Mr. President, Hear Your Enemies

“This president may occupy the White House,” said the senator seeking to run for president, “but for the last six years, the position of leader of the free world has remained open.”

A perfectly articulated observance of the current White House occupant …

An insight made by the current White House occupant, Barack Obama … Back in 2007 …

When Netanyahu puts down his bottle of Poland Spring water on the congressional lectern to talk about the Iranian threat, many voices will be ringing through the chamber.

Perhaps the loudest voice will be that of Jordanian King Abdullah II, who faces an existential threat from the terror group running Iran. Second loudest will make an extra effort to be heard — he is six feet underground. The late Saudi King Abdullah quietly used his oil wealth and his country’s sovereign wealth fund worth hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. stock to amplify what Netanyahu will be saying from the podium.

It may be that Israel has lost its biggest friend in Abdullah’s death. The monarch of nobody-knows-how-old had a visceral hatred for Iran and Syria and, according to most media accounts, closely coordinated with Israel on how to deal with the threat.

The glue that binds this Axis of Necessity — such as Israel’s Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, Jordan’s Abdullah II, Egypt’s El-Sisi, as well as mysterious “others” — has been the world’s great uniter. A paraphrase might go, “We are not an Arab Middle East or a Jewish Middle East but an Untrusting of the United States Middle East.”

When a speaker at the Republican convention in 2012 to nominate Mitt Romney spoke to an empty chair to symbolize the absent president, the White House Twitter account posted a picture of Obama sitting in a chair, along with a cute note: “This chair is occupied.”

Yes, the chair is occupied. State of the Union addresses are made. The commander in chief commands the troops. There’s someone to interview on the Sunday morning shows. The White House has an occupant. But the world lacks a policeman. The free world has no leader.

A growing number of columnists are making the case that a deal with Iran — any deal, even a bad one concocted with the flippancy of a Persian bazaar, even one that ends in an Islamic nuke — has been in the works for the Obama administration since the very beginning of his presidency. A report in Mosaic magazine even traces Obama’s craving for a beer with the mullahs back to 2007.

If terrorists killing Jews in a kosher supermarket on Erev Shabbos are just random acts of — I don’t know, handgun practice? — then the ayatollahs are just reviewing for their chemistry finals in Natanz and Fordow. (They skipped it back in ’79 ’cuz they were busy at handgun practice on the Shah’s range.)

So what’s to make of Obama’s promises to prevent the Persian bomb? Can it be chalked up to “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” phraseology?

Yes, but you don’t have to go back to Obamacare for precedent.

According to former Obama advisor David Axelrod’s new memoir, the president has always supported immorality and just pretended to oppose it, as a senator and 2008 presidential candidate. More to the point, Axelrod says he advised Obama to lie: “He grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position.”

More plainly said, Obama lied, morality died.

Unfortunately for Obama, the book came out the same week that NBC’s Brian Williams lost his job for similar stuff. Not exactly “lost” his job, but suspended for six months. Without pay.

We don’t get to do that if the president were to announce a nuclear deal that allows Iran to keep thousands of spinning dreidels, as published reports say is imminent. But the fact that Obama thinks he can get away with such a deal suggests, to borrow an expression, that he considers “the Americans [to be] too stupid to understand.”

Possibly another reason for Netanyahu’s insistence on giving the speech.

Philadelphia was announced last week as the site for the next Democratic nominating convention. While there, as I’m sure Obama will be, he can take a look around the City of Brotherly Love.

The president can visit Betsy Ross’s house, where, according to American lore, the first flag was sewn. He can tour Liberty Bell and inspect its crack. The professorial chief executive is a keen observer of these historical factoids.

But most importantly, Obama can visit the printing press where Benjamin Franklin (another Benjamin) wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack.

One gem Franklin wrote is, “Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.”

This article appeared in print in the February 25th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.