Yogi Berra and Carmen had the love story to remember with the Yankees

The best thing to happen to the Yankees legend was Carmen. He knew it. We all did. She was at his side from the time they married in January of 1949.

By Mike Lupica

http://www.nydailynews.com/

March 7, 2014

Yogi Berra and his wife Carmen wave to the crowd during Yogi Berra Day at Yankee Stadium in July 1999. (AP)

The glamorous couple, because one of them was a legendary Yankee and the other was one of the most famous movie stars ever, was Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. But that was not the great and lasting Yankees love story. The great Yankee love story was Yogi and Carmen Berra.

Yogi Berra is a great Yankee, too. Don’t worry about that, and one of the great winners in baseball history, a sweet and kind and good man who has always been so much more than the character with the funny lines and the funny television commercials. That has always been the thing with No. 8.

As much ballplayer as he was, he has always been a much better man.

And through it all, there was this great beauty, the former Carmen Short, at his side, from the time she married Yogi in January of 1949. She became a mother and a grandmother and the First Lady of the Yankees for such a long time, even through all the years when Yogi was estranged from The Stadium and his team because of the way he was fired once as manager by the late George Steinbrenner.

PHOTOS: CARMEN BERRA DEAD AT 85: HER LIFE IN PHOTOS

Always at Yogi’s side there was Carmen — pretty and smart and funny, a partner to him in all ways.

We were sitting in his living room one time in Montclair, N.J., and Carmen had walked out of the room. Yogi and I got back to talking about baseball and the Yankees and finally I asked him what he thought his greatest accomplishment was and he smiled, and nodded toward the door his wife had just walked through.

“Getting her to marry me,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”

They finally moved out of that lovely home and moved into an assisted living facility. Yogi will be 89 in May. Carmen had a stroke recently and died Thursday night at the age of 85. It was just six weeks ago that the two of them had made it to their 65th anniversary.

RELATED: YOGI BERRA'S WIFE OF 65 YEARS, CARMEN, DEAD AT 85

The books have been written and the movies have been made about Joe and Marilyn. We have always known so much about their romance and their short marriage and how he made sure there were flowers left at her grave until the day he died. He was Joe D., the Yankee Clipper, the man who had hit in 56 straight games and played in 10 World Series and saw his Yankee teams win nine of those. Marilyn Monroe was — is — one of the famous movie sex symbols of all time.

There have been other marriages between sports and show business since. Never one that seemed as iconic as that. But the marriage to talk about and the Yankees love story to talk about is the one between Yogi and Carmen.

If you were lucky enough to know her, to know the two of them, you understood it all the moment you walked through the front door of their home. You saw the way he always looked at her and she looked at him. Better than anyone, she saw all the good in her husband, the intelligence; understood why people always have said that they just wanted to go through life standing next to Lawrence Peter Berra, because good things always seemed to happen to him.

The best thing to happen to him was Carmen. He knew it. We all did. You would talk to her in all those years when he stayed away from the team, and she would always say the same thing, “Who would ever want to be mean to Yogi?”

RELATED: YOGI AND CARMEN'S LOVE INSPIRED WRITE STUFF

Carmen knew about all the famous lines credited to her husband, ones that helped create a whole Yogi industry, made him one of the most well-known characters in baseball history. She knew about him saying that it sure gets late early around here; and about the day that John Lindsay’s wife, Mary, told Yogi how cool he looked in a seersucker suit on a hot New York City Day and how Yogi responded, “You don’t look so hot yourself, Mrs. Lindsay.”

One day at the house in Jersey, Carmen said, “But you know who my husband really is? He’s an example of how you can come from where he came from and still have this kind of life in America. That’s who Yogi Berra is.”

Dale Berra and I were at a charity softball game one summer, and talking about how his dad had thrown out the first pitch at the same game once and been treated like some kind of rock star, even as an old man.

“A star who married a star,” Dale said.

He was talking about his mom, whom Yogi met when she was waitressing in the 1940s at Biggie’s restaurant in St. Louis. Yogi wanted to know if she was married and she laughed and said no. They started dating. He was 23 when they married, right before the Yankees season that began with five World Series titles in a row. She was 19. This was a romance that lasted all the way until this week at the Crane’s Mill Assisted Living Facility in West Caldwell, N.J.

