Two Farrows In One!

“Mia Farrow slams ‘British bystanders’ over Parliament’s Syria vote,” Twitchy noted yesterday:

Mia Farrow isn’t happy with the “British bystanders” in Parliament who voted Thursday against military intervention in Syria. Farrow is certainly no isolationist: in the face of genocide in Darfur, she led the effort to have corporations pull their sponsorship of China’s “Genocide Olympics” in 2008. Today’s vote in Britain, though, was to authorize a military response, which even the Red Cross has warned could “likely trigger more displacement and add to humanitarian needs.”

“Also, it’s racist not to support a war when Obama is president,” Glenn Reynolds adds today. Which may explain the disparity regarding the two tweets above, particularly given that removing Saddam was seen as a good thing in the 1990s by Al Gore and Bill Clinton:

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Or to put it another way:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

— From NPR’s 2009 transcript of “of the remarks then-Sen.* Barack Obama delivered in Chicago on Oct. 2, 2002. In his speech, Obama said that what he was opposed to was ‘a dumb war … a rash** war.’ He said the war was a ‘cynical attempt’ to shove ‘ideological agendas down our throats’ and would distract from domestic problems*** such as poverty and health care.” (Via Ace.)

Summing up, “It might seem confusing, but it’s very simple,” Jim Treacher writes today. “Sometimes going to war is bad, and those who do it are evil. Other times, the President of the United States is a Democrat.”

Hey, it’s not very hip to protest when a Democrat is in power.

* Actually, he was still an Illinois state senator in 2002. But hey, close enough for government work, I guess.

** Which was so rash, it wouldn’t begin for another six months.

*** Unemployment was 5.7 percent in September of 2002, one year after 9/11.

Update: Two administrations in one:

Obama in 2012: Taking ‘military action unilaterally’ in Syria would be ‘mistake’

Kerry today: The UN can’t do anything, so we’ll go it alone.