Category Archives: Barack Obama

UPDATED: Anything Obama Can Do, I Can Do Deadlier: That Sums Romney’s Foreign Policy

Barack Obama, Constitution, Elections, Foreign Policy, Just War, libertarianism, Old Right, Republicans, Terrorism, War

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stares into the Romney foreign-policy abyss, and demolishes Obama’s challenger for going AWOL, and allowing Americans to continue to drift unmoored. In fact, from Maddow’s impassioned plea, I hazard that if Mitt Romney fleshed out the details of an Old-Right, anti-interventionist stand, exposing the immorality of Obama’s adventurism and violations abroad, he’d get her respect, and, if not her own vote, that of many of her pals on the left.

Yes, on rare occasions, Rachel Maddow does surprise with a streak of independence. If I understood Maddow’s latest televised monologue–and I do believe I am not giving her undue credit—she is challenging Mitt Romeny to say something meaningful, anything, about US foreign policy. And, in particular, about Obama’s worldwide drone assassination program, which she, like any decent human being, abhors.

That’s all you’ve got. how about this. what would you do differently if the answer is we’d be stronger, that’s not an answer. we deserve a politics that is capable of giving us choices or setting up a debate about competing reasonable ideas about handling the controversial things the government does in our names.
I know what the obama administration’s position is on Afghanistan. because he’s the president. i have no idea what mitt romney would do differently in Afghanistan, if anything. i know what the obama’s administration is on drones. i frankly find that position hair raising. i know what the obama administration’s position is on Pakistan. i know mitt romney thinks pakistan is very important. is it inconceivable somebody would ask him why, how, what his plan would be when it comes to that country? politics should move us some distance toward debate and decision making on the hardest problems we face as a country. that is not what we’re getting from our politics right now. if we’re not getting it now, when…”

Obama, says Maddow, is “using flying killer robots to do kill people all over the world.” She invites Romney to step into the void,

and his “answer is that he also thinks killing bin laden was a good idea. [and that] he wouldn’t crash [a drone] in iran. any questions? it is days like this when you realize that however important this presidential campaign is and this decision is, that we as a country have to make between these two candidates, our politics are essentially failing right now. they’re essentially impotent now for debating questions like this one. choosing between candidates is supposed to be the way we choose between policies in important thing that affect our country including national security. but our politics have been allowed to shrink if one side doesn’t want to talk about it, we’re not going to debate it as a country. let people in Washington figure it out. a new report out today says our secret drone policy, which we’ve been implementing for the better part of a decade, may be radicalizing the residents with a radical country. we’re not going to debate that at all. that’s not a policy matter that’s bort some national discussion. no competing ideas about maybe a choice in course. this is what the democratic president is doing. the republican party has no competing ideas on this at all? nothing to say? with this policy, due process that we afford people, that we kill people, the due process ultimately consists of the president of the united states making the call.
…but we are in the process of picking who’s going to be the next president and we’re not asking where these two men stand on that issue or if they think they should have that power. if that power should exist. if we’re not going to ask these questions now. look at this week. you have president obama at the UN talking about the policy of Pakistan and Hillary Clinton meeting the president of Pakistan on the same day. you have the developing story of the drone attack yesterday that killed an al qaeda leader. and you have a presidential campaign. but the conversation when it comes to this stuff is, “he seems like jimmy carter.” i read that he was a one-term president once. really? that’s all you’ve got. how about this. what would you do differently? if the answer is we’d be stronger, that’s not an answer. we deserve a politics that is capable of giving us choices or setting up a debate about competing reasonable ideas about handling the controversial things the government does in our names. i know what the obama administration’s position is on afghanistan. because he’s the president. i have no idea what mitt romney’s [is]…

