The title of their editorial today depicts an Obama as a rigid and fundamentalist liberal ideologue. As I see it, they elegantly suggest the truth: he’s vacant—plain dumb—on Iraq. And I extend it to lots of other issues about which he knows little or nothing; and about which he has foolishly adopted locked-in positions appealing only to the far-left fringes of America and the middle east. Positions which he has been seen to be trying to move right of, in recent weeks.
Whether the war in Iraq is being lost or won, Barack Obama’s strategy remains unchanged.
BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: “They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.
This week, he was caught changing the policy position statements on his campaign web site, including one which declared the surge won’t work and is not working, in the brutal face of the obvious truth, which is that it has turned out to be a huge success thus far. In other words, he was utterly wrong, and dangerously so. Obama’s campaign is now in big trouble because of its own very important policy decisions have proven to be wrong. Luckily it’s only his campaign that’s in trouble as a result, not America.
The Washington Post goes on:
At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued—wrongly, as it turned out—that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war.
He wanted the troops out and a full surrender before the surge. Before the surge!
The Washington Post reached a scathing conclusion:
The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome—that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.
Obama panicked in trying to appease his far-left, MoveOn.org base from the get-go, then got stuck in that ludicrous position, convincing others to go along with it along the way (hi Canada!), and that position is one which would lead America into a massive strategic blunder which would have negative ramifications of historic proportions.
As one commentator, Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner said today, “The entire premise of Obama’s campaign is crumbling beneath his feet—that is the anti-war premise.”
Let’s hope it crumbles his chances entirely.
EXTRA:
Polls show that despite the entire mainstream media being totally in the tank for Obama, and all of Hollywood smooching his 8X10s, and every teacher and professor in America except eight preaching Obamism 101, and despite the huge spike that he should normally have gotten after that publicity of the successful battle with Hillary, McCain and Obama are still statistically tied.
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