She was there through the glory years of the 1950s with the New York Yankees, as DiMaggio gave way to Mantle in center field at the old Stadium. She was there when her husband got fired for losing Game 7 of the World Series to the Cardinals in 1964 and there when Yogi was with the Mets in 1973, and all the way back to Game 7 again, when it wasn’t over till it was over.

Always, she was there when you would visit them in Jersey, all her life and laughter and style and love of her husband filling the room, and Yogi’s wonderful American life. This was the love story to remember with the Yankees, today more than ever. The way the world has always loved Yogi, that is the way he loved Carmen.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/lupica-yogi-carmen-great-yankee-love-story-article-1.1714400#ixzz2vNFxn1IN

Today's Tune: The Pierces - Kathy's Song

Surviving Obama

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/
March 6, 2014


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, D.C.on March 5, 2012. UPI/Martin H. Simon/Pool


Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg minced few words in discussing the interview that US President Barack Obama gave him on the eve of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest visit to Washington.

Speaking with journalist Charlie Rose, Goldberg equated Obama’s threat to stop supporting Israel in international forums to the talk of a mafia don. Obama told Goldberg that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, “our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.” He added, “And that has consequences.”

That statement, Goldberg noted, was a “veiled threat” and “almost up there with, ‘Nice little Jewish state you’ve got there. Hate to see something happen to it.’” Goldberg saw the interview as Obama’s way of showing that he is beginning to abandon the pretense of supporting Israel, now that he no longer faces reelection. In Goldberg’s words, “It’s not that the gloves are coming off. It’s more that the mask of diplomatic language is coming off a little bit.”

Goldberg added that due to the fact that Obama “doesn’t have to run again for anything,” he doesn’t need to pretend feelings for Israel that he doesn’t have, by among other things, going to the AIPAC annual policy conference.

And indeed, Obama has achieved a comfort level with implementing anti-Israel policies. His threat to step aside and let Israel-haters have their way in places like the United Nations or in certain quarters of Europe is of a piece with several steps the he is already reportedly undertaking to harm Israel in various ways.

Before he was reelected in 2012, Obama felt it necessary to align his policies on Iran to the preferences of the US public. And as a consequence, although he voiced harsh criticism of congressional sanctions bills against Iran, he grudgingly signed them into law. (He then proceeded to use the sanctions he opposed but signed as proof that he supported Israel in speeches before Jewish audiences.) Now that he no longer has to concern himself with the wishes of the American public and its representatives in Congress, Obama has dropped the mask of opposition to Iran and forged ahead with a diplomatic process that all but ensures Iran will acquire nuclear weapons.

The same is apparently the case with joint US-Israeli missile defense programs. On Wednesday, it was reported that the administration has slashed funding of those programs by two-thirds for the 2015 fiscal year. Obama touted his previous willingness to fully fund those programs – manifested in his decision not to veto congressional appropriations, despite his stated desire to slash funding – as proof of his administration’s “unprecedented” security cooperation with Israel.

Then there are the low-level bureaucratic sanctions that Obama began enacting against Israel last year. These involve State Department activities that are not subject to easy congressional oversight.

For instance, last week it was reported that last year the State Department drastically decreased the number of Israeli tourist visa applications it approved. The rise in rejection rates has prevented Israel from participating in the visa waiver program.

Foreign Ministry officials told reporters they believe this is a deliberate, premeditated policy.

And this week we learned that last year the State Department rejected hundreds of visa requests from members of Israel’s security services.

Although White House spokesman Jay Carney was quick to claim that Israel’s interception of the Iranian missile ship en route to Gaza on Wednesday morning was the result of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation, the fact is that the US continues to undermine Israel’s covert operations in Iran. Earlier this week, CBS reported that the Obama administration has demanded that Israel stop its reported covert campaign to kill Iranian nuclear scientists in order to delay or block Iran’s nuclear progress.

Obama’s new willingness to threaten Israel and to take the actions he feels it is safe to take to downgrade Israel’s relations with the US will likely only grow after November’s midterm elections.

After the congressional elections, Obama will feel entirely free to attack the US’s closest ally in the Middle East.

So what can Israel do? How can Israel safeguard its interests at a time when the US president publicly trashes and threatens those interests and privately undermines them? Israel already did the most important thing in this regard when voters reelected Netanyahu to lead the government last year. During his trip to the US this week, Netanyahu made clear that he understands the challenge and is competent to handle it.

