You Can’t Say That on Television — But It’s Okey Dokey at The Daily Beast
May 24th, 2010 - 11:45 am
Am I reading too much into it, or did Peter Beinart really spend an entire column arguing that President Obama’s Afghanistan policy is just too-darned clever for West Point grads to appreciate?
You’re reading way too much into it. It’s simply a great fisking of Obama’s foreign “policy.” The column only mentioned the West Point grads as the audience; remove the grads from the column and it’s effectively intact.
Andy –
I think you need to re-read the column. Beinart wasn’t fisking Obama’s policy, far from it. He was saying that want he wants to do (and what Beinart endorsed!) doesn’t reconcile with what needs to be done in Afghanistan. In other words, Obama’s in a tough spot, so we all need to give him a break. Whaaaa.
And, I think I have this right, what Obama needs to do in AfPak (limited goals, shorter timeframe), is just too darn clinical and smart to be “inspiring” to West Point grads.
It’s all part of the “impartation” of a “mystical intelligence” and the personal desires of the supporter. They don’t actually read the words for what they are; they make them conform to their personal bias and desire. I ask everyone to read the “text” of all speeches (not just Obama’s) and you’ll see what I mean.
Liberal journalist 101: Trot out failed collectivist policy and claim “the reason it didn’t work is the right people weren’t in charge and not everyone participated ‘correctly’”. That one makes my side hurt! And Woodrow Wilson….Of Wilson’s “Fourteen points” my personal favorite stated “establishment of an organization that would protect the independence and sovereignty of all nations.” How’s that working out for the EUROPEAN UNION? We can’t keep California from spending itself into oblivion….and we are “sovereign states” supposedly. Yawn….socialism would work if the right people were in charge….and we can’t explain why it has failed every single time it’s been tried and every country currently using the “socialist model” has a larger poverty to wealth gap than the US does…but you can’t bring up the facts or you are a racist. WE GET IT!
By the way….does Peter not actually read any news? I got a good chuckle out of the “global warming” mention under the list of “global threats”. I wonder how many bullets and tanks that one will take.
I read it to say that Obama’s small-minded, incremental foreign policy may or may not be right, but it definitely is not inspirational. Beinart is telling Obama to stop telling soldiers we are sending them off to potentially die in exchange for petty little goals.
I don’t think so. I’m not particularly a fan of Beinart, but I don’t think that was what he had in mind. What struck me more than anything else was Beinart’s unwillingness to come out and admit that The One’s Kumbaya-as-foreign-policy strategy, like so many grand plans out of the faculty lounge, just doesn’t jibe with reality. He dances around that point the entire column, but just couldn’t quite bring himself to admit it.