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A post by Pat

Liberals endlessly congratulate themselves for their compassion. They are forever in search of a thirsty man in order to hold a cup of water to his lips, taking along their camera.

President Obama is making a spectacle of himself trying to be in the spotlight in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. Part of it is the post-Katrina template of being seen as on-the-job after President Bush was unfairly branded as uncaring and bungling. It may also be an attempt to boost Obama’s numbers or, ahem, a distraction from his political difficulties with the health care bill.

I’m not suggesting the President is entirely opportunistic. It is right for a U.S. President to speak up and aid the Haitian people who live in abysmal misery even without devastating natural disasters. Obama’s attentiveness strikes me as conspicuously overdone. For example, it is unnecessary for the President of the United States to personally give mundane progress updates on TV like he did yesterday afternoon when a press release would suffice.

While Obama is all over this one, there’s another disaster that has been building which could result in massive human loss, horrible suffering and shake the entire world. President Obama is doing nothing about it. It isn’t an earthquake. It’s Iran with a bomb.

After wasting a year under the pretext of following some kind of smarter strategy on Iran, the deadline for talks has passed. The next step was to be stronger sanctions, but without China signing on for that, nothing will happen. China wiped their shoes on us.

Expectations low for big powers’ meeting on Iran

The meeting comes after Tehran ignored a year-end 2009 deadline set by U.S. President Barack Obama for the Islamic Republic to respond to an offer from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China of economic and political incentives in exchange for Iran halting its nuclear enrichment program.

Five of the six nations that made the offer are sending senior Foreign Ministry officials — so-called political directors — to the meeting. But China decided not to send its political director. Instead, Beijing is expected to send a low-level diplomat from its U.N. mission, diplomats in New York told Reuters.
“We’re expecting a political expert from the Chinese mission who won’t have any decision-making authority,” a diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

China’s virtual snub of the six-power meeting has caused consternation among the four Western powers in the group, which had hoped to use Saturday’s meeting to reach an agreement on whether to begin drafting a new Security Council resolution on a fourth round of U.N. sanctions against Tehran.

Diplomats said they did not know China’s motive, speculating it might be to illustrate Beijing’s resistance to punishing Iran with more sanctions or dismay at U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province.

“There’s not much point in having the meeting in light of the Chinese representation but we’re going to have it,” a diplomat from one of the six countries said. “We need to send a message to Iran that we’re not dropping this issue.”

Earlier in the week, this was a topic of discussion on the Fox panel.

Krauthammer: Well, the farce continues. To hear Hillary speak again about smarter sanctions, smarter ways, smart diplomacy, this is comic arrogance on the part of the administration which has had a disastrous year in terms of Iran and still speaks of how smart it is …

…The idea that we can impose unilateral sanctions because, remember, the Chinese have said today and last week they are not going to join us and in the absence of the Chinese, you have nothing out of the Security Council. If you are going to impose unilateral sanctions, others will take our place.

…Unless you have universal sanctions, extremely strong, cutting off the gasoline, really targeting everything important, nothing is going to happen. The administration knows all of this. The lassitude with which it’s acting. It says the pressure track is on, engagement is on, it means nothing. Nothing is going to happen. This administration accepted the fact of an Iranian bomb and it’s prepared to do practically nothing except kabuki.

Hayes: The reality is there is no pressure track. There never has been a pressure track. It’s a joke. They pretend there is a pressure track because they want to seem like they’re being tough. When you pass on deadline after deadline after deadline, you don’t actually do anything, you cannot look tough. Fascinating article, one of the under covered story or under discovered stories of the past two weeks in the Washington Post, that reported to the extent that they are pursuing sanctions, and we just heard they’re going to be targeted smarter sanctions. To the extent they are pursuing the sanctions, the goal of the sanctions is to force the regime back in negotiations. So it’s all about engagement. It’s all about making a play to look tough when I agree with Charles. They’ve accepted the reality of a Iran with a bomb.

It is easy to be compassionate and send aid to people in need after natural disasters. That doesn’t distinguish a person as a great leader. It is managing the difficult problems in the face of evil intent by madmen that measures a leader’s greatness.