Since Netanyahu returned to the premiership in January 2009, he has implemented a policy of waiting Obama out. Over the past five years, the prime minister has only directly challenged Obama when he had no choice. And that has been the right course. Little good comes to Israel from open fights with the White House. Such fights should only be engaged when the consequences of having a fight are less bad than the consequences of not fighting.

In his speech at the AIPAC Conference on Tuesday, Netanyahu rebutted every position Obama has staked out on the Palestinians and Iran without ever mentioning Obama’s name. By doing so he energized Israel’s supporters while denying Obama the ability to claim that Netanyahu is unsupportive of his policies.

In other words, he humored the White House while staking out an independent Israeli policy for which he secured the support of Israel’s American backers.

But Netanyahu’s skill in maneuvering around Obama is not enough for Israel to safely weather his presidency. Israel needs an overall strategy for securing its interests.

Such a multi-pronged strategy begins with Iran.

Israel needs to directly attack Iran’s nuclear installations – by covert action as well as through overt military strikes, as required.

According to CBS, after Obama’s diplomatic capitulation to Iran became public, Netanyahu ordered Israel’s intelligence services to concentrate their efforts in Iran on exposing the fraudulence of Iran’s purported commitment to freezing its nuclear progress. But while this is important, exposing Iran’s duplicity is not nearly as important as incapacitating Iran’s nuclear sites.

With Obama now joining Secretary of State John Kerry in openly threatening to passively support a European trade war against Israel, it is imperative that Israel develop every economic opportunity it has to expand its markets. As Netanyahu made clear in his speech to AIPAC, Israel’s technological prowess has already made it a magnet for global investors. But these opportunities should be maximized through further economic liberalization.

In a conversation with Haaretz earlier this week, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz noted that “President Obama has been the president most hostile to the nation of Israel in modern times.”

In a conversation with this writer on Tuesday, Cruz placed the blame for Obama’s success in implementing his anti-Israel policies on the Senate Democrats, led by Majority LeaderHenry Reid.

In his words, “The challenge we are facing is that the number one protector of Obama’s foreign policy has been Harry Reidand the Senate Democrats.”

On the sidelines of the AIPAC conference, Cruz blasted the hypocrisy of Senate Democrats. “At the same time they block the Kirk-Menendez sanctions [bill against Iran] and blame Israel for the impasse in peace negotiations, they proclaim their support for Israel,” he said.

And Cruz is certainly correct.

There can be no doubt that Israel’s strongest supporters today are in the Republican Party.

But it is important to remember that most Democrats also support Israel. They are simply unable politically to withstand the pressures that Obama has brought to bear to force them to stand with him against Israel.

In his speech to AIPAC, Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee confessed that he was forced to stand down on Iran sanctions due to partisan pressure.

In his words, “When it comes to Iran, I have stood with you and have stood against so many in my own party.”

Menendez’s admission that he couldn’t withstand the pressures that Obama and Reid brought to bear against him indicates that among some Democrats, support for Israel remains strong, but that under Obama, Israel’s Democrat supporters are weak.

While deeply problematic, this is a problem with a limited shelf-life.

If Obama views the midterm elections as the final restraint on his ability to act against the will of the American public, his fellow Democrats likely view the elections as the last time Obama will serve as the head of their party during an election cycle. In the 2016 elections, the Democrat presidential nominee will set the tone for the party, not Obama. Moreover, as the full economic impacts of Obamacare, Obama’s signature domestic policy, become known after the midterm elections, Obama will be even more severely weakened. Consequently, his ability to pressure his Democrat colleagues to toe his line will be diminished.

Finally, given Obama’s obsessive focus on demanding that Israel surrender its land to the Palestinians, it is imperative that Israel develop a strategy for waiting Obama out on this issue.

Obama told Goldberg that Israel must surrender to the Palestinians forthwith, because it has no other option. In his words, “I have not yet heard… a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution.

As I explain in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, which was released on Tuesday, Israel has a viable alternative.

It involves applying Israeli law to all of Judea and Samaria and integrating the Palestinians into Israeli society.

Israel would not be endangered demographically or democratically if it adopted this approach, and it would certainly be better off militarily.

Netanyahu has stated his support for establishing a Palestinian state. But he has made clear that he will only agree to a peace deal that protects Israel’s vital interests. While maintaining faith with that position, it would be prudent for him to discuss publicly and at length the fact while a negotiated peace is his preference, there is a fine alternative to a Palestinian terror state in Israel’s strategic and historic heartland.

