Dan Drezner doesn’t think Mitt Romney needs to give a speech about the Middle East. He thinks Barack Obama probably ought to do that:
Right now, it’s the president who needs to deliver a major address. Americans are rightly confused by what the United States is doing in the Middle East, and President Obama had a pretty uneven week. On the one hand, there appears to have been some adroit behind-the-scenes diplomacy on Egypt. On the other hand, there are crisis moments when patience begins to look too much like passivity, and that’s beginning to happen to this administration. Sure, there have been times in the past when U.S. embassies and consulates around the world faced even greater threats — but things still seem pretty uncertain, U.S. lives have been lost, and the only thing that can be said for Barack Obama’s leadership this week is that he’s not Mitt Romney. Oh, and that the administration’s argument that this has been caused by a single stupid YouTube clip is utter horses**t.
Sign me up for putting a lid on the nonsense from Obama’s various mouthpieces about how these riots and protests were all caused by a single poorly produced YouTube trailer. We deserve better than that from this administration.
So what should Obama say about all the turmoil in the Middle East? Dan has a few ideas about that too. Click the link for more.
