Dana Milbank: Obama vacations as the world burns

◼ President Obama must really be teed off. - Washington Post

Hillary Rodham Clinton, his once-loyal secretary of state and his likeliest successor, has gone rogue, criticizing his foreign policy as too timid.

Obama responded with not one but two rounds of golf.

Clinton, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg published by the Atlantic over the weekend, offered a withering comment on the Obama doctrine, described in shorthand by White House officials as “don’t do stupid s---.” Said Clinton: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

As the criticism became public, Obama was doggedly sticking with his plans to go on vacation — a decision that, if not in the category of stupid stuff, could fit under the heading of “tone deafness.”

◼ It begins: Iraq crisis prompts Dems to dump on Obama’s foreign policy - HotAir

The Wall Street Journal observed on Sunday that President Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy is drawing awful reviews from the critics. What critics? “James Steinberg, formerly the President’s Deputy Secretary of State, and Robert Ford, formerly his Ambassador to Syria,” and, delivering the unkindest cut of all, “Hillary Rodham Clinton, formerly his loyal Secretary of State.”

Steinberg said Obama’s decision to provide just limited support to the Kurds, and to direct all other aid through the Iraqi government which has intentionally dragged its feet, “just leaves you scratching your head.”

“Nothing we can point to that’s been very successful,” Ford said of Obama’s approach to the Syrian civil war.

President Barack Obama continues to lack a foreign policy doctrine which guides his approach to crises as they arise. With the best of intentions, the president’s admirers routinely try to rectify this oversight by crafting a doctrine for the president, leading to a variety of aborted experiments and unintentionally humorous episodes. One such attempt to define the Obama doctrine recently resulted in this gem: “Don’t do stupid s**t.”