Michele, he’s black! You can’t criticize him! Shush before the thought police show up!

It is hard not to get the impression that the inexperienced and largely unlearned Obama really does not have a clue what he’d do or what his policy would be. That’s probably why he does better when he stays on vague, generalized concepts like “hope” and “change” without explaining what those changes would be or what we are to hope for.

how does mccain propose to end the war in iraq and the war in afghanistan and bring bin laden to justice and negotiate peace between israel and palestine and between israel and syria and to get north korea to dismantle their nuclear weapons programs? how does mccain propose we deal with the leaders of iran?

In their litany of American presidents who met with hostile dictators, supporters of Barack Obama cite John F. Kennedy and his meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. They leave out how it went.
The earnest, young American president wanted to forestall any possibility of misunderstanding and to win Khrushchev’s commitment to the international status quo. The blustery, risk-taking Soviet premier wanted to bludgeon Kennedy into making concessions that would further the Soviet goal of global revolution. With such clashing objectives, the two leaders didn’t exactly hit it off.
When Kennedy thought he was being accommodating, Khrushchev thought he was being weak. He pocketed rhetorical concessions by Kennedy and demanded more. Afterward, Kennedy called it “the roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy adviser George Ball later said that Khrushchev had perceived Kennedy as “young and weak,” and Kennedy confidant Gen. Maxwell Taylor thought Khrushchev concluded he could “shove this young man around.” Vienna was the backdrop for Soviet assertion in the Cold War flash points to come.
Not all talking is created equal. Which is why it’s folly for a presidential candidate to make a blanket promise to negotiate personally with adversaries. Asked last year at the YouTube debate if he’d be willing to meet “without precondition, during the first year of your administration … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea,” Obama said “yes.” Since then, he’s tried to elevate his ill-considered improvisation into foreign-policy gospel.
So when, in a speech in Israel, President Bush characterized trying to talk adversaries out of their hatreds as appeasement, Obama and his supporters reacted as if he had been skewered to the core. The Obama Doctrine had been attacked! On foreign soil! They countered that the act of talking is, in itself, not appeasement. True enough. But neither is talking a substitute for strategy.
Consider President Reagan, another president invoked by Obama supporters. Reagan believed in personal diplomacy, but concluded upon taking office that it was pointless to talk to Soviet hard-liner Leonid Brezhnev. In stiffening U.S. defenses and pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative, his administration sought to convince Moscow, in the words of Secretary of State George Shultz, that restraint “was its most attractive, or only, option,” while pressuring the tottering Soviet economic system.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the administration thought it had the strategic upper hand, and a man it could work with. Reagan met with his counterpart in Geneva and Reykjavik. Keenly aware of his inability to keep pace in a high-tech arms race, Gorbachev wanted any deal contingent on prohibiting SDI. Reagan said “no.” Out of his weakness, Gorbachev eventually gave the Reagan administration the kinds of arms cuts it wanted and openings in the Soviet system. The Cold War was about to end.
If a President Obama handles relations with Iran as deftly, maneuvering the clerical regime to its doom, he’s worthy of his hype. Nothing suggests that he even conceives of his desire to talk in these terms. To do so, he’d have to develop some appreciation for the concept of leverage.
Has the Bush administration been too diplomatically inflexible? Maybe, but it has allowed the EU-3 (Great Britain, France, and Germany) to take the lead with Iran, and the Europeans have offered incentives for the suspension of its nuclear program. It has engaged in prolonged negotiations with North Korea, winning the (dubious) promise of the suspension of its nuclear program. It has relentlessly promoted Israel-Palestinian negotiations.
We have a recent example of even more active Middle East diplomacy. President Clinton had Yasser Arafat to the White House more than any other foreign leader, and his secretary of state, Warren Christopher, spent long, bootless hours with then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. When Clinton tried to pressure Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak into a deal that wasn’t there near the end of his second term, the second intifada erupted. It wasn’t appeasement; it was just foolish. Obama beware.
Scanning the daily press, an American voter is likely to come away with the following characterization of Barack Obama: he opposed the Iraq war from the start, he conscientiously opposed it even when public opinion was against him, and if elected president, he would withdraw U.S. forces from there immediately. There is every reason to assume that Obama’s antiwar credentials have enabled his all-but-certain victory in the Democratic primary, and yet few have attempted scrutiny of those credentials (the New Republic and Commentary are the rare exceptions), let alone analyzed Obama’s policy prescriptions for how to resolve a smoldering crisis in Mesopotamia. As with much of his electoral appeal, the stump catechisms of “hope” and “change” have eclipsed Obama’s more wavering rhetoric about Iraq over the past five years. And as for what he plans to do going forward, his ideas are not just frighteningly ill informed and out of date, they’re not even on nodding terms with the realities in a part of the world that, since 9/11, has held a monopoly on our attention.
