Sullivan: Obama Is A Conservative President
Update: Ed Driscoll adds more.
Can you say demented?
This speech, to my mind, was a conservative one by a conservative president who seeks first and foremost to use existing institutions to address the new challenges of the moment, and then seeks pragmatic compromises, always open to future checks and balances, in those places where such institutions clearly need reform and adjustment.
yeah, the problem with the sullivan is the problem with a lot of conservatives. Y’all have become so attached to your own ideology, that you conflate anything “good” with being “conservative”. Being pragmatic isn’t conservative or liberal. Compromising isn’t conservative or liberal. Checks and balances aren’t conservative or liberal.
It’s silly. But then again, folks like you practice the same type of nonsense, just with a different idea of “good”.
Sullivan really is reaching here isn’t he?
I just have to wonder whether he’s trying to convince his readers or himself that Obama’s policies on Guantanamo are different than Bush’s.
But seeing as how I was fine with the policy under Bush, if all it takes is the addition of some flowery rhetoric to silence critics then I’m okay with it.
Some people don’t get out much …..
LOL, if Sullivan is a ‘conservative’, then you’d describe Joe Stalin as a ‘moderate.’ Sullivan’s not trying to claim Obama for conservatism, he’s running interference for / arguing against Obama being tagged as “The Most Liberal President in American History.”
Sully’s just spreading disinformation for his team – not the first time, certainly won’t be the last.
BTW – there’s nothing inherently good or righteous in being ‘pragmatic’ or ‘compromising’ either. The European nations were “pragmatic” in handing the Sudetenland over to Germany … hard to make a case that their decision was ‘right’.
LOL – News Flash! Sullivan is not conservative. And he isn’t good either. Not even a different idea of “good”.
Yeah, because there aren’t any liberals out there that equate liberalism with “good” and conservatism with “evil.”
“address the new challenges of the moment”
What is he talking about?
Isn’t Andrew Sullivan just one of those teabaggers?
I hear that Sullivan is still blogging from that mental institution up in Massachusetts. I don’t know if this is really true, but when one reads the kind of comments he made about Obama and Cheney’s speeches, one begins to believe that it’s likely true. The guy’s clearly nuttier than a fruit cake.
Osama,, a conservative? That makes about as much sense as saying Nancy Pelosi is sincerely honest.
OsamaHusseinIslamObama 2012′
(the terrorist/pirate/media choice)
-It’s never too early to campaign-
“LOL” – perhaps you should read up on the core underpinnings of Conservative Philosophy a la Burke, etc. I’m sorry to say that your statement reads as simply ignorant.
When you read the whole Sullivan “on vacation but able to interrupt my leisure to write a 5K word diatribe” the first word that comes to mind is – slavish. I am awaiting his heroic rendering of Obama’s command decision to unleash the dogs of war by giving command authority to take out the teeny-bopper Somali pirates. Obama as Mitch Rapp or Jack Reacher. And only Sully can conger that up out of his thinning air that he is breathing.
I’m with john at 1:35. If Obama adopts policies I agree with I don’t care if he and a bunch of leg tingled journalists are hypocrites. And there’s even a ‘plus’ in it too. I know the left is acting like fan boys and they know it too, at least sub-consciously. It’s not like I need the MSM to report this to me – I can figure it out for myself.
John, EBJ, I have to disagree with you.
There is virtuein telling the truth. It might be, in the narrow sense, pragmatic and positive for Obama to adopt Bush’ policies. But that’s only if Bush was correct. If, after a year of mindlessly and stupidly bashing Bush for his decisions and policies, Mr. Obama finds himself appreciating Bush’s strategies, he should man up, admit he was wrong a year ago, make the case to the public openly and honestly, then proceed.
He should, in essence, call B.S. on himself. Obama should grow a pair, call Bush and admit, like a man, that Bush was right, or Obama should forsake any claim to manhood. He has been savaging Bush for more than a year. Any honorable person would ask for forgiveness. Anyone who was truly interested in having Americans work together, would begin with himself.
There is no point in having a conversation if we are being doggedly dishonest about it.
If a person cannot admit that they were wrong, that person has no business leading.
To proceed without an explanation for adopting Bush’s policies keeps the issues messy and hinders our ability to progress in the WoT. It allows idiot Progressives to simply throw their hands in the air and say that yet another of their “Great Men” (and they have had so very, very many) has failed the true religion. They need to be told, pure and simple, that the true religion of Progressivism is an abomination whose main product is human destruction. Instead, by failing to come clean, Obama keeps that noxious swamp of foolishness wet and deep.
You expect far too much from Obama, Amos. He has skated through his entire life without ever once having to take responsibility for his actions, being certain to surround himself with white liberals who, blinded by his skin color, will excuse any crime, justify any misjudgement, spin every mistake, and attack those who would dare do otherwise as “racist”.
In other words, you have someone who, if he claimed he could fly and jumped off the White House roof, would have liberals like Andrew Sullivan lined up to watch, using their bodies to cushion his fall, spinning it as an example of his “bravery” and “determination to overcome racist gravity”, and destroying any and all evidence of the actual event.
wow only in wingnut-ville would someone propose that Obama apologize to George W Bush.
neither Obama nor Sullivan is likely to grow a pair or man up.
Obama will just keep adopting Bush policies as reality forces him to do so, while lying about the reasons for his actions and pretending he’s not, and Sullivan will keep tea-bagging his love object.
