"The Worst 10 Days of His Political Life"

President Obama is not only an embarrassment at home, but also abroad. His Asian trip has proven to be a disaster. Poor Barry! Between the shellacking on November 2nd and his unproductive trip overseas, his enormous ego has taken a bruising.

Read from Israel Matzav:

It starts: Obama rebuffed three times this week

"Prime Minister Netanyahu wasn't the only ally to rebuff President Obama this week. Ben Smith reports that Iraqi Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and close American ally, and South Korea also snubbed Obama this week.


'Eli Lake reports today that President Obama called Iraqi Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and close American ally, and asked him to give up his seat in the interest of a the power-sharing deal the U.S. prefers. Talabani, Lake reports, "rebuffed" Obama, and the piece includes a jab at the White House from Talabani's son.

...

Obama also suffered another public rebuff today with the failure to get a trade deal on his trip to South Korea, the third time -- following the failures to get the Olympics and to get much out of Copenhagen -- a high-profile trip hasn't quite concluded as planned.

These allies' willingness to snub Obama may reflect the perception -- among leaders whose habit is to obsess over, and over-read, American politics -- that the American president is on his heels, and among the White House's challenges in the coming months is to remind foreign leaders that Obama's still fully in control of a foreign policy that was hardly mentioned during the election and is not, in fact, expected to change as a result of Republican control of the House.'


Unless, of course, he's not fully in control, because he can't back up anything he says. If that sounds like a good thing to most Israelis it may not be. If we can snub him, so can Iran and Syria. Of course, Iran and Syria been snubbing him for the last two years anyway."


From (NY Daily News), via Weasel Zippers:


"President Obama is coming home from his overseas trip pretty much empty-handed.

After watching his party take a beating in the midterm elections, Obama wasn’t able to secure even a symbolic victory on a trip that was expected to give him plenty of opportunities to claim a win.

'This certainly was the worst 10 days of his political life,' said Baruch College political scientist Doug Muzzio. 'Given that he’s not going to be able to get any domestic achievements with the Republicans in control of the House … if he doesn’t do it in foreign policy that’s a big problem for him.

'He came back with bupkis [Yiddish for "nothing"].'

Obama’s inauspicious 10-day, four-nation trip included a failure to land an anticipated slam dunk free trade agreement with South Korea.

It also included a botched effort to rally Western allies to press China to budge on a monetary policy that threatens to keep the U.S. economy in the tank.

Yet Obama appeared to shrug off the lack of results during summit meetings with the world’s most powerful leaders.

'Naturally, there’s an instinct to focus on the disagreements, because otherwise, these summits might not be very exciting; it’s just a bunch of world leaders sitting around intervening,' Obama told reporters in South Korea.

'What’s remarkable is that in each of these successive summits we’ve actually made real progress,' he added, without anything of substance to point to."