In October 2002, the then-Illinois state senator addressed an antiwar rally in Chicago, where, describing himself as no pacifist, he affirmed, “I… know Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors… 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.”
Obama went on to campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as having been against regime change, ab initio. He lost that contest to Chicago favorite Bobby Rush, but has congratulated himself ever since for, as he put it in a debate at Dartmouth College in 2007, “telling the truth to the American people even when [it was] tough…standing up against this war at a time where [sic] it was very unpopular. And I was risking my political career, because I was in the middle of a U.S. Senate race.” Left out of this courageous resume is the fact that it was in his proximate political interest to take the position he did. He was trying to appeal, after all, to what the New Republic’s Michael Crowley called a “coalition of lakefront liberals and African Americans,” and he was running in solidly Democratic state from a district – Hyde Park – that was heavily antiwar. Obama’s own campaign manager at the time, Dan Shomon, admitted, “He knew, and I knew, that the liberal progressives were key in any Democratic primary.” Obama may very well have been sincere in his opposition to the war, but he could not have adopted any other position and still have had a shot at winning a contentious primary. Also, his courage in telling harsh truths to the American people cannot account for why he twice removed his Chicago speech from his presidential campaign website – a curious elision for a man who claims to have had greater prescience and “purity” on Iraq than any of his opponents on either side of the aisle did.
Far from being “above politics,” Obama has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to play the sordid game with almost undetectable skill. He has indeed equivocated and contradicted himself on the war, and he has more or less confessed to tilting whichever way the wind blows for the purposes of political expediency. When challenged with some of his own wobblier pronouncements on holding fellow Democrats to account for authorizing the war, he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the party had just put up “a nominee for the presidency and a vice president, both of whom had voted for the war. And so it probably was the wrong time for me to be making a strong case against our party’s nominees’ decisions when it came to Iraq.”
Thus Obama was willing to sacrifice his own belief in the folly of Kerry and Edwards’s decisions in order not to rock the boat on their way to the White House. What else might he be willing to sacrifice, go silent on, or obfuscate, when he himself is the one running for president? In an interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker in 2007, before he had declared his presidential candidacy and when he was still in the habit of giving Hillary Clinton her due: “[P]erhaps the reason I thought [the war] was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices… [Clinton] and I were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.” No doubt it is. But lest this generous dispensation to his future rival lead you to credit Obama for his humility and self-criticism, consider that the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, on which he claimed to have based his antiwar stance, conceded that Saddam had an arsenal of WMD but did not pose an imminent threat. As Crowley shrewdly puts it, “If Obama already accepted that Saddam had WMD, why would the intelligence have changed his view about war?” What would he have learned from classified information that he didn’t already know and that any one of the former Democratic contenders for president this year might have trotted out in their defense for voting to go to war?
Obama wasn’t even clear about being unclear. In November 2004, after winning his senate race against the farcical Alan Keyes, Charlie Rose asked him the same question – would he have voted against authorizing the president to go to war? Obama answered that time with a definitive “Yes.” Though he allowed that since U.S. forces were already fighting and dying in Iraq, “we’ve got to do everything we can to stabilize the country, to make it successful, because we’ll have too much at stake in the Middle East. And that’s the position that I continue to take.”
It took Obama almost a year before he gave another major speech on the war, though he did say, in July 2004, that his position was “not that much different” from George Bush’s – referring to the occupation. He attempted recently to explain his reticence as that of a freshman lawmaker who didn’t want to showboat during in his first year in Congress. When he did finally address the war, in November 2005, amidst the fervent leftist talk about “immediate” troop withdrawal, he struck a cautious tone, saying that our exit strategy ought to be conservative and gradual. He was against a full withdrawal but favored a reduction in forces. In June 2006, after the Golden Mosque bombing and the intensification of sectarian violence, Obama visited Iraq and came away even more chastened: “I’m… acutely aware,” he said, “that a precipitous withdrawal of our troops, driven by Congressional edict rather than the realities on the ground, will not undo the mistakes… It could compound them. It could compound them by plunging Iraq into an even deeper, and perhaps, irreparable crisis.”
