Barry's Best-Laid Plans

It should be clear to all that our fine young President just isn't very quick on his mental feet. He operates best within the confines of a carefully laid plan and doesn't function very well when his plans are disrupted. This seems to be true in matters big and small, whether it is a teleprompter screwup, or an unscripted question from the press, or an unanticipated foreign crisis, Barry's reaction is either incoherent flailing or a stubborn determination to stick to the script no matter what.

Obama's mental limitations were on full display this past week when popular aspirations for democracy erupted in Iran. Barry's game plan was disrupted and for several days he floundered around trying to figure out what to do. Apparently, the Washington Times reveals, he had already opened a personal channel to Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's mad mullah in chief, and was bent on pursuing personal diplomacy to resolve the Iranian threat to regional peace.

Prior to this month's disputed presidential election in Iran, the Obama administration sent a letter to the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for an improvement in relations, according to interviews and the leader himself.

Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the letter toward the end of a lengthy sermon last week, in which he accused the United States of fomenting protests in his country in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 presidential election.

U.S. officials declined to discuss the letter on Tuesday, a day in which President Obama gave his strongest condemnation yet of the Iranian crackdown against protesters.

An Iranian with knowledge of the overture, however, told The Washington Times that the letter was sent between May 4 and May 10 and laid out the prospect of "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations" and a resolution of the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

Read the whole thing here.

So inital overtures had been made, Barry was looking forward to sitting down and talking things over with the mullahs, and then the Iranian public messed everything up by protesting the fraudulent election. The plan had been disrupted and Obama's early reactions suggest that he was more upset by this fact than by the atrocities taking place on the streets of Tehran. More importantly, without a game plan in front of him he had not a clue as to what to say, what to do, and so he, as he has done so often in the past, simply voted "present" and said he would "bear witness" to what was happening. Apparently Barry lacks the experience, education and moral grounding to do otherwise.

Shouldn't we expect more from an American President than that?