Posted on 03/26/2008 11:20:44 AM PDT by Ooh-Ah
Spencer Ackerman has a long piece in the American Prospect which purports to be a serious exposition of Barack Obama’s foreign policy and of his choice of foreign policy advisers. Obama is said to have big, transformative ideas: He “is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we’ve heard from a serious presidential contender in decades.”
I got excited reading this — the kind of expectant feeling one gets upon sitting down to read something that proposes to be new and interesting. Ackerman writes that he “spoke at length with Obama’s foreign-policy brain trust” in order to take the measure of the “new global strategy” that President Obama will implement.
So what does this new strategy entail? Well, it will be
a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root.
So our foreign policy will be guided by “dignity promotion.” Ackerman quotes Samantha Power to flesh out the idea:
Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.
Power continues, arguing that U.S. policy should be “about meeting people where they’re at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That’s the swamp that needs draining. If we’re to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we’re not [providing].”
This is ludicrous. Islamist ideology itself is in many ways a type of “dignity promotion,” insofar as it is concerned with the recovery of Islam’s world-historical grandeur and the obliteration of western power, which is viewed as a source of humiliation and tyranny. Unfortunately for Obama and his brain trust, Islamism inspires a form of political and cultural dignity that runs far deeper than any sentiments created through enlarged American budgets for food distribution.
How does Barack Obama propose to offer Muslims the sense of dignity that they clearly derive from their participation in resistance movements whose most basic ambition is the rejection of the West? Is this really the sweeping foreign policy that Obama offers — an attempt to smother ideological radicalism with western materialism? This isn’t transformative policy; it is a banal example of defining a problem away.
You can continue reading the piece in search of specifics, but you won’t find any. It ends with a clichéd flourish:
Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?
“He goes back to Roosevelt,” Power says. “Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us.”
What does “liberal internationalism” mean in Ackerman’s imagination? What does “enlightened global leadership” entail? Does that mean we let Iran get the bomb, or not? Who knows. Now what was Ackerman saying at the beginning of his piece about hollow sloganeering?
The Obama Doctrine (Laugher and Barfer)
The Obama Doctrine [Important Article on His Foreign Policy]
PING for Obama.
Obama’s Doctrine is “kill the white folks, even the ones who voted for me.”
All according to this guy who can't name a SINGLE legislative accomplishment by Obama:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGeu_4Ekx-o
Just in case you were wondering, here is what Senator Obama HAS done. Be prepared, it's a loooooooooooooong list:
http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/02/27/obamas-empty-change-message/
I’m sure Mister Obama’s “dignity promotion” does not extend to a “typical white person” like is grandmother, who took him in, loved him as best she could, fed him, clothed him, saw to it that he got a good education at private schools. Nah, “dignity promotion” doesn’t count for us “typical white persons”. He just wants our voted to put him and his shrill, nasty wife in the White House. Should he get into the White House, will it be renamed the “Diversity House?”
It’s beneath my dignity to live on less than $1 million a year. Obama must make my indignity go away. /s
This is so incredibly stupid - and Marxist. From each according to his ability, to each according to his “dignity”.
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