Yet it didn’t take long for him to alter course and rhetoric again. By November 2006 he was calling for a “phased” withdrawal of troops, albeit without a rigid timeline for its implementation. He argued that a “redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining certain troop levels.”
When the President announced the “surge” in January 2007, Obama was vociferously against it, claiming it would not diminish violence. In February, after he announced his candidacy, he offered a plan that would bring all of the U.S.’s combat troops home by March 2008, or about thirteen months from that point, a projection that should have been the wake-up call for anyone serious about ending the war to realize that Obama was slightly less than serious. For one thing, it would take, by a conservative estimate, 16 months to do what Obama said could be done in thirteen. His current nebulous plan has made the necessary calendric correction, but the possibility of implementing it is still remote. Recall that President Bush announced on live television the infusion of 21,000 additional troops into Iraq. There were a few hiccups and head-scratches among keen observers of the actual deployment when 30,000 in fact were sent over, prompting the surge’s chief architect, Robert Kagan, to pen an apologia of his original math in The Weekly Standard. What accounted for the 9,000-man discrepancy?
There is a calculable difference between “combat brigades” and total armed forces. According to Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who wrote about the military logistics of remaining in and leaving Iraq in The Atlantic in June 2006, “[f]or each American soldier capable of going out on patrol or fighting insurgents, there are five support troops supplying his needs,” meaning that, at the pre-surge level of 130,000 troops, “only about 25,000 [were] combat troops.” These are the guys who routinely draw arms against insurgents, not their ancillaries such as MPs, signals officers and the like. Obama’s current plan – and here I quote from “Barack Obama: Turning the Page in Iraq,” his official campaign document on his war policy – calls for the removal of “one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of next year.” It allows for the maintenance of a “residual force” to “protect American diplomatic and military personnel in Iraq” and to continue battling al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. As for what “military personnel” will remain apart from that residual force, or how extensive that force will be, the Obama camp is mums, and for good reason.
Consider the following: The bulk of our presence is Iraq is confined to what are known as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), which are mostly located outside of cities and have excellent security. There are about 70 FOBs all across the country right now, and more than a dozen are giant military installations reminiscent, as Kaplan wrote, “of the West German garrisons from Cold War days,” the removal of which, needless to say, will not be easy, swift or likely given the capital investments they represent. Nor should one expect these facilities to be left unattended or manned solely by Iraqis. John McCain was quite right when he spoke of a prolonged U.S. presence in the Gulf, provided – and Obama and McCain’s liberal critics always fail to recapitulate this necessary condition – U.S. troops are not being targeted or killed. Most troops reside safely in these well-fortified FOBs, and they might continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As for the rest of the Pentagon’s materiel – tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, etc. – this will have to be evacuated slowly and under duress, with most of it traveling by ground toward Kuwait down Route Tampa, a highway favored by insurgents for its murderous potential due to its narrowness. (Evacuations by air would occur at an even more glacial pace, as the largest U.S. cargo plane can carry only one or two tanks per trip. There are 1,900 tanks in total in Iraq at present.)
The probable Obama model for withdrawal, if he ever gets around to sharing specifics, will in any event call for 30-35,000 troops, or roughly five brigades, to stay behind. In April, the candidate tellingly queried David Petraeus on the feasibility of keeping roughly this number in country if “we had the current status quo” in terms of security. Kaplan, too, cited 30,000 as the most “stripped-down” contingent required to occupy the FOBs. But even Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group and has endorsed Obama, has scuppered the idea of setting any firm withdrawal date-it just isn’t possible, says the reputed “realist.” More notoriously, Obama’s former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power was fired not for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” but for telling another truth, namely that any cited plan for withdrawal is a “best-case-scenario” subject to revision once Obama becomes commander-in-chief. Another way of saying this is that his current crowd-pleasing peroration of “Bring Them Home Now” is a feint.
