RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over Easter, I wrote a post at this space entitled “President Weirdo ^[1],” which got a fair amount of attention pro and con. In essence, I proposed that President Barack Obama was psychologically unfit to govern. Only a day later, we have received evidence that, if anything, I understated my case. Like some looney member of Code Pink, our president is abandoning the nuclear deterrent adhered to by every American president since Truman. And he is doing it in a manner that makes absolutely no sense.

The New York Times ^[2] explains it this way:

[Obama] ended up with a document that differed considerably from the one President George W. Bush published in early 2002, just three months after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Bush, too, argued for a post-cold-war rethinking of nuclear deterrence, reducing American reliance on those weapons.

But Mr. Bush’s document also reserved the right to use nuclear weapons “to deter a wide range of threats,” including banned chemical and biological weapons and large-scale conventional attacks. Mr. Obama’s strategy abandons that option — except if the attack is by a nuclear state, or a nonsignatory or violator of the nonproliferation treaty.

 

This is indeed astonishing. The President of the United States — whose most important duty is to protect the citizens of this country — is publicly abjuring the use of nuclear weapons if we are attacked by chemical or biological weapons — both of which are known to all of us as Weapons of Mass Destruction, the dreaded WMDs.

What are we to make of this and the man who is adopting this policy? Does he hate us? Does he hate this country? What would he do if there was, for example, a massive small pox attack on the U.S.? Send in the infantry? Call in the Marines? Try to reason with whoever did it and recommend they negotiate as the fatal disease spreads to millions of people?

Now I detest nuclear weapons as much as the next person, but this approach seems — I hate to repeat myself, but I will — deranged. It also has very little to do with actually reducing nuclear weapons in the world. Again, it seems like the act of an extreme narcissist, someone who wants to parade himself as anti-nuke while ignoring the checks and balances that have, in fact, kept nuclear weapons in their silos for decades.

Deterrence has worked. And now Obama wants to abandon or diminish it at the very moment Russia is modernizing their arsenal. What a strange person. President Weirdo, indeed. As I said in my previous post, “good luck to us.”