THREE MARTINI LUNCH: MAY 28, 2014

Brett Winterble and Jim Geraghty discuss WaPo's stinging criticism of Obama's foreign policy, a whistleblower's description of the V.A. as an "organized crime syndicate," and CNN's Carol Costello ignorantly crediting FLOTUS with signing a bill into law.



Obama leads America to glorious victory over straw men at West Point

There are those who believe military action is always the answer and there are those who believe military action is never the answer, but the president — wait a minute. No one believes either of those things! All right, granted, maybe John McCain does, but who else's foreign-policy views can fairly be reduced to one of those two positions? Even Ron Paul voted to invade Afghanistan. You know how it goes, though, with the Adult-in-the-Room-in-Chief: His position, by definition, is the sensible, pragmatic one, and therefore his critics on either side are necessarily out on the fringe. Ben Shapiro translates:

Obama: "We need to do stuff. And the stuff we will do will not be stuff that a crazy person says we should do. It will be good stuff."
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 28, 2014

So shopworn has this gimmick become that it's now practically a drinking game on Twitter during O's speeches to spot the straw men as they arrive. I do think there's a strategic component to it, though, not just some knee-jerk impulse on Obama's part to reassure the world that he's Mr. Reasonable. It's not quite true that McCain supports military intervention everywhere, but given his high media profile and his eternal belief that the U.S. should be doing more abroad, no matter how much the U.S. is already doing, I think he's become a useful proxy for that position to the White House. McCain is, after all, the closest thing the GOP currently has to a spokesman for George W. Bush's foreign policy (I think he's even more gung ho about interventionism than Dubya was, but never mind that) and running against Bush's foreign policy has always paid off for Obama.

As one person on Twitter said, read today's speech and you'll see that chunks of it seem to be aimed directly at McCain — which is to say, aimed directly at Bush. The same was true the last time he spoke up in defense of his foreign policy, slightly less than a month ago. Setting up that contrast, passivity abroad or another Iraq war, is good for O.

Also read:

Dear Leader vs. His Imagined Critics

Dear Leader fiddles with foreign policy speeches while Libya burns