Yet there are still more unsettling aspects of Obama’s inchoate Iraq plan. His campaign literature states: “If Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we would also continue training the Iraqi Security Forces.” Why should political progress be a precondition for training these forces – it wasn’t in the Iraq Study Group report, which cited failed reconciliation as a reason to concentrate more on military training as opposed to U.S.-led combat missions? And how many residual troops does Obama estimate will be required for such an enterprise?
Obama also demands that a “United Nations-Led Constitutional Convention” assemble to revise the current Iraqi constitution, which he sees as insufficiently inclusive Sunnis. This convention would “not adjourn until national reconciliation is reached and contentious questions such as federalism, oil revenue sharing, and de-Ba’athification are resolved.” Is no one at the Obama Headquarters aware that in February of this year, Iraq’s National Assembly passed a provincial councils law mandating new provincial elections by October 1; an amnesty law under which thousands of Sunnis imprisoned without charges will be released; and a de-Ba’athification law giving thousands of Saddam-era bureaucrats the ability to reassume their government jobs? Moreover, oil revenue sharing may not yet exist at the de jure level but it does exist at the de facto one, courtesy of a $48 billion budget that was also passed by parliament, allocating $10 billion – earned mainly from oil production – for even distribution to all eighteen provinces of Iraq. Does this sure sign of “political progress” mean Obama will similarly greenlight, as per the above, the further training of Iraqi forces? And how will that affect his overall drawdown strategy?
A more urgent question is this: How does Obama purport to restore America to its mythic former place of glory and esteem in the Middle East if he doesn’t bother to follow the news in the Middle East? The senator should update his website. And then he should have someone on his staff investigate what the typical Iraqi opinion is of the United Nations, selected by him to serve in the delicate role of constitutional revision and arbitration. Jonathan Foreman, a brilliant journalist and a contributor to Pajamas Media, has written of the native antipathy for the supranational body that produced immiserating sanctions, a decade of failed weapons inspections, and a secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who returned from Baghdad in 1998 declaring that Saddam was a man he could do business with. (Kofi’s son Kojo actually did reap illegal profits from the oil-for-food program, so Iraqi indignation on this score might be described as both righteous and misplaced). At any rate, the U.N. has not had an active presence in Iraq since insurgents bombed its embassy in 2003, killing its charismatic top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Obama further says wants to foster “regional stability,” particularly vital “given recent claims from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran will fill any vacuum created by American withdrawal.” Since he is campaigning for that selfsame withdrawal, why does he suppose Ahmadinejad will call the whole thing off just because he asks him to? Is he really that charming in person? Evidently so: “Obama also would be a tough negotiator with Syria and Iran,” continues his “Turning the Page” manifesto, “sending a clear message that they need to stop meddling in Iraq’s affairs.” Nice work if you can get it, but since Obama has clearly stopped meddling in Iraq’s affairs himself, not bothering to even keep up with significant events in its constitutionally certified government, his proposal to erase America’s military footprint and resort solely to diplomacy now begins to seem reckless and utopian – even more so than the adventurism he blames for getting us into this mess in the first place. How can anyone in possession of the foregoing facts and quotations be convinced of Obama’s superior judgment of what he once called “the most important foreign policy-decision in a generation”? He has been the beneficiary of luck, public obliviousness, media incuriosity and –much to her everlasting exasperation — Hillary Clinton’s inability to make any of this resonate with a smitten electorate. (And why has it never occurred to any journalist or pundit fond of the hypothetical to ask Obama if he would have voted for the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed unanimously in the Senate in 1998? A good follow-up to this would be to probe him on what he, as president, would have done to uphold that law short of removing the genocidal tyrant who necessitated it.)
There is every expectation that Obama will have his bluff called sooner or later. Adolph Reed, a prominent black leftist intellectual who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, published a fascinating and undervalued essay in current issue of The Progressive magazine. It is titled “Obama No.” Professor Reed followed the resistible rise of this young Chicago politico for quite some time and never liked what he saw:
Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people.
The GOP has apparently amassed 1,000 pages of opposition research on the opponent. What are the odds that Obama will not eventually be tasked with his contradictions and falsehoods and alarming displays of ignorance on Iraq?

