We waited three months for THIS? Gen. Stanley McChrystal recognized that the only way to make headway in the Afghan war – a war President Obama himself called “a war of necessity” before he stopped calling it a war at all and then returned to doing so tonight – was to bring 40,000 more troops to the front. So McChrystal put in the additional troops request.

Instead of responding, Obama mulled things over. And mulled things over some more. He held a National Security Council meeting. And then another.

Days passed. Obama attended more “man-made disaster” briefings (nine in total) as American soldiers were killed. He hemmed and hawed when anyone asked what was taking him so long to make a decision. The weeks trickled by and our soldiers – hampered by rules of engagement seemingly designed to give the enemy an edge – held their own and hoped for the requested reinforcements.

Meanwhile, Obama lost the Chicago Olympics bid. He won a Nobel Prize. He held a White House state dinner in a tent (the cost to taxpayers for that soiree is still unknown).

And McChrystal and the troops waited as Obama mused some more and asked the country not to rush to judgment on the Ft. Hood Massacre and played endless rounds of golf.

Finally, tonight, the president responded to McChrystal’s request. He did so first by announcing a pullout timeline before getting to the number of additional troops he would send over.

Gen. McChrystal requested at least 40,000 additional soldiers. That request was delivered to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 30^th. Tonight, Obama committed to 30,000 troops over the nest six to eight months.

But the president with his rhetoric sent the enemy a gift of hope instead of fear: by mentioning a timeline for withdrawal before getting to any talk of increasing the American presence in Afghanistan, he in effect told al Qaeda and the Taliban that if they bear with us until July 2011, we’ll be out of their turbans, whether we’ve finished the job there or not.

Setting aside any talk of a surge or timeline, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Obama’s speech is that he used it to sell his own interests. It’s no stretch to call him our most media-exposed president. He knows how to work a crowd, the liberal press and a teleprompter. Unfortunately, put him in front of an audience – especially one with cameras in the house – and he can’t stop his endless campaigning.

So Obama used his speech to slam George W. Bush and D1ck Cheney again by bringing up Iraq and whether that war was handled well or not. He used his speech to tell us that Islam “is one of the world’s great religions.” He reminded us that he’s a pacifist. (To reiterate: he talked about withdrawal before he talked about a surge.) He reminded us that America is all about human rights and that Gitmo had to be closed. And just in case you didn’t get his Muslim word embrace the first time, he told us that by fighting in Afghanistan, our nation affirms its commitment to the Muslim world.

Obama should have dazzled tonight. Instead, for all his somber look and tone, he came off looking like a huckster trying to pitch a tired bag of tricks.

Even when he did talk about the goals of the war remaining the same – “to disrupt, dismantle and defend al Qaeda in Afghanistan” – he didn’t get into specifics. And he seemed more concerned about the monetary cost of the war than the human cost.

In the end, Obama’s pacifist and withdrawal talk made him come off sounding weak. Indeed, his speech only affirms that Vice President D1ck Cheney assesses Obama correctly in his latest Politico interview:

“Here’s a guy without much experience, who campaigned against much of what we put in place ... and who now travels around the world apologizing,” Cheney said. “I think our adversaries — especially when that’s preceded by a deep bow ... — see that as a sign of weakness.” (December 1, 2009, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/30024.html)

Obama’s preference for an Afghan exit strategy over a victory is evident. Certainly al Qaeda and the Taliban read the president as weak before tonight’s speech. Nothing Obama said tonight will change their opinion of him. All that was missing was a bow.

It’s been over two months since General McChrystal, our top commander in Afghanistan, put out the call for more troops.  President Barack Hussein Obama continues to hem and haw and hold endless meetings to discuss the issue.  Maybe he’s too busy having parties with J-Lo and friends, compiling his enemies list, pushing healthcare, playing B ball and campaigning for fellow Dems to worry about such trivialities as warfare.  Meanwhile, things get worse abroad and more of our soldiers are paying the highest of price for an indecisive commander-in-chief.

Obama’s stalling is a perfect example of his methodology: vacillate and ignore a problem or fixate on discussion rather than action.  It’s inertia vs. movement.

President George W. Bush was all about action and movement.  People denigrated his cowboy diplomacy but he acted in the best interests of his country and those at risk.

Obama is standing still. He’s acting as if he were posing for an oil painting while America suffers.  He seems more interested in his celebrity status than the people he was elected to govern and protect.

When we do see Obama move, it’s to advance his personal legacy.  Consider that he still claims to have put an end to torture in the context of military interrogations when we never advocated it.  Consider that he continues to work to close Gitmo and bring terrorists to American soil.  (The Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens are under attack on a daily basis with Obama and his Marxist and Mao-loving camp, even as known terrorists will be given constitutional rights and tried in American courts.  OK imagines that so much of the information that could convict the terrorists will need to be omitted during their trials due to national security.  In other words, it's hard to feel confident that justice will be served.)

