Obama Promises Iraqi Heads In Exchange for Votes

This bit of Campaign 2007 Treachery from AP (4/21/07):

[Barack] Obama fielded questions about health care, gun control and energy during a midday appearance before some 200 people at a Nashua senior center. The residents politely applauded, and then Jean Serino of Hudson told the candidate her nephew was heading to Iraq to serve.

"I can't breathe," she said, her voice breaking with sobs. "I want to know, when am I going to be able to breathe? Are you going to get us the hell out of there? Promise us you will get us out of there. That's the most important thing."

"I can only imagine how you feel, as a father and as a parent," he said. "I don't go to a single town-hall meeting where I don't meet a mother or father who either is seeing a loved one go over there or has already lost someone, or has a loved one who has come back injured.

"So I make a solemn pledge to you, as president we will be out of Iraq," Obama said to loud applause. (Here's the whole article.)

What a pair of imbeciles. Obama's pandering, simpering vow to end the conflict -- as if our pulling out will end the conflict -- is pathetic. So is his reference to all the people he has spoken to. Hey, Mr. Obama, how about meeting with people who DON'T already agree with you? Not enough warm fuzzies?

This whole little exchange is the kind of emotionalism and pandering that will propel Democrats to promise defeat as an election platform in 2008. Once again, they show that they are not grown up enough to be in charge of national security or foreign affairs.

We should be wary of Obama and those who think the same way. Although Obama is transparent in his defeatism (for defeat is what he advocates, make no mistake), many others try to dress up withdrawl as shrewd foreign policy.

But here's the real problem. Promises of withdrawl and defeat are band-aids, and they attempt to compartmentalize the issue so that we won't think about what's over the horizon. As if withdrawing means there's nothing over that horizon. But withdrawl will have its consequences, so a commitment to withdraw American forces before the war is also a commitment to those consequences.

In other words, Obama's promise promises of a lot more, and a lot worse, than withdrawal alone. So some warnings:

Hey, Iraqi moderates, beware: Obama and Democratic others are promising your severed heads in exchange for votes.

Hey, Iraqi soldiers: they are promising to abandon you. You and your families will be among the first targets.

Hey, American soldiers: they are pandering to voters with promises to make you lose and thus pile shame on you.

Hey, American young people: in exchange for votes, yours and your parents', Democrats like Obama and Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are promising you a terrible inheritance: a generation without heroes, an ashamed nation, and a destroyed national confidence. And more and more years of "American is the bad guy" thinking.

That's what they did to my generation with Vietnam. They whined the U.S. into losing when victory was within grasp. Why? To make themselves feel better. It was all about feelings, not national interest.

My generation and yours are paying the price of that treachery. It's called terrorism.

Do not accept defeat. Reject it with all your heart. A nation willing to be defeated most certainly will be -- and probably deserves it.

Virginia Tech

I've had whack-jobs in my classes like that. I thought for sure they would bring a gun some day. Now that I think of it, there were kids at my undergrad college who were very, very disturbed. I remember a friend's roommate, Elena, who night after night slept in a cave of newspapers she made on her bed. Poor girl. There was just no reaching her.

At VT, I'm struck that the teacher who really was the hero of the moment (at least the one I've heard about) was a Holocaust survivor. Now that's someone who knows about fear and danger. A person from a totally different world than the students. I think it says a lot that it was only he who, instead of shrinking from it and trying to hide, stood up when he should have. (See Mark Steyn on this, too.)

A friend of mine said she feared that there is SO MUCH of this kind of stuff going on. She's right. I don't believe it personally, but I sympathize with my sister-in-law's rantings about this being "End Times." Of course, every generation in almost every age has had good reason to think the same (that's why I'm not especially worried now). But it troubles me nonetheless to think about sending little ones into the Madness.

My question when it comes to thinking about this isn't "why can't we all get along?" Rather, it's "where are the adults?" I think many individuals, and the culture as a whole, have abdicated the role they ought be playing: the role of the grown-up. This is the one who says, without apologizing, this is the ideal for behavior (even if most real people can't live up to it), even if it intrudes on your personal freedom. It's the one who says "hey, there are limits to your self-gratification." And "I'm sorry, but there are limits to what's "okay" in terms of behavior." The one who says, "It's not all about you."

Part of the trouble now is that one of the most childish, self-centered, self-gratified, boundary-defying, limit-vilifying generations ever is now in the role where the grown-ups are supposed to be. The defiance they've congratulated themselves for since they were teens, and the narcissism by which they justified it, are having serious consequences in the culture.

An example: Someone I work with at CDC seemed amused yesterday when she mentioned that the population segment with the fastest-rising incidence of new HIV infections is seniors. There were lots of suppressed giggles, and then someone summed it off by laughing (and I quote), "Ha ha! I guess they're not worried about getting pregnant, so they're just having fun!"

These are our rising seniors. Imagine what it will be like, just a few years hence, when the Me Generation goes to the home! It's all kind of humorous, I admit, but there's a reason it's funny: it's that we don't expect our seniors to act, well, like horny teenagers. We expect them to be upright and moral. In a very real but unacknowledged sense, we need them to set the moral boundaries for the rest of us. In other words, we expect them to be the guard rails at the cliff's edge. But if they don't fulfill that role, what then?

Here's the point -- the perceived culture (to the extent it's a coherent whole, and it isn't) may or may not have have needed some revision way back when, but it's equally true that the whole celebrated rebellion we grew up in the shadow of needed that solid civilization more than it would ever admit. It took what was good and real and benevolent about the culture it was rebelling against for granted, as if what was good in, say, deferring to one's elders couldn't be lost or didn't exist in the first place.

