President Obama needs to take the lead and 'Man Up' against Russia and Putin over MH17 tragedy

Here was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on CNN Sunday morning, talking about the missile that took down a Malaysia Airlines 777, a single act that was the same as 298 homicides. Feinstein was talking about Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who set this all in motion with his disestablishment of Ukraine, a nation that no longer belongs to Russia even though Putin seems to believe it should.

“I would say, Putin, you have to man up,” Feinstein said. “You should talk to the world. You should say this was a mistake, if it was a mistake.”

Feinstein’s sentiment was right. So was her obvious contempt for Putin. But it has become clear over the past week that the one who really needs to man up here isn’t the president of Russia, but the President of the United States.

This doesn’t mean that Barack Obama should have threatened to start a war with Russia. He wasn’t about to do that any more than the sainted Ronald Reagan was going to do that when Russia shot a Korean Air commercial jet out of the sky 30 years ago. And it doesn’t mean that Obama had to invade Russia the way George W. Bush and his chief henchman, Dick Cheney, did Iraq, in their mission to take out another regional thug, Saddam Hussein, one who in retrospect looks no more unhinged or dangerous than Putin is presently.

But what you saw in Obama’s initial reaction to this commercial airliner being shot out of the sky last week was just how detached he has become as he seems to be counting the days to when he is an ex-President of the United States.

And you saw something else, as the people around him in the White House not only defended his weird response to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, but also defended the fact that he carried right on afterward with another money grab in New York. More than ever, the people to whom this President listens look like kids who have taken over the principal’s office, ones who apparently think they can treat the rest of us like suckers.

“Abrupt changes to (the President’s) schedule can have the unintended consequence of unduly alarming the American people or creating a false sense of crisis.”

Someone should explain to Palmieri that if the country could deal with abrupt changes to a President’s schedule after terrorists blew up two of our buildings in Lower Manhattan and tried to blow up half of Washington, D.C., we could somehow have dealt with President Obama returning to the White House from Wilmington, Del.

Maybe then he could have done much better expressing his personal horror and outrage about what had happened in Ukraine than he had in the 40 seconds he devoted to it before returning to his prepared text in Wilmington.

We would have felt no better if he had. But we would have felt better about him, and his ability to lead, even the kind of strength we expect from the President in a moment like that. There is a reason why Putin thinks he can push people around, and steal in broad daylight, and lie the way he routinely does. One big reason is that we have a President who needs a day to say what he should have said to us in the high heat of the moment.

By Friday morning the geniuses around him had clearly convinced him how bad he looked on Thursday, when he had told us “it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy.” Wow. No wonder we constantly hear about how much smarter he is than everybody else in the room.

President Obama is right to say that we shouldn’t get out ahead of the facts here. But he has so much evidence already, starting with tracking pictures of that missile. He has had this evidence since the weekend, when he should have immediately convened a summit of the leaders of this country, and England, and France and Germany, and even the Netherlands. This is evidence — count on this — that will eventually be presented to the world at the United Nations by Samantha Power, our Ambassador to the UN, and soon.

And then, if the evidence is as good as we have been told, the President and his chief European allies must deliver the message that they are quite willing to bring down the Russian economy — and the billionaires it has produced, if necessary — if that’s what it takes to remove Russia’s president from power.

Always our President was good with speeches, and language. Last Thursday he couldn’t even manage that. It wasn’t the fault of John Boehner, or his other rabid opponents, or the right-wing media. It was on him. So is his handling of this crisis. Because if he can’t be a great President now, then when?