President Barack Obama has become a cloistered leader, interested only in what happens in the United States, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Daniel Henninger, deputy editorial page director of The Wall Street Journal.
"The world may be in flames in the Ukraine, the Middle East and so forth, but all he wants to think about and talk about is global warming and energy and education, minimum wage, income inequality,'' Henninger said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"He’s not interested in what’s going on outside the United States. He’s the most purely political president that we have had in this century, and that includes Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was really a highly political guy.
"But the difference is at least Johnson would turn his attention from time to time to public interest, and with Obama it’s just all politics all the time."
Henninger said the commander in chief keeps coming up with "more and more preposterous excuses'' for not involving his office in world issues.
"The thing that really, really jumped out at me was this event Monday … Obama went out on the White House lawn, spoke for about 10 minutes about both Gaza and the shootdown of [Malaysia Airlines] Flight 17,'' he said.
"He goes, and if this continues [Russian President Vladimir] Putin must understand that there is going to be a high price to be paid for it, and you go, what is he talking [about] – if this continues?
"You mean like more planes being shot out of the sky? … So much for the red line. It’s a very kind of frightening situation.''
He said some people are comparing 2014 to the periods just before the outbreak of World War I and World War II.
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