Posted on 01/24/2009 7:33:03 AM PST by DocT111
With a call for 'relentless' diplomacy, Hillary further obliterates W's legacy.
After Inauguration Day, departed presidents usually become footnotes pretty quickly. What we are witnessing now is far more dramatic. It's closer to a liquidation, or a cauterization. George W. Bush is being turned into an unperson, like a character out of Orwell. It's been only two days, and there is scarcely a trace of not only his personal presence, but of his policies. Or at least that is the impression Barack Obama would like to convey.
The process of erasing the last eight years from American history began with President Obama's inaugural address on Tuesday. Between condemning torture and expressing a willingness to talk with enemies, the new president began eliminating Bush even as the former president sat listening behind him. Then, on his first work day, Obama signed executive orders reversing the Bush administration's emphasis on secrecy and reliance on revolving-door lobbyists, to be followed by three more orders: closing Guantanamo Bay (within a year), forbidding torture and suspending military tribunals for foreign terror suspects. Meanwhile Treasury Secretary-nominee Timothy Geithner (whose nomination was finally approved by the Senate Finance Committee) said brand-new strictures would also be applied to financial bailouts.
Then, on Wednesday, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of two permanent envoys to major trouble spots—George Mitchell to the Mideast and Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was perhaps the surest sign of all that Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration, which saw diplomacy mainly as an exercise in stating terms for surrender, whether to Iran, Hamas or North Korea (except over the last couple of years).
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal just today speaking of the utter failure of the Dayton agreement and Bosnia. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123119981293655561.html Basically, Holbrook was in charge of the Bosnian smoke and mirrors policy of the U.S. Government.
As I recall, it was the Dems who were constantly whining that Bush wasn’t strict enough with the Iraqi gov’t concerning performance milestones. Of course, they know that, but it is their habit to turn everything on its ear. If you want to know what the Dems really think, just think the opposite of what they say.
Not at all. The practice described above was called damnatio memoriae by the Romans and actually attempted to expunge the memory of the individual from society.
Below is a fresco of the family of Emperor Septimius Severus that included his two children, "Caracalla" and Geta. After the death of Septimius Severus, Caracalla killed Geta and declared a damnatio memoriae that required that Geta's memory be expunged from society. Therefore, you see that Geta's faced has been erased from the fresco.
Caracalla knew who he was and was confident being Caracalla. He knew that he did not need Geta in life or as a memory and could therefore afford to engage in damnatio memoriae.
With Obama, it is totally different. Obama, knowing he does not have much to offer by way of experience or accomplishments, defines himself by:
1.) Skin color
2.) Being "Anti-Bush" with the codeword CHANGE ™ .
Without his skin color and without his status as "Anti-Bush", Obama has no identity, no meaning, no substance and no reason to have had anybody be eager to have voted him into the White House.
Obama NEEDS the memory of Bush.
So, no, Bush will never become an "unperson" like Geta. As long as Barack Obama is mention in History books he will have an * referring to the footnote:
* Anti-Bush
Without the memory of Bush, Obama is not an "empty suit". He is merely a naked "empty black skin".
And as Newsweak giddily proclaims Bush to have been “erased” from American history, who do you think will make a sudden, remarkable re-appearance when Hussein’s dismantling of our security apparatus leads to the next 9/11? Yes indeedy! Blame will be placed squarely on the shoulders of that previously irrelevant, unknown occupant of the White House as the left scrambles for the inevitable scape goat in order to excuse its own assinine, dangerous policies.
Now if they could erase his other programs like NCLB and the free drug program. I could support that part of his program.
This is the weakness of liberalism.
Notice that when Republicans enter office, there is not an attitude of “We are going to completely stop doing things the way our predecessor did them, and we are going to do them our way from now on.” It is usually a very measured approach, letting things go the way they did for a period of time before making changes, and those changes are usually incremental, not radical.
This is because conservatives understand that you do not need to re-invent the wheel. The problem with reinventing wheels, policies or anything else is that you often make the same mistakes the first inventor did, unless you take extra care to see why those mistakes occurred.
Liberals do not have the humility to understand this. It is why liberals are all socialists to a greater or lesser degree and believe in big, centralized government.
I use the analogy of a jumbo jet flying through the sky on auto-pilot, with no flight crew present, and a passenger opens the cockpit door and enters.
Conservatives would enter the cockpit, look around and take stock of the situation. They might look at the fuel gauge, look at the attitude and get a general feel of the situation. They probably wouldn’t touch anything right away, realizing that there are circumstances where doing something for the sake of doing something can be far more harmful. They might decide to put the headphones on, see if they can communicate with anyone, see if they can hear anything, and so on. They would probably try to find someone who could talk them down, and failing that, might try to figure out if there was anyone onboard with piloting experience.