I call that the "Push-Off Principle" (not a perfect name -- I'm still looking for a better one). What it refers to is the phenomenon where one group or idea or ideology both "pushes off" from an existing standard while also, without realizing it, taking the indestructibility of the standard's benefits for granted. The upshot is like revising a good but imperfect manuscript by throwing out your whole computer -- you get rid of the bad all right, but you also lose the good as well as the hardware that made revising possible in the first place.

Washington Post's E.J. Dionne

See the WP story, below.

Unfortunately, Dionne doesn't understand why anyone would watch Fox (which he betrays by lumping Hannity, a hyper-con, with O'Reilly; I guess they all look alike to him). He also appears to be unaware that it may be the left-wing tilt of all other networks that makes Fox appear "right-wing," if only by comparison. My personal opinion is that Fox is perceived as conservative for two reasons: 1) the presence of Hannity (who is balanced by Alan Colmes, a liberal) and because it allows conservatives a non-defensive place at the table. The problems with Dionne's assumptions are a) "Hannity and Colmes" is just one show on the whole channel, and b) Hannity is just half of that show. I'll concede that O'Reilly takes conservative positions on some issues, but he regularly hammers Republicans, the oil companies, and people like Pat Buchanan. And guess what? Fox isn't the only news organization ever to have reported something that turned out to be inaccurate.

Dionne also seems oblivious to the fact that classic "liberalism" involved liberating individuals from the excesses of government. Today's "liberals" aren't in that vein at all, instead preferring to use the machinery of the State as a weapon against private interests in order to achieve equality of outcomes (which they equate with "justice"), at the expense of liberty and personal responsibility.

What saddens me is how little people like him think of others. It's not that he doesn't care, but intentions aren't everything. By definition, he thinks people are too stupid to think or do for themselves and need enlightened people like him (using the power of the government) to save them from their baser angels.

Original article:

Saying No to Fox News
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, April 13, 2007; Page A17

I have this mischievous suspicion that Roger Ailes, the creator and chairman of Fox News, secretly admires the bloggers and other activists working to keep Democratic presidential candidates from debating on his cable network.
To be sure, Ailes will never say this. On the contrary, he is furious that MoveOn.org and others have struck a chord in arguing that Democrats have no business creating any formal link with a network that so openly favors conservative and Republican causes.
"Pressure groups are forcing candidates to conclude that the best strategy for journalists is divide and conquer, to only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage," Ailes fumed earlier this year as Fox's effort to sponsor a Democratic presidential debate in Nevada was falling apart. "Any candidate for high office of either party who believes he can blacklist any news organization is making a terrible mistake." Using the incendiary word "blacklist" was a nice touch.
What Ailes knows is that the campaign to block Fox from sponsoring Democratic debates is the most effective liberal push-back against the network that stars Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity since its debut on Oct. 7, 1996.
Ailes has been brilliant at having it both ways, insisting that his network is "fair and balanced" even as its right-tilting programming built a devoted conservative following that helped it bury CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.
While Ailes knew precisely what he was doing, his competitors flailed. They dumped one format after another, sometimes trying to lure conservative viewers from Fox by offering their own right-leaning programs. Loyal conservatives preferred the real thing and stuck with Fox.
My hunch is that Ailes, one of the toughest and smartest in a generation of Republican political consultants, sees his adversaries as playing the kind of political hardball he respects. It's why he's angry. The anti-Fox squad won a second round on Monday when Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined John Edwards in announcing that they would not appear at a debate to be sponsored by Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus in September.
The Fox debate saga is amusing, but it's more than that. It marks a transformation on the left driven by the rise of Internet voices and the frustration of liberals at the success of conservatives in using a combination of talk radio, Fox and the Web to propagate anti-liberal, anti-Democratic messages.
From the late 1960s until the past few years, media criticism was dominated by conservatives railing against a supposedly "liberal media." Hearing mostly from this one side, editors, publishers and producers looked constantly over their right shoulders, rarely imagining they could be biased against the left or too accommodating to Republican presidents. This was a great conservative victory.
The Bush years have changed that. Aggressive media criticism is now the rule across the liberal blogs, and new monitoring organizations such as Media Matters for America police news reports for signs of Republican bias, often debunking charges against Democrats. When you combine liberal and conservative media criticism you get a result that is more or less fair and balanced. Score a net gain for liberals.
Fox provided the new liberal critics with a target-rich environment. This, after all, is the network that in January floated a false report that Obama had been educated at a madrassa. The nicely staccato Fox report said of Obama's alleged time in an Islamic school: "The first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa. . . . Financed by Saudis, they teach this Wahhabism, which pretty much hates us. The big question is, was that on the curriculum back then?" Talk about Innuendo City. Fox's competition, notably CNN, went after the story and proved it untrue. Obama, as he recounted in his own book, went to an Indonesian public school.
Tell me again: Why do Democrats have an obligation to participate in debates on Fox?
I am an avid reader of conservative magazines such as National Review and the Weekly Standard. But if these two publications teamed up to sponsor a Democratic debate, would anyone accuse Edwards, Obama and Clinton of "blacklisting" if the candidates said, "no, thanks"?
I admire Roger Ailes's genius in building Fox News. I wish liberals could create a comparably powerful network. If Fox and such a network co-sponsored debates, I'd love to watch the fireworks. In the meantime, Ailes should be thankful to the conservative stalwarts who made his network a success and not be disappointed if his political adversaries take their business elsewhere.