
In a cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama offers astonishing scapegoating for his own foreign policy disasters.
According to Obama, the deterioration of the ISIS wasteland that is now
European allies, the president complained, did not do any follow-up nation-building despite the proximity of
Obama did not stop there.
Administration aides told The Atlantic that Obama's unfortunate quip about ISIS being a "jayvee" organization was really the Pentagon's fault. Gen.
Earlier, Obama had blamed the spread of ISIS on National Intelligence Director
Obama also criticized British Prime Minister
This blame-gaming is old and tired. After Obama established a "red line" with Syrian President
Not long ago, the Obama administration boasted of its swap of Taliban terrorists who'd been imprisoned at
When Obama has not been busy blaming former President
The new national divisiveness is, according to Obama, not due to his own past "get in their face" and "punish our enemies" rhetoric, but rather due to a combination of Republican partisans, electoral gerrymandering, the media and super PACs.
Sometimes the bogeymen are inanimate. ATM machines, tsunamis, oil-price spikes and the European financial meltdown supposedly all conspired to slow economic growth in America. Former Obama economic advisor
When Obama entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of
The Solyndra debacle, Obama claimed, was the fault of the Chinese, as well as both Democrats and Republicans in
Obama has even blamed the American people for their own economic problems. "The way I think about it is, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades," he said in a 2011 interview.
The flip side is that Obama rarely shares credit for unexpectedly positive developments that he had little or nothing to do with. His administration did its utmost to stop new oil and gas leases on federal lands. But when the fracking revolution nonetheless went on to make American nearly energy-independent and sent gas prices tumbling, Obama took credit for the windfall.
When Obama ran for office, he routinely blamed the Bush administration for the Iraq War. After the surge (which he opposed) worked, Obama entered office to a quiet
Yet when Obama pulled all U.S. peacekeepers out of
Taking responsibility for mistakes is a sure sign of character; blaming others is not.
After nearly eight years of buck-passing, Obama is starting to sound a lot like his Republican alter ego,
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Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.
