The Obama Effect?

The Obama Effect?:

It's become almost a parlor game to watch Obamaphiles spin the president's response to events in Iran. Uninfatuated observers have noticed that the president displayed a tepid and unsatisfying neutrality to events in the streets of Iran following the sham election -- just as he had done last summer when the Russians staged an invasion of Georgia. His first instinct was to preserve his bona fides for negotiating with the mullahs -- bona fides that he has been at pains to demonstrate over the past several months. Starting last January, President Obama put doubts about the nature of the regime in Tehran to one side and offered blandishments to the leadership of what he was careful to call 'the Islamic Republic.' In his Cairo speech, the president begged forgiveness for the U.S. role in a 1953 coup. U.S. embassies worldwide were instructed to invite Iranian diplomats to July 4 parties. By so doing President Obama granted legitimacy to the mullahs and suggested that the U.S. -- under new enlightened leadership -- was now a worthy interlocutor. At just that moment, the people of Iran told the world how thoroughly detestable and illegitimate the Islamofascist regime is. This must surely have been one of the worst cases of presidential timing in living memory."