It’s Wednesday, September 11th, 2013…and here’s a quick and dirty edition of The Gouge!

First up…

Forgive, but never forget.

Next up, the WSJ‘s take on Neville Obama’s rather hasty and indescribably injurious retreat from the box he built:

Obama Rescues Assad

The President lets Putin outmaneuver him on Syrian chemical arms.

What could be worse for America’s standing in the world than a Congress refusing to support a President’s proposal for military action against a rogue regime that used WMD? Here’s one idea: A U.S. President letting that rogue be rescued from military punishment by the country that has protected the rogue all along.

That’s where President Obama now finds himself on Syria after he embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s offer to take custody of Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons. The move may rescue Mr. Obama and Congress from the political agony of a vote on a resolution to authorize a military strike on Syria. But the diplomatic souk is now open, and Mr. Obama has turned himself into one of the junior camel traders.

What a fiasco. Secretary of State John Kerry, of all people, first floated this escape route for Assad on Monday in Europe where he was supposed to be rallying diplomatic support for a strike. The remark appeared to be off-the-cuff, but with Mr. Kerry and this Administration you never know. In any case before Mr. Kerry’s plane had landed in the U.S., Russia’s foreign minister had leapt on the idea and proposed to take custody of Assad’s chemical arsenal to forestall U.S. military action.

The White House should have rebuffed the offer given Russia’s long protection of Assad at the United Nations—a fact noted with scorn on Monday by Mr. Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice. Instead Mr. Obama endorsed the Russian gambit as what “could potentially be a significant breakthrough.” The Senate immediately called off its Wednesday vote on the military resolution. By Tuesday Assad had accepted the offer that he hopes will spare him from a military strike.

France will press for a U.N. Security Council resolution supposedly for U.N. inspectors to supervise the dismantling of Syria’s stockpiles, though Russia will no doubt try to put itself in the lead inspecting role. On Tuesday Russia was even objecting to a French draft that would blame the Syrian government for using chemical weapons. Mr. Putin also insisted the U.S. must first disavow any military action in Syria, even as he and Iran make no such pledge.

On second thought, fiasco is too kind for this spectacle. Russia has publicly supported Assad’s denials that he used sarin gas, but we are now supposed to believe it will thoroughly scrub Syria of those weapons. We are also supposed to believe Assad will come clean about the weapons he has long denied having and still denies using.

“Okay…ya got me; I really haven’t the slightest clue about running anything but my mouth!”

Oh, and we can be confident of this because U.N. or Russian inspectors or someone will be able to locate the entire chemical arsenal, pack up arms that require enormous care in transport, and then monitor future compliance in the continuing war zone that is Syria.

Even if you believe this will happen, or is even possible, Assad will emerge without punishment for having used chemical weapons. He can also be confident that there will be no future Western military action against him. Mr. Obama won’t risk another ramp-up to war given the opposition at home and abroad to this effort.

Assad will also know he can unleash his conventional forces anew against the rebels, and Iran and Russia will know they can arm him with impunity. The rebels had better brace themselves for a renewed assault. At the very least, Mr. Obama should compensate for his diplomatic surrender by finally following through on his June promise to arm and train the moderate Free Syrian Army. Otherwise he runs the risk of facilitating an Assad-Iran-Russian triumph.

The alacrity with which Mr. Obama embraced Russia’s offer suggests a President who was looking for his own political escape route. His campaign to win congressional support has lost ground in the week since he needlessly blundered into proposing it. His effort to rally international support foundered last week at the G-20, where Mr. Putin looked dominant, and Mr. Obama’s approval rating has been falling at home.

In his Tuesday speech, Mr. Obama tried to put his best face on all of this. He took credit for it by claiming that his threat of “unbelievably small” military force, as Mr. Kerry advertised it, induced Assad to see the light. He claimed that he had personally floated the idea of international monitoring of Syria’s weapons. But this admission merely underscores how eager Mr. Obama is to find a Syria exit short of having to follow through on his military threats. His speech amounted to a call to support a military strike that his actions suggest he desperately wants to avoid.

The world will see through this spin. A British commentator in the Telegraph on Monday called this “the worst day for U.S. and wider Western diplomacy since records began,” and that’s only a mild exaggeration. A weak and inconstant U.S. President has been maneuvered by America’s enemies into claiming that a defeat for his Syria policy is really a triumph.

The Iranians will take it as a signal that they can similarly trap Mr. Obama in a diplomatic morass that claims to have stopped their nuclear program. Israel will conclude the same and will now have to decide if it must risk a solo strike on Tehran. America’s friends and foes around the world will recalculate the risks ahead in the 40 dangerous months left of this unserious Presidency.

What concerns us isn’t Obama’s lack of seriousness, or his loss of face; it’s the fact eventually American troops, and likely innocent civilians, will be the ones paying for this wanker’s Marxist machinations and egregious errors.

As Rush Limbaugh put it prior to the President’s latest expulsion of hot air…

Shouldn’t Putin Address Us Tonight?

As Conn Carroll notes in the Morning Examiner:

Obama votes present on Syria

Progressives: shunning any shred of responsibility for messes of their own creation since 1912.

Speaking from the East Room of the White House Tuesday evening, President Obama used Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s offer to secure Syria’s chemical weapons as an excuse to delay a congressional vote on Obama’s proposed military strike that most Washington observers expected the chief executive to lose.

