This government is not about governing. It is about creating an impression. That worked on the campaign trail in 2008, but it is a disaster in the White House (and the Gulf), where rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

Either the government knows how to stop the oil spill or it doesn’t. If they know how to stop it, then why have they let thousands of barrels of oil per day keep gushing out, for weeks on end?

If they don’t know, then what is all this political grandstanding about keeping their boot on the neck of BP, the attorney general of the United States going down to the Gulf to threaten lawsuits — on what charges was unspecified — and President Obama showing up in his shirt sleeves?

Just what is Obama going to do in his shirt sleeves, except impress the gullible? He might as well have shown up in a tuxedo with white tie, for all the difference it makes.

Even our domestic policies can affect foreign leaders: Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the air-traffic controllers’ strike impressed the Russians with what kind of man they were going to have to deal with, as former Soviet officials said publicly many years later.

By the same token, domestic bungling by Barack Obama sends a dangerous signal to countries which hate us.

President Obama had barely settled into the White House before he began demonstrating his willingness to sell out this country’s friends to appease our enemies.

His trip to Moscow was to try to make a deal with the Russians, based on reneging on the preexisting American commitment to put a missile shield in Eastern Europe.  He spoke grandly about “pressing the reset button” on international relations, as if all the international commitments of the past were his to disregard. They are not.

We are already seeing the consequences. Even Turkey — formally a NATO ally — is cozying up to Iran, now that it is painfully clear that Obama is not going to do anything that has any realistic chance of stopping Iran from going nuclear.

Obama's Snake Oil by Thomas Sowell