I was watching U.S. President Barack Obama speaking at a news conference in California the other day and I did not know whether to laugh or cry. "There is not a single candidate in the Republican primary that thinks we should do anything about climate change, that thinks it's serious," Obama said. "Well that's a problem. The rest of the world looks at that and says: ‘Well, how can that be?' "
I have to be politically correct, but I can't. I have to say: "Oh yes, he is right. It's a shame that the Republicans don't have a word about that," but I won't. It would be really nice to talk about global warming given the fact that historically the global north of industrialized nations, the U.S. and Western Europe, has mostly contributed to it, and I surely will be effortlessly cool when I talk about it. Maybe I can wear skinny jeans, headbands and horn-rimmed glasses, too, and I can trick myself thinking how sensible of an environmentalist I am, but it is really irrelevant today. Considering the urgent, alarming problems the rest of the world has been suffering, it is not a priority for me, or millions of people as well.
I know that we can knock on a deaf man's door forever, especially if he is a hipster, who is the president of the U.S., but does not shoulder the burden, and there will be no answer, but we will keep saying.
The rest of the world stopped counting how many times Obama said that Syrian President Bashar Assad cannot stay in power. After five years of his empty promises and hollow declarations, after his infamous Syrian red line debacle, his capitulations to Iran like an award for its contributions to the bloodshed in the Middle East, and after his refusal to aid Ukraine, we now have other problems: Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Assad keeps killing his own people with the help of thousands of Iranian troops, Hezbollah fighters and now with the huge support of Russian warplanes. The Assad regime says that the PYD, the PKK's Syrian affiliate, enjoys the support of not just the U.S., but also the Assad regime, and the U.S. still keeps using them as their ground forces. The PYD also cooperates with Russia, changes the demography in northern Syria, takes control of Arab villages where there is no DAESH presence, fights Syrian opposition groups backed by the U.S., threatens Turkey which hosts around 3 million Syrian refugees, calls on Westerners to join group and attack Turkey, carries on a deadly attack in the heart of the country, Ankara, and follows its own agenda, but the Obama administration keeps saying that the group is effective in fighting DAESH.
Middle Easterners regard DAESH as abhorrent and want the brutal organization to be destroyed. The Obama administration's policy of focusing exclusively on DAESH, omitting the other problems and trying to convince everyone in the region to do the same, however, has made the hell of the Middle East hotter. DAESH is not the root of the problem; it is just a symptom. While Obama's policies keep failing, the sources of the problems grow and keep DAESH alive. On the other hand, while the Kremlin is threatening the world with a third world war, NATO is sending ships to patrol the Aegean Sea in an effort to stop migrants from making it to the EU. More than a quarter million people have died in the Syrian civil war, more than half of the entire population of the country had to leave their homes in attempts to survive and the civil war has spilled over surrounding countries, Obama said unblushingly in California that Syria is not a contest between him and Putin while we still remember his newsflash speeches about Syria in 2011-12.And now, like it was not enough that he asked all of us not to think about anything else but to focus on DAESH, he wants the Republican candidates, the ones who are frighteningly aggressive and eerily popular thanks to his failures, to focus on climate change.I can assure Obama that the rest of the world has been following the Republican debates and they are appalled by what they hear. Donald Trump wants to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. and Ben Carson has compared Syrian refugees to rabid dogs. The Republican candidates act like they are in a race of evil, one promise following another. They vow to waterboard, and "do a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," repopulate Guantanamo, kill families of suspected terrorists and carpet bomb Middle Eastern countries. One has even criticized another for having insufficiently endorsed torture.
Regarding Trump and other Republican candidates' comments, Obama said in California that the American people are pretty sensible and he thinks they will make a sensible choice in the end. Well, maybe Obama has faith in the American people, but all we see is that they are disappointed with Obama in their own ways. There are millions of Americans who applaud the Republican candidates' promises of torture and argue that they will take the U.S. back. Obama took office after President George W. Bush, but now someone who is way worse than him may become the U.S. president. It is serious and it may happen. Then whose fault will it be?
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