Liberals would enter the cockpit, look around and scream out “Nobody is flying the plane!” They would jump in the pilot seat, grab the control stick and shout “We have to get this plane on the ground or we’re all going to die!” They might dive the plane towards the earth, looking frantically for an airport, making the assumption that of course, you could fly a plane from the sky “just by looking around, there is the airport over there, let’s get to it!” without realizing that is one of the most difficult things even for veteran pilots who might have the advantage of at least being familiar with the area and comfortable with trying to pick up landmarks from the air. They would dive the plane, then suddenly realize they don’t know how to turn the plane, how to apply rudder or lower the flaps and landing gear (probably wouldn’t even realize those were needed) and would simultaneously realize they had no idea how to stabilize the plane in level flight or re-engage the autopilot. The passengers, feeling the gyrations of the aircraft and knowing something was wrong, would begin to panic, and before you know it, there would be a huge flaming hole in the ground.
It is the same thing with a military campaign, an economic crisis, an environmental issue, solving an education or social problem, or just about anything else you can think of.
Liberals see the levers, dials and controls of something powerful and complicated, and instead of figuring out how they work or even if they work, they make the assumption that no matter what, they can control this better than anyone or anything that controlled it before. They don’t even think that sometimes putting your hands on the levers of something powerful is much, much more damaging than keeping your bloody damned hands OFF of them.
If it is a military campaign, they get in their armchairs and begin looking at the maps, targets and forces involved, pick up the phones and begin issuing orders and edicts to generals. You end up with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Desert One and Mogadishu.
On environmental issues you end up with some kind of foreign species of fish that you brought in from South America to control some other kind of issue, and it ends up destroying the native ecosystem, or on a global scale, you destroy the ability to obtain energy for an energy dependent world because you need to save the existence of the Alaskan Spotted Lugwort. They determined through their “science” that DDT made the egg shells of predatory birds thin causing their populations to decrease, and viewing it as a canary in a coal mine, outlawed DDT, thereby condemning tens of millions of people (or over the years, perhaps even hundreds of millions) to misery and death from insect borne diseases such as malaria. Even worse, you end up with liberals trying to deliberately destroy industry and economies, an attempt to plunge the entire western world into a depression, and they base their desire to do this on “Global Warming”. To sum up this particular angle and encapsulate the liberal mindset on all these issues, but most importantly environmental ones, remember this quote from a feminist wall mural I see in Cambridge, MA: “INDICATION OF HARM, NOT PROOF OF HARM IS OUR CALL TO ACTION”. Look well upon that quote...it sums up liberalism in one compact line.
If it is a economic or social issue, they begin to make policy and throw money at it without even considering for a single damned second if what they are doing is really going to produce the expected result. If it doesn’t help or makes things worse, they simply throw more money and legislation at the issue, without bothering to dismantle the agencies or defund what they did before that failed miserably. In this, you end up with Rent Control (a liberal invention which destroys the availability of affordable housing), Social Security (a liberal invention, a Ponzi scheme on a grand scale that gave people the false security they didn’t have to save for themselves) the Great Society, Welfare, School Busing, declining ability of students and failing schools, disintegration of the family and soon, socialism and Third World Squalor.
And folks, this new President, is steeped up to his oversized jug-handled ears in the arrogance and ignorance of Liberalism. He is a racist, socialist and marxist. He believes it to the core, and he is now the most powerful man in the world.
We have a problem.
He is actually doing the Republicans a favor. He has just made the WOT his war, fairly big a gamble I would guess.
Well, to be honest, what else is Shrillery going to say? She *IS* the Secretary of State... and diplomacy *IS* her job, now.
Thank you rlmorel for a most excellent and eloquent essay on the situation we now find ourselves in. With only a mere 92 hours+/- in “power” the new administration has turned the bus (fka the USA) around and steered it steeply downhill, racing at mach speed toward the cliff of oblivion. Very, very scary times are rapidly approaching.
As you stated “We have a problem”.
Thanks. What I am concerned about is these people destroying in a short time the goose that lays the golden egg (Free Market forces in the USA)
I never thought it could happen in one administration before, but I am concerned.
As am I.
Try erasing those last eight years for the Iraqis. And for the hundreds of thousands of us who have worked very hard, risked our lives at times and ridden out the war, believing the best in spite of the media and its naysayer followers.
Hey, Newsweek and Obama: Erase THIS.
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