If the Palestinians are uninterested in negotiating a viable agreement with Israel, then Israel will feel free to adopt an alternative course of applying its laws to Judea and Samaria.

At a minimum, such a move by Netanyahu would discredit and end Obama’s demographic threats, which are based on falsified Palestinian census data. It would place pressure on the Palestinians to show their hand – either embracing peace in a genuine manner, or demonstrating the basic falsity of their protestations of peaceful intentions. Either way, Israel would be better off.

Obama’s newfound courage to begin abandoning his pretense of supporting Israel presents Israel with a new challenge. But it is far from insurmountable. With the proper mix of policies, Israel can absorb Obama’s blows and even to blunt them, as Obama becomes an independent, unrestrained, and weak lame duck president. 

The IRS’s behavior taxes credulity

By George F. Will, Published: March 7, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.

Obama breezily says there was nothing more sinister than “boneheaded decisions” by wayward and anonymous IRS underlings. Certainly boneheadedness explains much about this administration. Still, does he consider it interesting that the consequences of IRS boneheadedness were not randomly distributed but thwarted conservatives?

The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10,000 to anyone who can identify aliberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had — an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriotsand True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling, opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids — government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech.

This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FEC’s enforcement division told the Republican: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we will drop this case.” So spoke Lois Lerner.

There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Dana Milbank: Issa hits a new low

George F. Will: Scowling face of the state

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Stayin' Alive (Live 2014)

The Ideologue vs. the Children

New York's new mayor attacks charter schools, proving his critics right.

By Peggy Noonan

http://online.wsj.com/

March 6, 2014 5:54 p.m. ET

What a small and politically vicious man New York's new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn't like charter schools. They are too successful to be tolerated. Last week he announced he will drop the ax on three planned Success Academy schools. (You know Success Academy: It was chronicled in the film "Waiting for Superman." It's one of the charter schools the disadvantaged kids are desperate to get into.) Mr. de Blasio has also cut and redirected the entire allotment for charter facility funding from the city's capitol budget. An official associated with a small, independent charter school in the South Bronx told me the decision will siphon money from his school's operations. He summed up his feelings with two words: "It's dispiriting."

Some 70,000 of the city's one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.

These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage.

A group of charter school students rally in support of charter schools outside the Capitol in Albany, N.Y.Associated Press

Mr. de Blasio's move has caused considerable personal anxiety and widespread public anger. The Daily News on Thursday called the nearly 200 Success Academy students who now have no place to go the mayor's "educational orphans." A reporter spoke to distraught families. "I wanted the best for my daughter," said Rakim Smith, 40, a cable technician from Harlem whose daughter Dymond is a sixth-grader at Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School. "Now they're trying to take it away." "I don't know where else I can send my son so that he can have the same level education," said Fatoumata Kebe of the Bronx, whose 11-year-old son, Ousmane, goes to Harlem Central

On Thursday Mr. de Blasio went on a sympathetic radio station and couldn't have been clearer about what is driving his actions. Charter schools may help the poor and those just starting out in America, they may give options to kids who've floundered elsewhere, but a lot of them are supported by rich people. There is a "strong private-sector element" in their funding, he said. The mayor agreed with host Ebro Darden that "a lot" of charter schools are funded by big business: "Oh yeah, a lot of them are funded by very wealthy Wall Street folks and others." When Mr. Darden and co-host Peter Rosenberg suggested that a "campaign" to portray the mayor as anti-charter-school was also funded by big business, Mr. de Blasio, as the New York Post noted, didn't disagree. "I think you're providing a keen political analysis there."

Clever people usually try to hide their animus. This one doesn't care if you know how he feels about that "element."

It is true that wealthy and public-spirited New Yorkers, out of loyalty to the city and its future generations, give a lot of money, care and time—the last, time, doesn't get noted enough—to create and help run many of the city's charter schools. They should be thanked for this, every day. Again, they do it because they care about children who would otherwise be locked into a public-school system that doesn't work.

But the people who run the public-school system that doesn't work—the one where you can't fire teachers who sexually prey on students and principals who don't even show up for work, which is to say the public schools run by the city's huge and powerful teachers union—don't like the charter schools. And they are the mayor's supporters, a significant part of his base.