Barack Obama is ambling rather than sprinting across the primary-season finish line. It’s not just his failure to connect with blue-collar Democrats. He has added to his problems with ill-informed replies on critical foreign policy questions.
On Sunday at a stop in Oregon, Sen. Obama was dismissive of the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. That’s the same Iran whose Quds Force is arming and training insurgents and illegal militias in Iraq to kill American soldiers; that is supporting Hezbollah and Hamas in violent attacks on Lebanon and Israel; and that is racing to develop a nuclear weapon while threatening the “annihilation” of Israel.
By Monday in Montana, Mr. Obama recognized his error. He abruptly changed course, admitting that Iran represents a threat to the region and U.S. interests.
Voters need to ask if Sunday’s comments, not Monday’s correction, aren’t the best evidence of his true thinking.
Is Mr. Obama’s first instinct to dismiss North Korea, the world’s worst nuclear proliferator, as an insignificant threat? Is his immediate reaction to treat Venezuela as a wayward child, rather than as an adversary willing to destabilize the hemisphere? Is his memory so short he has forgotten the Castro brothers’ willingness to aid revolutionary movements? Is he so shortsighted as to ignore the threat to Mideast stability that Syria’s meddling in Lebanon and support for Hamas and Hezbollah represents?
Mr. Obama’s Sunday statement grew out of a kerfuffle over his proclaimed willingness to meet – eagerly and without precondition – during his first year as president with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. On Monday, he said it was a show of confidence when American leaders meet with rivals; he insisted he was merely doing what Richard Nixon did by going to China.
I recommend that he read Henry Kissinger’s book, “The White House Years.” Mr. Obama would learn it took 134 private meetings between U.S. and Chinese diplomats before a breakthrough at a Jan. 20, 1970 meeting in Warsaw. It took 18 months of behind-the-scenes discussions before Mr. Kissinger secretly visited Beijing. And it took seven more months of hard work before Nixon went to China. The result was a new relationship, announced in a communiqué worked out over months of careful diplomacy.
The Chinese didn’t change because of a presidential visit. In another book, “Diplomacy,” Mr. Kissinger writes that “China was induced to rejoin the community of nations less by the prospect of dialogue with the United States than by fear of being attacked by its ostensible ally, the Soviet Union.” Change came because the U.S. convinced Beijing it was in its interest to change. Then the president visited.
The same is true with other successful negotiations. President Ronald Reagan prepared the ground for his meetings with a series of Soviet leaders by rebuilding the U.S. military, restoring confidence in American intentions, and pressuring the Soviets by raising the specter of a missile defense shield.
Reagan knew rogue states only change when they see there are real consequences of their actions, and when it is in their interest to change. This requires patience, vision, hard work and the use of all the tools, talents and relationships available to the U.S. We saw a recent example when Libya, fearful of American resolve after 9/11, gave up its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. These programs, incidentally, were more advanced than Western intelligence thought.
Reagan knew he must not squander the prestige of the American presidency and the authority of the United States by meaningless meetings that serve only as propaganda victories for our adversaries. Mr. Obama seems to believe charisma and smooth talk can fundamentally alter the behavior of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.
But what might work on the primary campaign trail doesn’t work nearly as well in Tehran. What, for example, does Mr. Obama think he can offer the Iranians to get them to become a less pernicious and destabilizing force? One of Iran’s top foreign policy goals is a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. This happens to be Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy goal, too. Why should Iran or other rogue states alter their behavior if Mr. Obama gives them what they want, without preconditions?
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama said in Florida that in a meeting with the Iranians he’d make it clear their behavior is unacceptable. That message has been delivered clearly by Republican and Democratic administrations in public and private diplomacy over the past 16 years. Is he so naïve to think he has a unique ability to make this even clearer?
If Mr. Obama believes he can change the behavior of these nations by meeting without preconditions, he owes it to the voters to explain, in specific terms, what he can say that will lead these states to abandon their hostility. He also needs to explain why unconditional, unilateral meetings with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il will not deeply unsettle our allies.
If Mr. Obama fails to do so, voters may come to believe that he is asking them to accept that he has a “Secret Plan,” and that he is hopelessly out of his depth on national security.