And Obama promises to make Cap and Trade a reality.  This on the heels of growing evidence that Al Gore's global warming is a hoax (and a profitable one that’s made the ex-vice president rich in spite of thousands of scientists who counter the issue and want to debate Gore on the issue; he refuses. He even had a reporter’s microphone cut when the questions concerning discrepancies in An Inconvenient Truth grew too warm and inconvenient).

Moreover, Obama promises to make national healthcare come to pass.  This is yet another power grab designed to dismantle the greatest healthcare system in the world.

In other words, when it comes to radically changing our country – for the worse – Obama hops to the task with a lilt in his step.  But when it comes to directing necessary attention to foreign policy and winning a war, he checks out.

How’s this for cowboy diplomacy:  “the strategic nuclear power of the United States has been so greatly modernized and expanded in the last 1,000 days, by the rapid production and deployment of the most modern missile systems, that any and all potential aggressors are clearly confronted now with the impossibility of strategic victory – and the certainty of total destruction – if by reckless attack they should ever force upon us the necessity of a strategic reply.”

Who spoke those words?  No one, actually – but President John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have, if he had lived long enough to make it to the Dallas Trade Mart the afternoon he was assassinated.  The differences between John Kennedy and Barack Obama – between being a Democrat in the Kennedy era and being a Democrat in the 21^st century – are profound.  JFK spoke often of peace in the world, but he understood the price that had to be paid in order to attain it.  His administration engaged in numerous clandestine activities designed to ensure America’s freedom and safety.  Obama’s vision of a pacifist world, on the other hand, is pure fantasy - a utopian dream.  Ultimately, it’s about ignoring a problem and hoping it goes away, rather than acting to fix it.

Obama’s M.O. also involves using the lamestream media to set up smokescreens and divert attention from a lack of decision on Afghanistan and our country’s most pressing issues.  We hear more about balloon boy hoaxes than about energy bills that will kill our already depleted bank accounts. We hear about Obama’s vow to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military while our soldiers are imperiled abroad.  We hear about how baaaaaaaad FOX News is, how Obama will not grant it any interviews until at least 2010 and how it isn’t a true news facility.  The latter from Obama advisor David Axelrod, who also told ABC that FOX is undeserving of being treated as a true news organization: “the bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way, and we're not going to treat them that way” (Ann Sanner, “White House Continues Attack on Fox News,” October 19, 2009, http://www.gopusa.com/news/2009/october/1019_wh_fox.shtml).

Here’s another line from John Kennedy’s undelivered speech:  “If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help.”

Thankfully, more and more Americans – including many Obama supporters – are getting tired of the endless wordplay. They’re growing exasperated with the stalling and smoke and mirrors.  They comprehend that Obama is more about inaction than action.  The president’s approval rating has hit a new low. Obama's loyalties or lack thereof are drawing attention. Fewer are laughing when the birthers cry out that being a Natural Born Citizen is an important issue for U.S. presidents.  More Americans are questioning why Obama didn't embrace his Muslim root system until after he was elected.

Countless articles, documentaries and films recently heralded the Woodstock Festival’s 40^th anniversary. Few of the retrospectives mentioned the soldiers dying in Vietnam as stoners rocked out in rural New York.

Something similar is happening now. Afghan War Commander General McChrystal requested 40 thousand additional troops weeks ago. Instead of complying, President Barrack Hussein Obama continues to stall even as he attends to matters he deems more important than losing a war.

But Obama must consider the 2016 Olympics his most pressing political matter. He wants the games held in Chicago. So of course, he and First Lady Michelle are jetting off to Copenhagen– in separate planes – to make a personal appeal to the Olympic Committee. Never mind that the cost of Obama alone making the four thousand mile trip aboard Air Force One will set American taxpayers back anywhere from $300K to $500K, each way (Penny Starr, CNS News, September 30,2009, http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54762).   After all, there’s no other way to get in touch with the Olympic Committee except to go meet it face-to-face, right?

The Afghan war should be tops on Obama’s list. Instead, he’s doing anything but making a decision on whether or not to honor General McChrystal’s troop request. That stall is costing us lives. McChrystal admitted on last Sunday’s 60 Minutes that he’s spoken to Obama just once in the past 70 days. Never mind that there’s a chain of command in place and Obama wants McChrystal to communicate with the Pentagon first. The president can do better than have a single direct communiqué with his on-site commander in 70 days. To do otherwise is an insult to McChrystal and every soldier who volunteered to serve his country in any way it deems necessary.

Funny how Obama continues to hedge – and liberals continue to give him a pass – on an Afghan war decision. Remember how the libs crucified President George W. Bush for not taking a firmer stance on Afghanistan? Remember how they vilified W for the troop surge in Iraq, which finally turned things around?

