POWER TO THE PEOPLE – AT 9:04 P.M. ET:  Samantha Power, a "human rights advocate" in the White House, has come out of the shadows to give fulsome praise to dear leader for his handling of Libya.

Power won the Pulitzer Prize for a book on genocide.  An Obama favorite, she had to lay low during the 2008 campaign after calling Hillary Clinton "a monster."  Thus, the precision of her wonderful mind.

She also is known as pointedly anti-Israel, interesting for a great humanitarian.   There is no record to show that Power realized that the Mideast is ruled by brutal dictators until confronted with the reality of the last several months.  She is credited, along with Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, with pressuring Obama into acting in Libya.  She apparently had nothing to say about Iran when protesters were shot in the streets.  Power speaks:

White House aide Samantha Power, a former news reporter turned anti-genocide advocate, said President Obama’s two-year campaign to promote human rights helped trigger the uprising in Libya against Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s rule.In a speech Monday at Columbia University, Ms. Power, director of multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, defended her support for the military operation against Libyan government forces and said the president’s efforts, through speeches in various foreign capitals, made it easier for other nations to stand with the United States against tyrants.

Oh please.  The Libya revolt was made possible by the example of the other revolts that preceded it.  If Obama's speeches had anything to do with it, it would have happened much earlier.

“The president has argued our interests and our values cannot be separated,” Ms. Power said, speaking to a friendly crowd of about 130 people. “These values have caused the people of Libya to risk their lives on the street.”

Not so fast, Sammy.  We're really not sure who the rebels are.  And Obama sure exercised American values when he remained silent for days over Iran. 

Ms. Power sidestepped questions about reports she was among three female Obama administration aides who pressed the president to go to war in Libya.

On the military operation to impose a no-fly zone, however, Ms. Power, said that “force can be justified on humanitarian grounds.”

Ms. Power said the international coalition acted to save the rebel-stronghold city of Benghazi because of Col. Gadhafi’s attacks. “On a single day, he killed 1,200 people on suspicion” of being anti-government rebels, she said.

“To put Libyan events in historical perspective,” she said, “in Libya, it took us nine days impose asset freezes and travel bans,” while pressuring regimes in the Balkans and other places took years.

Power has her fans, but others feel she has little idea how the real world works, that everything to her is black and white.  We'll see if the Power Doctrine, or Obama Doctrine, or whatever it is, has any use down the road, when things may get much tougher and decisions harder.

March 29, 2011