◼ Steve Kroft asks Obama whether the attacks on American embassies around the Muslim world, and especially in Libya and Egypt following Obama’s military and diplomatic interventions, had changed his mind about the Arab Spring. Obama gives a you-gotta-break-a-few-eggs-to-make-an-omelette response that’s pretty inappropriate, considering the outcome in Benghazi: - Ed Morrissey/HotAir
The violence isn’t a mere “bump in the road,” and neither are the rise of these groups to power. They are going to be national-security concerns for the next several decades. That’s the outcome we wanted to avoid, and the one reason why we allied ourselves with Mubarak and ended up in an arms-length relationship with Qaddafi. The assassination of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the sacking of the Benghazi consulate weren’t “bumps in the road,” either, unless one thinks that kind of thing is normal even between diplomatic antagonists.◼ Obama's '60 Minutes' interview is full of misstatements - NY Daily News
Finally, listen to Obama explain about how democratization trumped American security concerns in the region and the calculus of our alliances. With that in mind, care to guess what the Saudis might be thinking? I’d guess that they’re recalculating their own alliances to avoid becoming “bumps” in Obama’s road.
The best that can be said of President Obama's '60 Minutes' interview last night is that he did slightly better than in last week's interview before a hostile Univision forum. At least last night he managed to stick to the same popular, thoroughly debunked economic claims that have served him so well on the stump. And he managed, once again, to navigate foreign policy with the deft touch of indifference and to ultimately stun viewers with a surprising reflection on his own failures in office.
