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Say Goodbye to the Statue of Liberty
The president is ticked off at the French.
The American Spectator
Andrew B. Wilson
11/14/13
SATIRE
Excerpt:
This just in from the Obama White House: The Statue of Liberty, the colossal neoclassical statue on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric August Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, as a gift to the United States from the people of France, will soon be toast.
French toast.
Over the heated objections of Chuck Schumer and other leading Democrats, and against the languorous advice of Jean-François Kerry, his French-speaking Secretary of State, President Obama is now prepared to order the immediate dismantling of the statue for shipment back to France in early 2014.
“As far as I’m concerned,” the president told a top aide, “they can take back the Eiffel Tower as well.” Informed that the Eiffel Tower was actually in Paris, he shot back, “Whatever. Do you take me for some kind of idiot? My job is to do the policy. Your job is to take care of the details without wasting my time.”
Thus spake the president — despite a Harvard Law degree, surely the most geographically illiterate president in American history. Among other miscues, he once claimed he had visited “all 57 states”; he lamented that he did not speak the “Austrian language” (difficult to do when there is no such language); he called for moving more of the Army’s Arabic translators to Afghanistan (not part of the Arab world); and he recently discussed deepening “our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina; or Savannah, Georgia, and Jackson, Florida,” all of which are found on the East Coast, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever. The president is a no-nonsense policy man and he was mightily displeased when he and Monsieur Kerry (still trying to fill Hillary’s pumps) were unable to get the French to go along with a plan to relax economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for some very iffy promises from Iran to slow the development of nuclear weapons. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius publicly called the U.S.-backed plan “a sucker’s deal.”
So now it is time to get tough with France — if not Iran, or Syria, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The imminent return of the 127-year-old statue of the robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, will no doubt remind many people of Obama’s earlier decision, upon moving into the White House, to return a bust of Churchill to the British government. But that was a small treasure on private display, not a national monument of gigantic proportions. And who can forget, or wants to forget, the words on the plaque found inside the pedestal of the statute:
All of this makes the return of the statue the most dramatic expression to date of the five-point Obama Doctrine. Under this doctrine, as defined by Daniel Pipes at the National Review, the Obama administration is firmly resolved to: “Snub friends, coddle opponents, devalue American interests, seek consensus, and act unpredictably.”
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View the complete article at:
http://spectator.org/articles/56484/...statue-liberty
The president is ticked off at the French.
The American Spectator
Andrew B. Wilson
11/14/13
SATIRE
Excerpt:
This just in from the Obama White House: The Statue of Liberty, the colossal neoclassical statue on Liberty Island in the middle of New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric August Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886, as a gift to the United States from the people of France, will soon be toast.
French toast.
Over the heated objections of Chuck Schumer and other leading Democrats, and against the languorous advice of Jean-François Kerry, his French-speaking Secretary of State, President Obama is now prepared to order the immediate dismantling of the statue for shipment back to France in early 2014.
“As far as I’m concerned,” the president told a top aide, “they can take back the Eiffel Tower as well.” Informed that the Eiffel Tower was actually in Paris, he shot back, “Whatever. Do you take me for some kind of idiot? My job is to do the policy. Your job is to take care of the details without wasting my time.”
Thus spake the president — despite a Harvard Law degree, surely the most geographically illiterate president in American history. Among other miscues, he once claimed he had visited “all 57 states”; he lamented that he did not speak the “Austrian language” (difficult to do when there is no such language); he called for moving more of the Army’s Arabic translators to Afghanistan (not part of the Arab world); and he recently discussed deepening “our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina; or Savannah, Georgia, and Jackson, Florida,” all of which are found on the East Coast, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Whatever. The president is a no-nonsense policy man and he was mightily displeased when he and Monsieur Kerry (still trying to fill Hillary’s pumps) were unable to get the French to go along with a plan to relax economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for some very iffy promises from Iran to slow the development of nuclear weapons. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius publicly called the U.S.-backed plan “a sucker’s deal.”
So now it is time to get tough with France — if not Iran, or Syria, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The imminent return of the 127-year-old statue of the robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, will no doubt remind many people of Obama’s earlier decision, upon moving into the White House, to return a bust of Churchill to the British government. But that was a small treasure on private display, not a national monument of gigantic proportions. And who can forget, or wants to forget, the words on the plaque found inside the pedestal of the statute:
Give us your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
All of this makes the return of the statue the most dramatic expression to date of the five-point Obama Doctrine. Under this doctrine, as defined by Daniel Pipes at the National Review, the Obama administration is firmly resolved to: “Snub friends, coddle opponents, devalue American interests, seek consensus, and act unpredictably.”
.........................................
View the complete article at:
http://spectator.org/articles/56484/...statue-liberty