LOL is right. It has become sadly apparent that Obama will never consider apologizing to Bush because Obama’s character is as juvenile and shallow as LOL’s. Neither Obama nor, I expect, LOL has ever considered whether he might possibly be wrong in the false things he said. Going the next step and apologizing for them is really veering into wingnut-ville. Wow indeed.
As Amos says, the pity is that Obama could accomplish much of his purported objective of “bringing the country together” if he were to own up to the obvious truth that he often attacked Bush without any honest basis. The fact that Obama will never admit this illuminates one of the main facets of his personality — a facet that is developing him into the worst president of the modern era.
Explains a lot about Sullivan really. He often claims he is a conservative, but he is not.
All Obama did was do what lefties often accuse conservatives of doing. Wrapped himself in symbols and the flag… his nonsense about the constitution is just that. No where in the Constitution do enemy war prisoners have rights to go to federal court… but constitution this, constitution that… blaw blaw blaw… Just because lefties on the Supreme Court gave them such a [new] right after loosing in all the federal courts beneath them…. Well, they’re lawless (re: Bush et all)… bunk. The Supreme Court’s lefties are lawless for living constitutioning new rights out of thin air and overturning 200+ years of jurisprudence / precedent to give the left the outcome they wanted.
elf in the Constitution, but his sheep don’t see that he tramples on it like Bill Ayers stomps on the flag.
“Like the president, I am under no illusions as to the enemy we face and the need to fight it.”
This quote from Sullivan is to my mind, the greatest lie he tells and that liberals tell. In fact, the president did not speak about who that enemy is and what they are. He did not even mention a thwarted jihadist attack in NYC just the previous evening. He avoids Islam as the generator of jihad.
I have never heard what the left wing manifesto on who the enemy is, why they must be defeated and how we are going to defeat them. Never.
If liberals had ever expressed half the amount of fury towards jihad as they do towards Miss California, Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin, they might begin to evince some kind of credibility on national security.
The truth is that this discussion of waterboarding and “torture”, Gitmo and such other horrors is a function of luxury. We have not had an attack on our soil since 9/11. But using waterboarding to stop an attack on LA should never have happened, to their thinking. The galling hypocrisy is that had there been one, the left would have blamed it on Bush and Cheney.
The luxury I refer to is the false sense of security that has fallen over us that is due to the very security that Bush provided. The Dems know that people have dropped terror as a priority precisely because it has not happened here in a while. Which has led to childish wishful thinking that it is gone for good. Adding to that is the endless pounding of our media regarding Iraq and a hazy, subconscious rewriting has happened in the minds of much of the public. The question has been rewritten back to Colombia University’s assumptions: Why do they hate us? Which leads to Obama’s: How can we make them like us?
The question/answer conservatives have done a horrible job of articulating: Why we should hate them and destroy them.
Ironically, women’s groups and gays have given great support to Obama and the left while conservatives have been left to point out that women and gays in Islamic countries are the victims of an ancient apartheid and mass murder. That they are third class citizens and legal structures from the time of the Prophet prevail and crush such groups legally. Gays are flung from cliffs in Iran and Perez Hilton is calling Miss California the “C” word. A Muslim murders women and children in a Seattle school because of their being Jewish and Mel Gibson’s drunken rant is front page news for a week, while the Muslim mass murderer is quietly dropped from media sight.
Sullivan and certainly the left he has joined, has NEVER done a full throated drive back to Islamic jihad. Clinton blew up some tents in Afghanistan in the midst of impeachment. Obama has continued the effort in Afghanistan he inherited and has -hypocritically- embraced some of the policies of Bush.
But clear statement of who the enemy is and how he is going to defeat them is an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
And hoping to get people to like Obama as a method of winning a war is self-adulation taken to the cosmic. Americans were feeding and saving Iraqi children while Al Queda was blowing children up even as Obama was voting in Chicago to allow babies who had survived abortion to die in garbage cans. Obama’s contention is that “I am liked, therefore the US shall be liked.” Worked out real well with additional troops for Afghanistan. And dropping some Gitmo boyz onto the Netherlands.
The enemy is gone from public polling as a major issue, but the enemy is not gone. The enemy is Islamic in foundation, rises spontaneously in US prisons, Saudi madrasas and in Iranian fatwas against gays and in an infinite series of assaults on civilization since the time of the Great Prophet. Immediately after 9/11 there were mass rallies in Pakistan and elsewhere for Osama bin Laden. As Afghanistan fell to the US and Al Queda ran like rabbits from our wrath, the rallies fizzled and the died. Al Queda was viewed as losers.
Crushing our enemy is a strategy for winning a war. Apologizing to fascists for waterboarding them is a strategy for self-immolation and defeat.
Sooner or later, this enemy who is still unnamed by Obama will rear his head and strike. At some point in the great future, we will learn that Obama reverted to waterboarding terrorists in great secret. However their will be no outcry then.
Or imagine this: Taking a poll in say, early 2002.
Do you support or oppose the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammad and others like him in the pursuit if intel about possible terrorist attacks?
Or is waterboarding a profound betrayal of American values and to be avoided no matter what?
Explain to the polled that waterboarding is done to many US troops as part of their training, that it might not yield any info but is not fatal. But call it “torture” for the sake of the polling as stipulation to its opponents.
I think the vast majority of Americans would not only support it but would expect more harsh methods be used. Esp. at that time.
Now, apparently a simple majority still supports it.
I can’t wait to get my stimulus check. Then I’ll possibly shut up and cry when Obama speaks.
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