People taking the high ground in Libya, while Obama wusses out

The mad "our man in North Africa" Gaddafi continues to make things worse for his own people.  Firing on people, even children, hiring thugs from other countries in order to shoot and kill Libyans .... how much more insane can this guy get?

Yet, ordinary Libyans haven't lost it all (ht)


Christopher Hitchens is unhappy with President Obama's responses, or the lack of any, to the revolutions on the "Arab Street"

For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned "violence" in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi's remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland.

Perhaps the line about testicular fortitude was not off the mark, after all!  Hitchens concludes thus:

Libya is—in point of population and geography—mainly a coastline. The United States, with or without allies, has unchallengeable power in the air and on the adjacent waters. It can produce great air lifts and sea lifts of humanitarian and medical aid, which will soon be needed anyway along the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, and which would purchase undreamed-of goodwill. It has the chance to make up for its pointless, discredited tardiness with respect to events in Cairo and Tunis. It also has a president who has shown at least the capacity to deliver great speeches on grand themes. Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock.

Or, as we put in bluntly at casual conversations, "all talk and no shit."

Wait, is Obama slowly backing away from all this for the reason that Jon Stewart has figured out?

The Daily Show - Mess O' The Whole Potamia Region - Libya Uprising
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