This week’s Weekly White House Report Card finds our grader Jed Babbin highlighting the contradictions of President Obama’s last tour of Europe where he told anti-Trump protesters back home that they shouldn’t stay quiet.
Jed Babbin
In British slang, the word “whinging” means complaining persistently in a peevish or irritating manner. President Obama spent most of the week whinging around Europe addressing distraught liberal leaders and other fellow globalists. His audience’s’ moods reflected the populist surge in Europe following the British Brexit vote and Mr. Trump’s election. Obama told whoever would listen, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that globalism really wasn’t dead and that his policies really had been the right things to do. That, of course, was precisely the opposite of what voters decided on November 8th.
Speaking in Berlin, Obama also urged President-elect Trump to stand up to Russia whenever it deviates from American values and “international norms.” Where was that stout-hearted defiance when Mr. Putin engineered the conquest of Crimea by Putin’s “little green men” and the subsequent invasion of Ukraine, where fighting continues?
With “mostly peaceful” — i.e., partly violent — demonstrations/riots in several cities Obama was given the chance to call for peace after his meeting with Merkel. Instead, he incited the demonstrators by saying that they shouldn’t remain quiet.
The president’s whinges included his statement that Mr. Trump’s victory was due to social media such as Twitter and Facebook. That’s bad news for the CEOs of those companies who broke their picks trying to elect Hillary Clinton.
Grade: D
Jed Babbin is an Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him @jedbabbin
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