By taking the easy way out, and avoiding a congressional defeat that would have humiliated him on both the domestic and international stages, Obama has given Putin a golden opportunity to strengthen Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s military. More importantly, Obama’s bumbling has given Putin a way to achieving a huge boost in Russian influence, particularly in the Middle East, where the Great Bear of the North has had a minimal role since 1970, when Egypt switched from being a Soviet client state to a U.S. ally.

Complete incoherence

Obama’s 15-minute address stumbled aimlessly from exhortations for action one minute to calls for patience the next. One minute Obama was comparing Assad to Hitler, the next minute he was asking for time to negotiate with him. Obama outlined no coherent plan of action, other than sending Secretary of State John Kerry to meet the Russians, and didn’t ask the American people to do anything other than watch horrific videos of children dying.

How far down the rabbit hole will Obama go?

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have front page stories Wednesday detailing how impossible it would be to secure chemical weapons in any country in the midst of a civil war. It simply can’t be done. As former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told the Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein, the Russia plan “is an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ proposal.”

Will Obama eventually admit he’s been had? Or will he quietly let Russia have a free hand in Syria, functionally ending the civil war in Assad’s favor, and just be glad that he no longer has to deal with the issue?

Uhhh…that would be the latter.  But not before The Dear Misleader declares the disastrous denouement another diplomatic coup, a deliberate distortion the MSM will dutifully echo.

Then there’s this assessment on The Obamao’s actions from Danielle Pletka writing at AEI.com:

Obama: L’etat, c’est moi

There is a theme that threads its way through the political life of Barack Obama, and it is the only way to understand Syria, Benghazi, and so much more. Sadly, that theme is not principled opposition to war or even a desire to diminish America’s footprint on the world stage; it is egotism. (We’d suggest unbridled ego…coupled with a burning desire to diminish America at home and abroad!) How can we reconcile the president’s myriad positions on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Egypt, al Qaeda, and more? The answer is that his opposition/support/outrage/fervor for the use of force in Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Yemen/Pakistan/etc can only make sense if we understand that when Barack Obama thinks it’s ok, it’s ok.

And when he doesn’t, well, it isn’t. Like the old riddle about the two Indians, one of which always tells the truth and the other who always lies, we are left trying to make sense of the president’s many, many contradictory statements. Last night’s speech was no different; the vast mass of his short address to the nation was about the imperative of answering Assad’s use of chemical weapons with military force. The final minutes were about not using that force. Congress should authorize the decision, but shouldn’t vote now. The strike will be limited, but lethal. We’re not the world’s “policeman,” but we can’t turn the other cheek at this challenge to “freedom and dignity for all people.”

Small wonder, then, that neither the American people nor Democrats and Republicans in Congress are willing to follow a man whose sole guiding principle is, “If I want to do it, it’s right.” Especially when the likely corollary is, “And now I don’t want to do it anymore.”

It is fine for a leader to be conflicted, and justifiable to delay military action in the hope of diplomatic solutions. But it is not fine to work out that conflict on American television screens, nor to laud (and indeed, take credit for) solutions that are false on their face. Similarly, it is fine to justify the use of force in Libya on the grounds that, absent intervention, “Qaddafi would commit atrocities against his people. Many thousands could die. A humanitarian crisis would ensue. The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners.” But it’s not fine to pretend those words were never uttered, precedents not set, and that somehow, dead Syrians are less worthy. Every step the president has taken in facing up to the challenge in Syria – a complex one, no doubt – is to rationalize why his previous utterances don’t apply. The simple problem is that those rationalizations don’t make sense. And there is now such a vast trust deficit that even members of his own party are distancing themselves from Obama.

I have written repeatedly that the United States has an interest in ensuring a stable and Assad-free future for Syria; many of us have written on a variety of occasions about how to work toward that goal. But forget about Syria for a moment. What about Iran? Even the Rand Pauls of this world allow that we are facing the deadly prospect of an Iran with nuclear weapons. On Monday, Susan Rice repeated Obama’s oft-stated line that “we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.”

Oh really? Can anyone believe that in Tehran they see the president’s contortions on Syria as a deterrent? His willingness to ignore 13 previous uses of chemical weapons against the Syrian people in violation of his own “red line” as determination? Rather, the president has done little more than assure Iran’s new leaders that Washington is fundamentally unserious when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, not to speak of its ongoing support for Assad, for Hezbollah, and for terrorists in Gaza.

It is easy to dismiss this latest in a series of foreign policy debacles as nothing more than the flailings of an amateur. But this man is the President of the United States of America.  He certainly hasn’t forgotten the title; merely the responsibility he has to uphold the dignity and strength of the office in the service of the best interests of the nation.

Let’s be honest; the only thing which has shown the least sign of improvement since Obama took office is his golf handicap.  As for America and most of the rest of the world…

…it’s crash and burn!

Next up, two pieces of good news, courtesy of Bill Meisen and Jeff Foutch…

Colorado Lawmakers Ousted in Recall Vote Over Gun Law

Don’t let the door hit you in your unconstitutional asses on your way out.

Weiner, Spitzer Political Comebacks Fall Flat

We’d term it going limp!

 On the Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another Sign The Apocalypse Is Upon Us, courtesy of Louise Wilson:

Marriott Hotel Offers Free Mini Muffins ‘In Remembrance Of Those We Lost On 9/11’

9/11 Muffins; right up there with the Edsel, New Coke and a 2nd term for Obama!

Magoo