The very existence of charter schools is an implicit rebuke to the public schools. It means they are not succeeding, and something new must be tried. That something new won't be perfect—no charter school is, and some are more imperfect than others—but people still line up to get into them. And there's something to the wisdom of crowds. When a school exists for the students, you can tell. When it exists for the unions, you can tell that too.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is not politically inept, made clear this week that he will stand with the charter schools. Mr de Blasio had come to Albany Tuesday on what is called lobbying day. He brought more than 1,000 people and held a rally to press state lawmakers to increase city income taxes to pay for prekindergarten education. Mr Cuomo, who had already told Mr. de Blasio that he backs pre-K but not a tax hike, decided to hold his own rally. His crowd, full of charter school students, teachers and families, was much bigger than de Blasio's. Mr. Cuomo had fiery words. "They say it's cold out here, but I don't feel cold, I feel hot. I feel fired up," he said. "You are not alone. . . . We will save charter schools."

This was centrist and politically clever, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Mr. Cuomo showed not all Democrats are on the same page on education reform, and some are passionately for it.

***

We close with a little red meat because there's something in this story—frightened children, cold political operators—that gets our blood up.

Nice liberals who back school reform are saying some very strange things about what Mr. de Blasio is doing. They're being awfully understanding. They're saying you have to appreciate that compared with his political base, the mayor is really staking out a middle ground. He is not going as far as the progressive left wants him to. They want to block all charters. They're disappointed! The teachers union doesn't want any charter expansion. And they're his base!

It is not the job of nice liberals to make excuses for pols who take a good thing from kids just to satisfy a political agenda. It is not the job of nice liberals to forgive a politician acting in a brutish way, throwing poor children from hard circumstances out of good schools.

It's not the job of liberals to explain that away. It's their job to oppose it, because this move against charter schools is an opening feint, a showing of mood, and a sign of things to come

The nice liberals of New York are sounding on this very much like frightened French aristocrats in 1792: "You have to understand, Marat is pretty ideological and we're lucky he's only cutting off our ears and nose and not our heads." No, he came for their heads later.

You say,: "He's not Marat, he's just a slob." That's true. But even slobs need to be opposed now and then.

In this move more than any so far, Mr. de Blasio shows signs he is what his critics warned he would be—a destructive force in the city of New York. When a man says he will raise taxes to achieve a program like pre-K education, and is quickly informed that that program can be achieved without raising taxes, and his answer is that he wants to raise taxes anyway, that man is an ideologue.

And ideologues will sacrifice anything to their ideology. Even children.

The wages of weakness

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: March 6, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

President Vladimir Putin listens journalists' questions on current situation in Ukraine at the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential residence outside Moscow on Tuesday, March 4, 2014. (AP)

Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.

He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness.

Really? Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia annexed it 20 years before Jefferson acquired Louisiana. Lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot.

Now Russia looms over the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin can take that anytime he wants — if he wants. He has already destabilized the nationalist government in Kiev. Ukraine is now truncated and on the life support of U.S. and European money (much of which — cash for gas — will end up in Putin’s treasury anyway).

Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history, and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.”

This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman’s club where violations of territorial integrity just don’t happen.

“That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior,” says Kerry. Makes invasion sound like a breach of etiquette — like using the wrong fork at a Beacon Hill dinner party.

How to figure out Obama’s foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” On what planet? Followed by the assertion that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” — like NATO? — “make no sense in an interconnected world.”

Putin’s more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions.

(1) Upon coming into office, he initiated the famous “reset” to undo the “drift” in relations that had occurred during the George W. Bush years. But that drift was largely due to the freezing of relations Bush imposed after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Obama undid that pushback and wiped the slate clean — demanding nothing in return.

(2) Canceled missile-defense agreementswith Poland and the Czech Republic. Without even consulting them. A huge concession to Putin’s threats — while again asking nothing in return. And sending a message that, while Eastern Europe may think it achieved post-Cold War independence, in reality it remains in play, subject to Russian influence and interests.

(3) In 2012, Obama assured Dmitry Medvedev that he would be even more flexible with Putin on missile defense as soon as he got past the election.

(4) The Syria debacle. Obama painted himself into a corner on chemical weapons — threatening to bomb and then backing down — and allowed Putin to rescue him with a promise to get rid of Syria’s stockpiles. Obama hailed this as a great win-win, when both knew — or did Obama really not know? — that he had just conferred priceless legitimacy on Bashar al-Assad and made Russia the major regional arbiter for the first time in 40 years.