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UPDATE (9/26): In reply to the Facebook thread: MRP, as per usual, your position is in contradiction to mine. As I’ve replied to you many times, and in almost every post or column of mine, yours is standard anarchism, and it goes as follow: “Don’t say anything, for it is nothing really. Do not comment on policy, for it compromises precious libertarian purity. Do not apply your mind to the issues of the day to enlighten your readers and bring them closer to liberty, for no enlightenment other than the immediate and absolute application and acceptance of the non-aggression axiom can be entertained.” Pretty much. I’m sorry, Myron, but, like it or not, what Maddow said is important. Objectively speaking. And my anti-war readers are better informed for understanding how truly remiss Romney is for not breaking with the Bush-McCain axis of evil. It takes no intellectual effort whatsoever to adopt a default position of intellectual ennui and superiority.
Finally, I am unconvinced Romney is as bad a man as is Obama, on a personal level. Romney is just a conformist, and pig ignorant in terms of political philosophy.

UPDATED: ‘The Child’ Was Not Born In A Barn & Was No Brainiac (The Belated ‘Scoop’)

Barack Obama, Education, History, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

He was a child of privilege, not of hardship. He lived in Jakarta’s most exclusive suburb. His white grandmother—whom he once tarred with the taint of racism and with whom he lived in Hawaii—was a bank vice president. She sent him to an exclusive private school. Later on he was a shoo-in at Columbia and Harvard Law School. During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, his student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest ranked professors in his last 5 years at the university. As we already know, “The Child,” Barack Obama, left no record of legal scholarly writings.

Four years after his election—and a week since CNN’s Jessica Yellin revealed nothing but her own adoration in “Obama Revealed,” an agonizing hour with the president—the Washington Examiner investigates. The belated report will be out tomorrow.

Via Fox News:

UPDATE (9/20): As promised, The Obama You Don’t Know, a belated ‘scoop’ by The Washington Examiner.

For the Love of Obama

Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections, Elections 2008, Journalism, Media, Republicans, Socialism, Taxation, The State, Welfare

Speaking to “a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser,” on a Sunday in April 2008, one presidential candidate slimes small-town America as bitterly clinging to their guns, bigotries and bibles. The media listens in, but decides to keep a lid on the rant, because, in the words of a reporter who like the rest was rooting for the candidate, she “didn’t want to bring down the campaign.”

Four years later, another presidential candidate states a few plain facts about an electorate of which “47 percent ‘will vote for [Obama] no matter what’; “who are with him,” no matter what, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”; who regard as an”entitlement” the fruits of another man’s labor, and think “government should give it to them,” and who “will vote for this president no matter what… people who pay no income tax.”

The same reporters who refused to pull back the curtain to reveal Obama’s contempt for small town Pennsylvania are hyperventilating over Mitt Romney’s unvarnished assessment of a large portion of the Democratic Party’s constituency.

One is, seemingly, forbidden to point out that while some people work for their living, others vote for their livelihood.

Thankfully, Romney is not groveling, this time, but simply affirming the figures and his,

concern about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work.

Now Is Not A Good Time, Bibi

America, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to demand face time with Barack Obama. A smart man, Bibi knows exactly that he can help make Obama look bad, and with this maneuver, make Romney’s insane foreign policy bellicosity look good.

I would even venture that Netanyahu has pulled a self-serving political maneuver by inserting himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season.

Via RT:

Reuters report that Netanyahu’s office had requested a meeting with the American commander-in-chief, but that staffers for the president don’t seem interested in entertaining the idea. “[T]he White House has got back to us and said it appears a meeting is not possible. It said that the president’s schedule will not permit that,” an Israeli official tells Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Now more than ever I fear that Mitt Romney, were he to be elected, would go to war with Iran, simply to fulfill a campaign promise: friendship with Israel no matter the costs to war-weary Americans.

I understand that readers who frequent this space crave partisanship. They’ll have to go elsewhere. I detest Obama and what he stands for. But that doesn’t mean I will not call it as I see it on those rare occasions when the president is right. Obama is on the campaign trail (fooling the American people for the second time around). Israel is a wedge issue in this election. Now is not a good time, Bibi.

Moreover, and as I put it in “The Titan is Tired”:

The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Israel, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.