On Monday, President Obama arrived on a presidential visit to Ethiopia. The trip to the east African state raised eyebrows, even among President Obama’s allies on the American left.
"The timing of President Obama's . . . travel to Ethiopia could not be worse, or more troubling,” said Jeff Smith of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, a couple of weeks prior to the trip. President Obama’s visit “comes in the aftermath of an election that has been universally decried as a sham and a mere rubber stamp for the long-ruling governing party. If President Obama truly wanted to stand behind his strong human rights rhetoric, and behind the values of democracy and respect for human rights, then visiting Ethiopia is not the way to live up to those professed ideals,” he added. The Open Society Foundations and World Movement for Democracy later joined the RFK Center in releasing a letter raising questions about the president’s Ethiopia sojourn.
Making matters worse, while speaking at a news conference in the Ethiopian capital, President Obama – in the words of the New York Times – “lashed out” at several of the Republican candidates to succeed him. First, he bemoaned “a general pattern [in the election] we’ve seen that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad.”
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