Ken Blackwell learned two things from his parents that he says President Barack Obama would be wise to consider in international affairs.
The former mayor of Cincinnati and the senior fellow for family empowerment at the Family Research Council told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV that his father told him about bullies, "He who is fought easiest is fought most often."
Blackwell's mother gave him this parenting tip: "If you reward bad behavior, all you get is more bad behavior," he said Wednesday.
"My concern is that we turn our backs in this naïve hope that all men and women are intrinsically good with pure motives," Blackwell said. "That just flies in the face of human history. We can't retreat from the world. We can't be duped."
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Blackwell wrote a column for
Town Hall comparing the current geopolitical landscape in Europe to that preceding World War I, and ripping Obama's handling of the Ukraine crisis.
Blackwell told Malzberg the president has been far too weak on the international stage.
"We cannot let this make-believe notion that everybody wants to do us good, no one wants to do us harm and that the capacity to do us harm can't reach us in reality, to take route," Blackwell said. "That will just get us into a bigger problem with a greater loss of life, with a higher hurdle to get over to protect our interests."
He worries, too, that Americans won't be mentally prepared to stomach international crises in the future.
"What I am afraid of is that this generation of Americans has been lulled to sleep by this president's rhetoric and his naivete," Blackwell said.
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