(5) Obama keeps cutting defense spending. His latest budget will reduce it to 3 percent of GDP by 2016 and cut the army to pre-Pearl Harbor size — just as Russia is rebuilding, as Iran is going nuclear and as China announces yet another 12-plus percent increase in military spending.

Puzzling. There is no U.S. financial emergency, no budgetary collapse. Obama declares an end to austerity — for every government department except the military.

Can Putin be faulted for believing that if he bites off Crimea and threatens Kiev, Obama’s response will be minimal and his ability to lead the Europeans even less so?

Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn’t have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin’s decision easier.

Russia will get kicked out of the G-8 — if Obama can get Angela Merkel to go along. Big deal. Putin does care about financial sanctions, but the Europeans are already divided and squabbling among themselves.

Next weekend’s Crimean referendum will ask if it should be returned to Mother Russia. Can Putin refuse? He can already see the history textbooks: Catherine the Great took Crimea, Vlad (the Great?) won it back. Not bad for a 19th-century man.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this issue:

Henry Kissinger: How the Ukraine crisis ends

E.J. Dionne: Crisis in Ukraine? Blame Obama!

Anne Applebaum: Russia’s Western enablers

The Post’s View: Mr. Putin might actually believe his own propaganda

David Ignatius: Robert Gates tells Republicans to cool it on Ukraine

Obama in Denial on Russia

Misspelled “reset” buttons were never going to cut it. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

March 6, 2014

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton in 2009

Things are moving far too fast in Kiev, Moscow, and Crimea to write about events there. But the past isn’t going anywhere. Though you wouldn’t know that from the way the Obama administration talks about it.

Throughout this crisis — indeed, throughout all of Barack Obama’s presidency — the White House has been eager to insist that our long, unpleasant history with the Russians is behind us.

Obviously, every administration wants a fresh start with long-time rivals. That’s why there have been four “resets” with the Russians since 1991, including George W. Bush’s famous soul-searching gaze into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and Hillary Clinton’s comic effort to give the Russians a “reset” button (that actually said “overcharge” on it).

Fresh starts are fine. But when Obama came into office, his administration implicitly blamed our poor relationship with Russia on Bush, as if Russia’s misdeeds were provoked by America.

In 2012, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for his claim that the Russians are our “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” and scoffed: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

That scorn looks embarrassing enough given recent events. But the truth is Obama’s hostility to Romney’s policies had little to do with their being outdated. Obama didn’t like America’s Cold War policies during the Cold War.

In 1983, then–Columbia University student Obama penned a lengthy article for the school magazine placing the blame for U.S.–Soviet tensions largely on America’s “war mentality” and the “twisted logic” of the Cold War. President Reagan’s defense buildup, according to Obama, contributed to the “silent spread of militarism” and reflected our “distorted national priorities” rather than what should be our goal: a “nuclear-free world.”

Of course, it’s unfair to put too much weight on anyone’s youthful writings. Except there’s precious little evidence his views have changed over the years.

In his first term, President Obama’s biggest priority with Russia was to get the two countries on the path to that “nuclear-free world.” One of his — and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s — first actions in office was to betray our commitments to Poland and the Czech Republic on missile defense.

Indeed, across a wide range of areas, it has been Obama who has been, in the words of the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, in a 1980s-soaked “foreign-policy time warp.”

Two weeks ago, in response to tensions in Ukraine, the president explained that “our approach . . . is not to see [events in Ukraine] as some Cold War chessboard in which we’re in competition with Russia.” This is a horrible way to talk about the Cold War because it starts from the premise that it was all just a game conducted between two morally equivalent competitors.

Similar comments about “Cold War rivalries” and the like are commonplace of late, particularly during the Sochi Olympics, when NBC commentators were desperate to portray the entire Soviet chapter as nothing more than a “pivotal experiment.”

My old boss, William F. Buckley, responding to claims that the U.S. and the Soviets were morally equivalent, said that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as the sorts of men who push old ladies around.

While America surely made mistakes during the near half-century “twilight struggle,” the simple fact is that there was a right side and a wrong side to that conflict, and we were on the right side of it. The Soviet Union murdered millions of its own people, stifled freedom in nearly every form, enslaved whole nations, and actively tried to undermine democracy all around the world, including in the U.S.

President Putin, a former KGB agent, has said that the collapse of the evil empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. That alone should have been a clue to this White House that misspelled reset buttons weren’t going to cut it. But they were too stuck in the past to see it.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.