The perils of sunshine on a cloudy day

Huh?

Obama is the guy that folks were criticizing back in August for saying that, if elected, he might order unilateral military strikes against terrorists hiding in this Islamic country.

Lots of folks were criticizing him for saying that. I remember hearing them.

So now we have a post suggesting that Obama might be too conciliatory and references the very subject on which he was six months ago deemed too aggressive?

Strange, very strange...

Here's a good, measured criticism of Obama's proposal for presidential diplomacy with dictatorial regimes by someone who is no fan of Bush's frequent cold shoulder approach.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120295423439867155.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

I think the problem with Obama is that his rhetoric and his complete lack of foreign policy experience allows for concerns about him being both too conciliatory and too aggressive. All we have to go on is what he says, and he's said both.

How will history evaluate the foreign policies of George W. Bush and his response to 9/11?

Can we know with a reasonable measure of "to-vote-or-not-to-vote-for-him" certainty that the policies and responses of Barack H. Obama will be worse - or better?

Can we say the same about John McCain, should he get the nomination?

Bugg: "Put it this way-we are financing a "stimulus package" by borrowing from the Chinese in the form of t-bill sales so come July we can have the economy stimulated by the purchase of junk consumer goods produced in China. And everyone is okay with that, including Mccain. We don't deserve the Republic bequeathed to us by Franklin, because we are now giving in to the temptation to vote ourselves the Treasury.Add in the Obama childrens' crusade joke of a campaign, and it's proof that we are unserious tykes."

We've been paying for the war in the same way, and watching a huge amount of that borrowed money go down the rathole of Halliburton/Bechtel mismanagement. The GOP has uttered nary a sound about this, and have fought for any kind of accountability measures.

To complain about a stimulus package that spends a fraction of the money that has been wasted by Halliburton/Bechtel seems to be more partisan than crunchy to me. If you were really concerned about the debt we are running up you would be calling for a war tax to pay for this "war on terror."

I wish the pundits, prognosticators and political bloggers would just STFU every once in a while. Your track record for accuracy and prophesy has been pathetic.

For the past eight years all you pundits have been "reading tea leaves" and "unpacking arguments," picking the sinew out of every little utterance and, of course, fomenting hysterical fear wherever you go.

And what have we, the American people, gotten for all this effort? Well, it seems that 70 percent of the time, you're completely wrong about whatever it is you're talking about. And instead of accompanying your glib "mea culpas" with any sort of real acknowledgement about how inept most of you are at your jobs, you go on just as you were making more "analysis." (Out here in Dogpatch, we call it a "guess.")

What the hell do any of you know about leadership? Half of you bloggers sit around and let someone else to do the heavy lifting, the leading, the fighting, the dying. All most of you do is lift your pasty butts off your chairs and comment on how they can do it better. Hell, most of your don't even do your own reporting; you just wait for someone else to do it and comment off that.

Please. Guys like Dreher and Douthat constantly bitch about the culture and the "State of the Community," but I'd be willing to bet that neither one of these guys is a member of a single board or group in their own communities. (You know, it's just so much easier to complain.) Same on the liberal side; let everyone else do the work and just complain how it wasn't done right and how YOU would have done it.

I am not saying that we don't need people to comment on the way things are and how they ought to be. It would just be nice if any one of these geniuses would actually get their hands dirty and do something about it.

I'm still wondering if Obama's rhetoric can survive the mute button. After all, the voters in those primaries have lots of reasons to vote against Hillary just for the sake of voting against Hillary and hot air only carries so far before it gets really old.

My personal guess (and the crystal ball being in the shop means I'm probably wrong) is that there are about 5 non-black voters who will vote against Obama to prevent him from being the first black president for every one who will. Of course they won't say that to the pollsters so polling Obama accurately is impossible.

The other matter to be considered is that Hillary has been unable to really attack Obama hard because of the position of black voters in the Democratic party, sort of like the reason McCain cannot really unload on Huckabee because of his religion. But, in the general election, the Republicans will not hesitate because they know that their voters just won't care. They would love nothing more than for Obama's supporters to turn this into a racial election because then they can bury him under his supporters. We saw a preview of this in Tennessee when a popular black politician's supporters made the mistake of crying racism and it turned the white voters against him, costing him the election. It would be the same as if Huckabee were the nominee and the Democrats would gleefully portray him as a nutcase with a bible.

Anyway, this is too long and the gist of it is simple. If Obama is nominated, the moment it becomes a racial election he loses.

To complain about a stimulus package that spends a fraction of the money that has been wasted by Halliburton/Bechtel seems to be more partisan than crunchy to me.

