Media aghast as Trump blames Obama for Syrian chemical attack . . . but he’s right

It’s considered untoward for presidents to expressly blame their predecessors for problems. And let’s be honest: Conservatives jumped over Barack Obama all the time when he blamed George W. Bush for everything under the sun.

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If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!

You got elected to fix it, bro, so quit whining about who caused the problem and just fix it. Generally speaking I think this would be a good philosophy for presidents to follow – and yes, that absolutely includes Donald Trump and his penchant for pointing the finger at Obama. But even if the behavior is considered unpresidential, there are times when it needs to happen. What’s going on right now in Syria is an object lesson in why we can’t have presidents making empty threats against dictators and then wimping out when their bluffs are called. That’s exactly what Obama did in 2013 with respect to Bashar Assad and his chemical weapons, and it’s directly responsible for the chemical attacks we saw over the past week. The cause-and-effect needs to be understood, and this is a situation in which Trump is correct to point out it:

If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

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What Obama did was the opposite of courage in every way

The media are aghast, of course, because their hero Obama is being taken to task by the dark lord Donald Trump. And Obama himself is trying to rewrite the history of what happened, as reported by The Hill.

Obama said last year that he believed his decision to negotiate rather than respond with force to Syria’s use of chemical weapons required some of the greatest “political courage” of his presidency. That was despite Obama saying in 2012 that if Assad used chemical weapons it would cross “a red line” with the U.S. The United Nations accused Syria of using chemical weapons on its own people in 2013. “You generally get praised for taking military action, and you’re often criticized for not doing so,” Obama said last May. Dozens died and hundreds were reported injured Saturday in an alleged chemical attack in Syria.

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This is exactly what happens when a U.S. president makes an empty threat, and backs down when bad guys call his bluff

What a crock. What Obama did was the opposite of courage in every way. Let’s review: In 2012, during his re-election campaign, Obama explicitly identified the use of chemical weapons as a “red line” Assad could not cross without facing U.S. military intervention. Assad crossed the red line in 2013, figuring correctly that Obama would lack the guts to carry out his threat. This became a major opportunity for Vladimir Putin, who offered Obama the chance to save face by swooping in and claiming to negotiate a deal with Assad that would see Assad give up his chemical weapons, with the Russians making sure. That Obama agreed to this was one of the jokes of all time, but the media let him get away with it – the same media who now scream that Donald Trump is somehow Putin’s lapdog. And yes, this is exactly what happens when a U.S. president makes an empty threat, and backs down when bad guys call his bluff. Barack Obama is directly responsible for the fact that Bashar Assad still has chemical weapons and has no fear of using them. He should be called out. I’m glad Trump did. But now Trump has to do something about it, or he’ll end up just as culpable as Obama.

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