Following his comments on Turkey, Rick Perry went on to say this:

Our — our — our president, has a foreign policy that makes our allies very nervous and emboldens our enemies. And we have to have a president of the United States that clearly sends the message, whether it’s to Israel, our friend and there should be no space between the United States and Israel, period.

Perry didn’t seem to notice that he had just gratuitously insulted the government of a major treaty ally of the United States before attacking Obama for “making our allies very nervous.” Juan Cole goes a bit far when he says that “Obama hasn’t done that at all.” (via Andrew) Despite Obama’s original intentions to repair the badly damaged U.S.-Turkish relationship, the first two years of his term saw the continued deterioration of ties, and some of that was the result of Obama’s decisions.

Obama and Erdogan reportedly patched things up last year, which has facilitated U.S.-Turkish cooperation on Syria and other matters. It’s still hard to forget that Obama ignored Turkish complaints about the flotilla incident and slapped down the Turkish-Brazilian effort to negotiate a fuel-swap deal with Iran. Of course, this isn’t what Perry was talking about, since he has a selective definition of ally and presumably he has no problem with U.S. actions that humiliate allies so long as it is done for the “right” reasons.

Update: On a related note, Mark Perry discusses his Jundallah/Israel story with Al Jazeera here.

Second Update: Perry is still an idiot. On top of everything else, he repeats the false boilerplate line that Turkey had a “pro-Western stance” under Ataturk. Ataturk’s Turkey was a neutral power that inclined toward the Bolsheviks at first and it had no love for the Western governments that had tried to partition it after WWI.