Obama Responds To Critics

Barack Obama has responded to recent criticism citing his alleged lack of experience. Evidently no one in his campaign told him to stop digging.

"I am not afraid of losing a propaganda battle to a bunch of dictators," Obama said Thursday.

Apparently Obama doesn't understand the importance of propaganda battles, particularly as dictators use them to control their populations, as well as influence regions, especially as regards the Middle East. What is it he advocates, exactly? Losing the propaganda battles and then invading the Middle East country by country to moderate its various all the more inflamed citizenries? This is not a man accustomed to having his words looked at very carefully. He may be audacious, as he is clearly not careful, but I'm uncertain we want that in a next President just now.

Obama said critics have ignored his vow to work cooperatively with Pakistan and that his call for negotiations with hostile foreign leaders was only common sense.

Presidential administrations often use surrogates to make statements, or leak items designed to keep an adversary off balance as part of a negotiation. The notion that one person in the form of a would be President would both threaten to invade a country at the same time he claims to want to negotiate with it strikes me as a bit schizoid. Unless of course you buy his clarification, which amounts to - I wasn't serious when I talked about invading Pakistan.

He also said he would always work with Pakistan and simply was stating his commitment to ensure that terrorists not have a safe haven.

Huh? Which is it, the predicate for his invasion fantasy was a Pakistan that didn't get the job done? But now he would "always" work with that? He certainly thinks he's a genius according to this bit, maybe it just isn't coming across right now.

"My call for a new foreign policy is based on the same thing that informed my opposition to the war in Iraq: common sense, not conventional Washington thinking,"

Given that all the available intelligence, whether the Left now likes to admit it, or not, and a decade of flawed if not failed UN sanctions rendered the Iraq situation intractable before the start of the war and that an overwhelming majority of Americans, not just DC insiders, supported the war at the time, it's unclear whether Obama thinks he's smarter than everyone else, or simply lacks the resolve to ever fight a war.

As for this last bit, Obama should know better than most we already elected a fellow from Hope. After all, he's now running against his wife. If Americans going to the polls in 2008 were so all fired up concerned about our reputation in forgotten parts of the world, it's likely that they wouldn't be all that forgotten in the first place. Obama may well have a grand vision of what he'd like to do as President. Unfortunately when it comes to relaying it to average Americans, since the blush has come off the rose of the clean, articulate, challenger, he's looking less and less grand everyday. He can hope to be President all he wants, the fact is, it ain't gonna happen.

In his first term in the Senate, Obama has sought to use his inexperience as an advantage, arguing that Clinton and other candidates are creatures of Washington and not capable of pushing for real change. On Thursday, he again pointed to his new approach to foreign policy.

"Think of what we can achieve together if we change the conventional thinking that's squandering America's reputation in the world," said Obama. "We can have a foreign policy that the American people are proud of and set an example of leadership that inspires not hate, but hope, in forgotten corners of the world."

Comments

[Fred Beloit]

"In his first term in the Senate, Obama has sought to use his inexperience as an advantage, arguing that Clinton and other candidates are creatures of Washington and not capable of pushing for real change." But Obama did no such thing in his pre-campaign days in his first term in the Senate. He only started arguing Washington's evils when he started campaigning.

I must apologize to the good Senator Obama though. I have made fun of him in the past because he wrote a book about being in favor of "hope". Now I find that there is a wider dimension to this man. He is also for "real change". But I notice that Bridal Cake Boy is also talking about "real change" and I'm intrigued.

Both have been or are in the Senate. Yet each deplores the ways of Washington, of which the Senate is so large a part. What did they do there in the Senate, I wonder, to advance hope and real change? And if Washington is a foul den, why did they work so hard to gain access to it? After all "hope" isn't really DOING anything; it is wishing for something. As for "real change", what does this mean? Are they going to try to remake the Constitution?

[Purple Avenger]

Could someone please tell all the illegals that our reputation has been squandered and they really don't want to live in an international pariah.

[Dave Freeman]

Whoever is writing this misleading garbage about Barack Obama is doing a diservice to honest journalists everywhere.

Saying Obama recommends invading Pakistan is totally misleading and inaccurate.
He clearly stated that if he had "actionable intelligence" of the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and President Musharref was unable to act that he would launch an attack against those who plan our nuclear annialtion.

Going after the leadership of those who plot our destruction is what every President would do. In order for Senator Obama to become President he must tell the American people what he would do if he faced such a decision.

Senator Obama's correct judgement regarding Iraq might appear to some to be that of a pacifist like Dennis Kucinich. As a candidate he needs to be clear about his foreign policy intentions.