Given McCain’s age he has the perfect answer for how he deals with Iran, the same way Eisenhower did. He stages a coup and has the leaders of Iran killed.

GO JOHN HAGEE!!!! YEAH WHAT A TESTIMONY THAT MAN IS!

For some reason I think that John Hagee should worry about his afterlife acomodations being somewhat warm. And his congregation should be on the lookout for stray lightning bolts as the Almighty’s aim is not always that good.

“pompous, arrogant and clueless”
Are you clueless as to the meaning of these words? You can disagree with Obama, but his statemtns about Iran do not in any way meet the definition of these words. However, your attack does, setting youtr self up as the all knowing judge of foreign policy, and thus capable of declaring these words about Obama.
Serious question! What would Jesus tell the world to do in reference to Iran? Nuke them, or try diplomacy? Are you a pretrib, premill, dispensational wolf in sheeps clothing at Westminster? Your hype and panic on the topic seems to suggest so. I always think it is wise to use diplomacy as a first option in foreign policy. Your view seems to be much closer to Chairman Mao, who said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

I’m in agreement. To me Mr. Obama seems very pompous, arrogant and clueless — and very like John Kerry. He seems to be very naive and ill educated on foreign policy issues. He’s a glib speaker with a teleprompter, but not very good on the fly. (Lots of mistakes, misteps and uhs, and erms). By the way, the huge crowd in Oregon? How many people came out to see The Decemberists (the headliner) and stayed for Barack Obama do you think?

Pompous,arrogant and clueless…sounds like the Bush administration.
Obama actually has a brain- so of course the Repubs can’t relate to him.
Of course we could do what the neocons want and go to war with Iran,but we don’t have enough military left , thanks to that genius the Supreme Court placed in the White House. And we don’t have the money to do it anyway, because our fearless leader already spent us into near bankruptcy.
So what are the GOP plans, other than keep doing what’s not working, and expecting that it will all work out in the end?

“GO JOHN HAGEE!!!! YEAH WHAT A TESTIMONY THAT MAN IS!”
*Yawn*

“how does mccain propose to end the war in iraq and the war in afghanistan and bring bin laden to justice and negotiate peace between israel and palestine and between israel and syria and to get north korea to dismantle their nuclear weapons programs? how does mccain propose we deal with the leaders of iran?”
How does Obama plan to end the war in Afghanistan and find bin Laden? Will he invade Pakistan as he promised?

you didn’t answer.

“you didn’t answer.”
Neither did you and I asked first.

Michelle:
Your blog claims to have a reformed view. How this post really reflect a reformed view of current events? Please tell? If I were ignorant of reformed theology, I would think it was close to Hagee, based on how you post.

“I would think it was close to Hagee, based on how you post.”
How is it close to Hagee?

“Your blog claims to have a reformed view. How this post really reflect a reformed view of current events?”
This is pretty easy actually, I’m surprised that you have to ask. Don’t the Reformed believe that their political leaders should lead without getting them killed? Shouldn’t the Reformed be wise in the selection of their political leaders and make sure that the elect those whose position on foreign policy not change 15 times in one week.
Do you need a quote from Calvin to see how this is a Reformed view?

“This is pretty easy actually, I’m surprised that you have to ask. Don’t the Reformed believe that their political leaders should lead without getting them killed? Shouldn’t the Reformed be wise in the selection of their political leaders and make sure that the elect those whose position on foreign policy not change 15 times in one week.”
Nothing uniquely reformed about the above. Actually not at all indicative of reformed theology. Agnostic’s would agree with the above. Arminian theology would definitely agree. Is this the best you can do on reformed theology? More pragmatism than theology, and, as usual for you, an attempt to use hyperbole as proof. Yea- quote Calvin on how diplomacy is evil!
Most people who do not want anyone to engage in diplomatic talk with Iran is extreme pro-Israel, anti Muslim, anti palestinian. Most have a theological view that is pretrib, premil, and thus to be on “Gods” side you have to support Israel in anything they do. You seem to have this view, putting you in the camp of Hagee and Parsley, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones.
Although I prefer Iran does not get nukes, I see no significant difference between them having them and Pakistan. The only increased threat I see in them having them, vs Pakistan, is potentia attack on Israel. North Korea is a much bigger threat with Nukes. I do not want anyone to get nuked, even Iran, but I do not think Israel deserves any special protection above any other country. Hal Lindsey style eschatology has influenced way too much foreign policy.

“How does Obama plan to end the war in Afghanistan and find bin Laden? Will he invade Pakistan as he promised?” was nowhere in your post.
my apologies but in fact, the 2 questions you asked were:
1. “Distinctive, yes, but clearly defined?” which you then answered yourself with “Not quite,” and
2. “Something positively Clintonian about Obama, don’t you think?”
those both seem pretty rhetorical to me, but i’ll take a stab at it them. i’ll answer the second one first – sorry, i see nothing of hillary clinton in obama. they are quite different people with similar political platforms. to answer your first question – nope, not clearly defined so as to not bore the press and people who wouldn’t pay attention anyway (anything more than a 7 minute explanation seems to bore the simple-minded), but then neither are bush’s policies on domestic spying, or on how to win the war in iraq, or how to distribute billions of u.s. dollars for rebuilding iraq, or anything else to do with iraq for that matter. and neither are mccian’s policies on fixing the economic spiral bush put us in, or …
now, your turn.