Truth be told, the Iraq surge was a resounding success. And in that fact is the key to Obama’s fudging on a similar Afghan surge. Sure, angering liberals may account for part of the president’s hesitancy, but there’s also this to consider: To give McChrystal the additional troops he requested would be tantamount to admitting that W was right in ordering the Iraq surge.

In fact, George W. Bush was right about a lot of things. He was right about the Iraq surge and he was right about Iran. Recall that Bush was laughed at for treating Iran as a dangerous enemy determined to join the nuclear arms community. Now we’ve learned that Ahmadinejad and company have long been cooking up uranium in hidden sites throughout the country.

W understood what President Ronald Reagan understood all too well: peace is best upheld through strength. Iran wouldn’t be processing nuke fuel and preparing an Israel doomsday bomb if Reagan, George W. Bush and VP Cheney were still in power.

And neither Reagan nor W would be running a fool’s errand to Denmark in order to secure a round of games while our troops are pleading for help.

By Oscar De Los Santos and Kelly L. Goodridge

For years it was all too easy for liberals to find a scapegoat for the world’s ills. In fact, they’re still using the same punching bag now and again. When all else fails, blame George W. Bush. But these days we have a new commander-in-chief, one who addressed the world at the UN today (September 23, 2009) and scolded it for not helping America with its economy and wars.   Of course, if Barack Hussein Obama were honest, he would start shouldering the blame for our rapidly stagnating national state. If anyone is to blame for resurrecting Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” it’s Dreamboat Obama himself, who has embarked on starry-eyed, dead-end idealist missions that are stripping America of all respect in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Obama used his global platform to warn the world that it had to quell its “almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction” (Matt Spetalnick and Andrew Quinn, “Obama seeks help at U.N., some raise questions,” Reuters, September 23, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE58M0VN20090923?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=69).

Truly, if there’s anyone at fault for driving us into inaction these days, it’s Obama himself. He’s so obsessed with passing healthcare reform that Americans don’t want, that he’s hurting us by ignoring our immediate need: a troop surge in Afghanistan. He laid out his plan six months ago. It’s a little late to be worrying about cost and strategy, yet he continues to waffle. (Regardless of what excuse he wishes to toss at us, we understand that Obama won’t green-light General McChrystal’s request for 40 thousand more soldiers for fear of losing leftist votes to pass his healthcare bill. McChrystal is the top military commander in Afghanistan. He’s at the source. He knows what he needs to make a difference in an otherwise futile exercise. Obama doesn’t care. In fact, the president had McChrystal’s request muzzled for days in order to embark on another healthcare TV blitz.)

 So obsessed is Obama with moving cap & trade forward, that he’s ignoring the fact that the earth is experiencing a decade of its coolest temperatures. So obsessed is Obama with making nice with the Russians, that he’s thrown Poland and the Czech Republic – and America’s safety – under the bus by abandoning our planned overseas missile defense system in favor of Defense-Lite.

And what did Obama get for making nice with people who hate America? The same thing he got by calling our enemies before calling our allies the morning he took office; the same thing he got for bashing his country while on his international apology tour; the same thing he’s going to get for ordering the Defense Department to radically downscale our nuclear arsenal; the same thing he’s going to get for sharing his dreamboat vision of a world without nuclear bombs: NOTHING.

In fact, rather than getting anything, Obama is still busy ceding the national farm. Consider that during the harsh economic climate the U.S. is weathering, we’re still giving away billions to the very people who would blow us away in a heartbeat, if given the opportunity. Consider that America “is expected to spend about $36.7 billion on its foreign aid budget next year” (William La Jeunesse, “Tracking Your Taxes,” FOX News, September 22, 2009). Lest you think all of the money is designated for humanitarian causes, think again. Here’s an infuriating breakdown of the money that will be doled out, according to FOX News:

• $98 million to persuade Kim Jong-il of North Korea to give up nuclear weapons
• $20 million for political prisoners and political rights in Castro's Cuba
• $6 million to promote civil society in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela
• $500,000 for border security in Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya
• $26 million to help train police in Evo Morales' Bolivia
• $56 million to support the rule of law and human rights in Vladimir Putin's Russia, arguably one of the world's richest nations

(Source: William La Jeunesse, “Tracking Your Taxes: Sending Billions in Aid to Despots and Wealthy Nations,” FOX News, September 22, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/22/tracking-taxes-sending-billions-aid-despots-wealthy-nations/)

So why shouldn’t NATO and the rest of the world leave America in the lurch? They know someone who is ignoring everything but his own Machiavellian reckless visions is running our country. Michael Savage asserts that Obama is “to the left of most of the dictators in the UN.” As a result, Savage declares, “I’m flabbergasted” (960 WELI radio, September 23, 2009). OK feels the same way.

There was so much talk about a so-called “bridge to nowhere” a short while back. Now we’re a country marching toward nowhere – except perhaps Omega – thanks to a reckless non-leader who duped many into electing him.