He is a candidate, he is not the President so his communication must be clear to the American people. Those who expect a candidate to follow the same modus operendai as a sitting President are misguided.

To try to discredit Obama for working through the system amd becoming a Senator is ludicrous. One can criticize and change things from inside and organziation much easier than from without.

Oh and we should all be terrified because Barack Obama as President might have a conversation with some of the reigning despots. Perhpas there are things you can say in person that are not wise to say through the press or leadked via aids.

It seems the author has an ego so big he or she cannot perceive and comprehend a different approach.

[Rich Casebolt]

(take note, Mr Freeman ...)

"Think of what we can achieve together if we change the conventional thinking that's squandering America's reputation in the world,"

Actually, the conventional thinking is what you are advocating, Senator ... thinking that, whereever it was implemented as policy, allowed our enemies to grow stronger and bolder as they LAUGHED at the arrogant EGO's of the so-called Best and Brightest like yourself.

You and your fellow-travelers believed your "enlightened" intellect placed you above the need to prosecute war ... when in fact, your ideas made the inevitible wars longer and harder than need be.

Frankly, your statement is just another piece of Leftist boilerplate, which has already been shredded like wet tissue paper by history.

"We can have a foreign policy that the American people are proud of and set an example of leadership that inspires not hate, but hope, in forgotten corners of the world."

Let me show you some hope, Senator ...

... the hope seen on the faces of Eastern Europeans as the Berlin Wall came down.

... the hope seen on the faces of Russians as the Soviet Union collapsed.

... the hope seen on many American faces, as the ICBMs were removed from the silos that sat next to their farms and towns, never to return.

... the hope seen on the faces of Afghanis as we helped them wrest control of their nation from the Taliban.

... the hope seen on the faces of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites as the statue of Saddam fell in Baghdad ... and on their inked fingers as they voted for the first time in modern history in an election that really counted ... and in their actions when they treat us as the "al-Ameriki tribe", trusting us to help protect them from militant hatred -- foreign and domestic.

None of that is the product of your kind of thinking.

It is the product of the kind of thinking you dare to call "conventional" ... but actually is anything but, especially coming from the White House:

> The concept that totalitarian enemies who stoop to terrorism and mass murder do not deserve the same respect and deference as rights-respecting governments.

> The assessment that an overreliance on diplomacy on our part opens up vulnerabilites for our enemies to exploit.

> The wisdom to see that, for some enemies, CREDIBLE, TIMELY, RESOLUTE and DECISIVE confrontation is the only way to protect life and liberty ... ours, and that of the people living under the thumbs of these enemies.

Virtually ALL the progress, since WWII, that has been made in the area of world peace and freedom ...

... the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS liberated, the nuclear-arms stockpiles reduced in REAL terms, the reduction in tensions that kept our forces on high alert for decades, while sometimes also leading to actions of cold/covert warfare ...

... were NOT the product of the formalized-lying-in-formal-wear of diplomacy, advocated by "enlightened" souls like you, Senator, and your fellow-travelers in ideology ...

... but were the product of the very "cowboy diplomats" y'all derided in the 1980's, and are still deriding today.

Memo to the Senator:

In the light of history, the real peace song is not "Kumbiyah" ...

... it is "Yippie-Ky-Ay-A".

[Dave]

Mr. Casebolt suffers a common conservative malady, rigidius opinionitis.
"Your ideas made the war longer and harder than need be". Though I take absolute delight in the deposing of genocidal dictators the tactics used post Saddam have been an obivous failure.

The inability of most Republicans to recognize the basic reality of Iraq has lenghtened and continues to prolong a battle in the war on terror that offers no possibility of an American military victory beyond what has already been acheived.

The reality is that as long as our military remains in Iraq no Iraqi faction allied with us will be allowed to succeed. The fact of the matter is that the Islamic world choose immorality over the infidel. Most of the Arab and Persian Islamic world will side with a genocidal dictator over a democratic Muslim allied with the Infidel. It is truly race over right.

Senator Obama agreed with President George H. W Bush and Dick Cheney of the early 1990's in their judgement that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein cause more problems than it solved.

Mr Casebolt confuses the policies of Senator Barack Obama with Senator Kucinich.
Swarmy sarcasm is no replacement for careful consideration of the facts.

Here is a fact for you. The Republican party is going down with the ship, the USS Iraq Democracy. They have lost sight of the fact that no matter the outcome of this BATTLE for Iraq the war on terror and terrors war on us will continue.