I don't doubt there's been some waste & mismanagement in the war effort, and I've no problem with a latter-day Truman Committee or the like (provided it doesn't morph into a latter-day Committee on the Conduct of the War). And a temporally-graduated tariff on imported oil (and the like), in the name of financing the war, strikes me as a fine idea.

Then again, fighting wars on borrowed money is hardly unprecedented; see the Civil War, and both World Wars. Of course that's not ideal, but OTOH, any war that serves American national interests (*) can be viewed as an investment in the future of this country - and war bonds as analogous to private borrowing to finance capital upgrades.

Then again, war bonds probably wouldn't be necessary if we weren't already spending such large sums on bread & circuses (e.g., Social Security, Medicare). Or perhaps we're financing _those_ with T-bills, and spending the tax money on the war? By that interpretation, financing even more B&C (i.e., the stimulus) via borrowing is at least consistent with past practice....

(*) Of course, this assumes that the Iraq War is in our national interest. Then again, if it isn't, then the _entire_ war - including (say) efficient uses of PGMs and money to treat wounded veterans - is a waste of money. Not just the appropriations wasted on KBR mismanagement.

Aucontraire Fracois! It is not only the rich, white, and well educated who are voting for Obama, perhaps not even the majority of this demographic in his wins thus far. Maybe you've heard a little bit about the ENORMOUS outpouring of support from the African-American community? Folks who are often on the lower end of the economic spectrum? Many of whom are serving in our military right now?

These millions of supporters DO feel the economic squeeze and they do bear the burden of our military misadventures. I'm really not sure why support from well educated white people should be held against Barack anyway. They're apparently smart enough to know that the republican alternative is madness, following McCain down the rathole that Bush has created for us.

On another note, John E. has hit the nail on the head. I immediately remembered Obama being tongue lashed for suggesting we should take a hardline against Western Pakistan. Now it's conservative conventional wisdom. This alone makes the central point of Wieseltier's argument invalid. Next pundit, please....

Chris M,

I don't deny that Obama now has overwhelming support from the African-American community. The swing of that support his way in recent weeks is what will make him the Democratic nominee, rather than Hillary Clinton. That said, the swing only started to occur when the Clintons tried to rebrand Obama as the "black" candidate -- and had so much success that their hope to do so for short-term tactical gain turned to a fear that having done so would sink them in strategic terms, as indeed it has. But it's still the case that Clinton leads Obama among all non-black groups at the lower end of the income scale -- ie among the blue-collar constituencies that once were the very basis of the Democratic Party. My worry about Obama is that he doesn't really have a feel for these folks and their needs and that the people he does have a feel for are not ones who have enough at stake in the election to be morally responsible in who they choose for President. None of the candidates -- Democrat or Republican -- appeals to me much, but while I do think more of Obama as a person than I do of Clinton, I feel much more sympathy for her supporters than I do for most of his -- that is, for the bulk of them from outside the black community, the bulk of them that are rich bobos without much to lose or to gain either way.

The Israel-hating Kim has been asked time and time again to leave this board. I haven't figured out yet how to block his IP, but I delete his posts as soon as I find them. Help me out when you see them posted -- drop me an e-mail at rdreher(at)dallasnews.com, and let me know where I can find them.

At least Obama understands the problem is actually Pakistan and Afghanistan, instead of claiming we should keep screwing around in Iraq.

But people take his Pakistan comments out of context. He's not going to randomly bomb there without the support of Pakistan's government...he's talking about attacking areas not under their control, and, if it happened, would almost certainly be a joint effort to help Pakistan recover control, not seen as an attack on Pakistan.

Of course, it could still be a bad idea if it helps the radicals in Pakistan's government gain power. Which would be impossible to predict a year in advance, or even three months. The first step might be to help stabilize their government and then help them regain control of their whole country.

I hope he makes the right call either way, because it could be a bad idea, but it's also a bad idea to just ignore bin Laden. But it's not the crazy war-mongering idea that people make it out to be.

Wieseltier evidently believes in McCain's "Hundred Years War."

BTW, do neocons ever realize that the United States has DOMESTIC as well as FOREIGN problems? And that they often interact in complicated ways (trade, immigration)?

It's this attitude that we're already in Shangri-La, and so we can descend down to save the rest of the world, that got us into this nightmare in the first place -- kind of the reverse of "One Tin Soldier."

DavidTC, what you call "screwing around" in Iraq others might consider "preventing genocide" on a Congo-like scale. There is also the fact that the U.S. cannot get permission from Musharraf in Pakistan to cross the border to go after Bin Laden. Why does Obama think Musharraf will give him permission?

I don't hear much from Obama that suggests he cares about the complexity of these issues, since everytime he talks about a solution, it sounds like something virtually everyone would like to see happen, like bringing our troops home from Iraq, or "getting" Bin Laden.