace and no movement towards peace. Under Trump, the US relationship with the Israelis has been repaired; the US relationship with the Saudis, the Egyptians and the other Sunni Arab states has been greatly improved as well. There is still no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the Palestinians now know that they don't get to dictate the terms of any deal to a subservient USA.
3. Under Obama, there was an "agreement" to end use by Syria of chemical weapons. While the agreement existed, the Syrians did not bother to comply with it. Trump ignored the agreement and has struck the Syrians twice for using chemical weapons. Since the last US strike, the Syrians have refrained from deploying the chemical weapons again.
4. Under Obama the economy stagnated. We never had any year in which economic growth topped 3%, a figure below the average growth since World War II. President Trump jettisoned the over regulated methods of the Obama years. He also approved the biggest tax cut of the recent past, something that Obama fought against. Now, the economy is growing much more quickly that was the case in the Obama era.
There's more, but this is enough to consider the ridiculous hypothesis of the "expert" from the NY Times. Trump is being successful; America is winning. It's not vandalism to get rid of losing and improper theories of governance. Sure, Obama's legacy is being erased. It's a sad and dangerous legacy that ought to go sooner rather than later. For the first time in a long time, we have a president who understands that what one does is much more important than what one says.
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