“Nothing uniquely reformed about the above.”
Well, Reformed is biblical Christianity after all and has universal truth for all.
“Yea- quote Calvin on how diplomacy is evil!”
Were did I say that diplomacy is evil? Talk about hyperbole. It’s amazing how many commenters do the very things they accuse me of
“Most people who do not want anyone to engage in diplomatic talk with Iran is extreme pro-Israel, anti Muslim, anti palestinian. Most have a theological view that is pretrib, premil, and thus to be on “Gods” side you have to support Israel in anything they do. You seem to have this view, putting you in the camp of Hagee and Parsley, Pat Robertson, and Bob Jones.”
That would be true if I were dispy, I am not. I’m amill and believe that God is no longer dealing with land but a kingdom that is not of this world. I don’t believe that we should negotiate with terrorists who are bent on our destruction. I think that it is unwise. They obviously won’t be honest with us in negotiations. They will tell us what our itching ears want to hear and then continue to do what they want to do (look at North Korea as the perfect example). Wisdom is justified by her children.
Apparently you don’t put much stock in wisdom. That’s too bad because God did. Look at how much of the Bible is wisdom literature. Wisdom should guide us when we look at world events, not emotions.
“Although I prefer Iran does not get nukes, I see no significant difference between them having them and Pakistan.”
Oh, has Pakistan threatened to destroy us?
“Hal Lindsey style eschatology has influenced way too much foreign policy.”
I think that we found an area in which we agree but that doesn’t mean that we meet with Iran. Iran isn’t just Israel’s enemy they are our enemy and have been since the Carter administration (do you remember that time? I do, I lived through it).
BTW, you can be pro-Israel and not be a dispy. Why would we want to stand aside and witness genocide? We didn’t do it in Bosnia. Did you complain when we fought in Bosnia?

“my apologies but in fact, the 2 questions you asked were:”
Actually I asked the questions in the earlier, related post.
So, you really haven’t answered my questions

You have yet to say anything uniquely reformed. I initally looked at your blog becuase you claimed a reformed point of view. Maybe 1-2% is. The rest, indistinguishable from what Falwell would have said, and much of what Hagee says.
You apparently think diplomacy is evil, you are attacking Obama for wanting to engage in it. Don’t attack diplomacy, and then claim to support it. Mine was not hyperbole. If you think you do not exercise hyperbole excessively, yuor eyes are still blinded.
I suspected you would say you are amil. Think! Think of the amil contradictions of some things you post.
I now see you have set yourself up as the judge of wisdom. Yes, i lack it in many ways. Apparently you feel you have it in full measure. Very proud of yourself! You say I lack wisdom, supporting diplomacy, and try to use the wisdom books to prove it.
So lets apply some wisdom books:
Proverbs 25:18 says, “A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow.” (You have beared false witness to Obama)
Psalm 12:3-4 says, “The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things: Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own: who is lord over us?” (Think of how you flattered your pick for the primary, and how you try to flatter yourself by putting others down)
Ecclesiastes 5:3 says that “a fool’s voice is known by multitude of words.” (you do seem to like to hear yourself talk)
Ecclesiastes 5:2 says, “Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.” (Let your words be few-Michelle)
Proverbs 12:18 “There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the tongue of the wise is health.” (does your tongue try to pierce, or give health)
Proverbs 18:8 says, “The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly.” (You seem to try to perpetuate alot of tales on here)
Apply the three verses below to Obama, and your blogs on him. You may also want to apply them to how you respond to others here.
Smart people know how to hold their tongue;
their grandeur is to forgive and forget.
Proverbs 19:11 (The Message)
A man’s wisdom gives him patience;
it is to his glory to overlook an offense.
Proverbs 19:11 (New International Version)
Sensible people control their temper;
they earn respect by overlooking wrongs.
Proverbs 19:11 (New Living Translation)
Really-try to be uniquely reformed, as you claim to be, instead of spouting the same things Fox news would say. If you continue to be nothing but a parrot for the republicans, don’t claim a reformed perspective. I will watch and see if you can actually become more uniquely reformed in perspective, or if you actually lack the capacity to apply a uniquely reformed faith to your world.

“Actually I asked the questions in the earlier, related post.”
sorry, i don’t know which post you’re talking about. all your posts are filled with ODS.