I keed, I keed; of course he will. Jennifer Rubin writes:
In a smart take on the West Point speech Fred Barnes observes:
I couldn’t be the only person who thought Obama once again both scapegoated and slighted George W. Bush. Early on in his administration, Obama recalled that he had agreed to a “longstanding request for more troops” in Afghanistan, implying that Bush had turned that request down. I don’t think that’s quite accurate.
And Obama praised the military for the success of the “surge” in Iraq without mentioning the person who — against the advice of nearly everyone in Washington — ordered that troop increase, Bush. Obama tacitly acknowledged the surge had worked, though he didn’t seem to remember that he’d insisted that it would worsen conditions in Iraq.
No, he’s not alone. It has become a nervous tic with Obama. Something is wrong, people are upset — blame Bush! Obama is going to need to rely on conservative support to prosecute the war since his own crowd certainly won’t be cheerleading for him. So it would have been politically smart and classy to have credited Bush with the surge or with leaving him the assessment for the Afghanistan war, which he relied on in the spring (the one his team previously denied receiving). But that’s not this president’s style. For reasons that aren’t quite clear — either personal peevishness or political expediency — even in a wartime speech in which bipartisanship would have been essential, he felt compelled to get in his digs. If President Obama seems smaller than candidate Obama it’s because he allows pettiness to get the best of him. He should give it up. He’s now president after all.
When all you’ve done your entire adult life is run for office, it’s must be hard to remember that you’ve actually got the top gig now — there’s no promotion left. Unless…
There is a “meme” that occured to me that I feel needs to get out there. I thought of this when it was mentioned that “In November, more Americans died at the hands of Islamic extremists in Texas than in Iraq.”
I thought Iraq had actually sunk into the sea and been declared a new ocean, for all the news that has come out of it…. essentially since the surge began to succeed. We all know why…. it was shaping up as a victory, it IS a victory now and has been for some time, and as long as Bush was in office, the MSM could not afford to talk about it.
And I guess they still can’t, as it remains “Bush’s War”, God forbid it could be a victorious one.
So we hear utter silence. But let us watch — Could it be that, oh, in about six months… a year-and-a-half into the Obama administration…. we will suddenly get a slew of stories talking up a genuine ‘VICTORY!!” in Iraq? Stories that will imply, if not baldly state, that such victory is all due to our wise and stately current CinC and his successful policy of “winning the war Bush lost in Iraq”?
Such stories would be so utterly shameless, so Orwellian, such an insult to the intelligence, such an utter and blatant inversion of the truth, that projectile vomiting would be an appropriate response to them. But does that mean they will not try to sell us on the idea?
I think the only question in many media maven’s minds would not be “is it true”, but rather “Can we get away with it, or is it just so shameless that it will backfire on us?” (Not, is it morally wrong to tell the lie, just, will it work for us in the end.)
Even I think such stories might be a bridge too far for the soldiers of The Narrative, but maybe they are obtuse and/or immoral enough to try.
Keep your eyes open for such stories, pre- 2010 elections. And be ready to pounce when they appear.
Obama absolutely hated giving that speech last night because he knew it would cause conflict within his own party. And while he’s perfectly happy to anger Republicans in general and conservatives in particular as long as he’s got a united Democratic Party behind him, he hates conflict with the far left or the Blue Dogs.
This time, he had to side with the ‘Dogs because to side with the left and abandoning Bush’s WOT strategy would mean owning any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil or against U.S. interests. Sending the 30,000 troops maintains his ability to say he followed the Bush plan and it didn’t work, if another attack occurred. But then he still had to attack Bush as part of an effort to at least partially placate the left for not abandoning the strategy (since the left as a group isn’t running for re-election in 2012, they really don’t give a damn if pulling out of Afghanistan would boost the chances of a future al Qaida terror strike; they’d just blame Bush for it and bask in their own moral superiority, but Obama, and/or Rahm and Axelrod knows that attitude/alibi would produce a 2012 election loss in the range of Mondale’s in 1984 to Reagan and far worse than Carter’s loss to the Gipper in 1980).
Obama doesn’t know HOW to be president. He didn’t know how to be a US Senator nor state senator either; remember all the “present” votes?
The guy is nothing but a CANDIDATE. He literally does not know how to do or be anything else.
The speech was a candidate’s speech…directed at his own party…showing them that he is prepapred to lose, as they wish, but it’s going to have to be done on his time table…so the Right can’t make use of it until after the next midterm election.
After all…he’s got serious fish to fry…government takeover of medicine and Cap and Trade.
He’s stalling with the war.