It’s a rainy day here in Kauai (I know – tough gazook!) so I have had a chance to cruise around the Net a bit. ABC is reporting an uptick in terror concern: U.S. Headed for ‘Heightened Alert’ Stage. Since all politics is local, I can report that I noticed something odd myself when journeying back and forth on the Bainbridge Island-Seattle ferry last week – a heightened presence of bomb-smelling sniffer dogs. These cute fellows were a heavy presence, nosing out the trunks of the cars lined up for the ferry on both ends. Being an interloper from LA, I can’t be sure if this uptick was significant, but there were more dogs in evidence than I can remember, having traveled the route on over a dozen occasions now.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama seems to adopting a foreign policy best described as “McCain lite.” Technically, Obama doesn’t get intelligence estimates until he is officially nominated but does he know something we don’t know? Or is he just reading the normal tea leaves and sashaying to the center for election purposes? Certainly the latter, but possibly the former. But what does this make Obama the man? Who is he really?
Jon Voight, one of Hollywood’s more outspoken figures on the center-right, is skeptical: “Sen. Barack Obama has grown up with the teaching of very angry, militant white and black people: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers and Rev. Michael Pfleger. We cannot say we are not affected by teachers who are militant and angry. We know too well that we become like them, and Mr. Obama will run this country in their mindset.”
Jon has a point, but actually I think Obama is more confused than that. We have all been subjected to various influences – it becomes a question of how we process them, how we decide to react. Obama appears to be one of those guys who stands back, waiting to see which way the wind is blowing, then he sways one way or the other according to the moment, masking his vacillations with high-flown rhetoric. I wouldn’t call him a socialist, as Voight does elsewhere in his oped, or anything else. He doesn’t have a real opinion. There is, in the words of Gertrude, no there there.
I think Obama has the mental illness known as “Borderline Personality Disorder.” He failed to bond with his mother, his grandmother, and certainly his father. In addition, he was jerked around so much as a child that he failed to bond with American and Americans.
In his heart, he has no home, and you can’t fake love of country. It shows every time he opens his mouth.
It turn out – or not – that nobody can find Obama’s University ‘thesis’.
His professor (who doesn’t have it either) recollects that it was <i?“an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States.”
http://tinyurl.com/6rjg9t
Wasn’t Arms Reduction code for disarmament?
Yikes.
“We have all been subjected to various influences – it becomes a question of how we process them, how we decide to react. Obama appears to be one of those guys…”
Indeed, we have been subjected to “various influences.” There was a moment, after the 2000 election, when GWB told some advisors, “I got a good deal of the gay vote, didn’t I?” And smiled.
Also, Lanny Davis recalled a moment when Bush, then his Yale classmate, stood up for a gay student there. But then, as president, Dub can’t even bring himself to say “homosexual” in any public remarks and supports a constitutional amendment that would write them out of the country, so there you go.
And what do we get from you? Toothless support of gay marriage on your blog, and the occasional favorable reference to Tammy Bruce, because hey, some of your best friends are gay.
As for Obama, I noticed you used the words “seems” and “appears.” How very speculative of you, and thus emblamatic of someone with no grasp of (or desire to follow) voting patterns or speeches. Anyone who’s been following these two factors for the past five years knows where the two major candidates stand, yet as Christopher Hitchens today noted, the GOP has a vested interest in painting the opposing candidate as an America-hating pacifist.
The populace isn’t stupid, Roger. They know it’s bad form for a party to argue that, in order to be a “good” American, one has to spend the better part of every day condemning his fellow Americans as week-kneed appeasers.
That’s not what you do in so many words, of course. Rather, you claim to know nothing about a major candidate for the presidency, despite all that is readily available on the public record. This sort of innuendo, when coupled with the fact that your blog contains nearly no evaluation of Senator McCain’s positions on the issues (save your brief web interview), is designed to create doubts in voters’ minds. I’m not sure how McCain’s views on abortion, marriage, and yes, campaign finance reform, can possibly jibe with your own libertarian leanings, so what have you got? A “gut feeling” that McCain, who wavered on the surge a year ago and whose foreign policy tent is big enough to include Scowcroft, Kissinger, Kristol and Lieberman, will kill more people than the other guy?
And when the wind blows nuclear dust over our heads? Obama will stand back and do…what?
I think Jon Voight has guts to say this considering where he works.
Jay,
Since you reference the Hitchens column today, I’ll quote this part from that column:
“Shortly after Baghdad had fallen at a then-cost of perhaps 100 U.S. fatalities, he (Obama) said publicly that there was no serious difference between the Bush position and his own. It was only by retro-engineering his politics, and pointing to a speech he had made in Chicago very much earlier in the Iraq debate, that he was able to create the idea that he had been both braver and more prescient than his rivals for the nomination.”
The case stated in this column is that Obama waits to see which way the wind blows, which is what he’s done on Iraq all along, and is the point Hitchens makes. Obama gave more props to the surge in February than he does now, simply because his general election opponent’s greatest asset is his support of the surge (and to say in your words that McCain “wavered” on the surge is, I think, more than a bit off).
Why doesn’t Obama say, “I got the surge wrong, but I got war right.” and leave it at that? I suspect he doesn’t because he knows that so long as things go well in Iraq he merely has to look presidential, and admitting you got a major policy decision wrong doesn’t look presidential, at least not to campaign managers.