Posted on 11/27/2008 7:42:25 AM PST by pabianice
Leading opponents of the war have mostly been silent as president-elect Barack Obama, who first built his national image on the foundation of his early opposition to the Iraq war, assembles a group of national security hands that is anything but a team of doves.
It's a disorienting moment for the peace wing of the Democratic Party, at once elated America selected a new president opposed to the Iraq war and momentarily disoriented by the imminent removal of a commander-in-chief whose every action they've opposed for the past eight years.
“Shock has paralyzed them for the moment,” said Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who writes The Washington Note, a popular foreign policy blog. “We are in an Obama bubble now. And it’s tough to step out and be first to deflate the bubble.”
Especially, he added, before that bubble takes shape.
“You’ve got some people like myself who are saying there may be an interesting design in what Obama is trying to do. Maybe it doesn’t fit easily in a neatly sculpted box of liberal pacifist and warmonger hawk. Maybe it’s more complex than that.”
Still, it’s clearly a team that tilts to the right of Democratic foreign policy thought.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
I’ll bet keeping Gates on as Sec of Def is putting their knickers in a twist too. LOL I love it!
Yeah, right.
Hussein can’t move too fast. He plans to make us all LOVE him, like Chavez. Then he thinks he can do whatever he wants, of course, like Chavez. (a crappy job in Venezuela)
Democrats always start wars, usually through direct initiation, but sometimes through sheer lack of action (like Clinton). Obama's most natural "course of action" will be inaction. Leave the troops in Iraq with no strategy, minimal support, and a constantly shifting and amorphous set of tactical goals. Of course, that assumes he'll be made president. Which he won't be.
Once again CNN dumbs down their audience by not explaining that the UN mandate to be in Iraq expires this December and that a status of forces agreement had been in the works for the past year. So of course CNN says this is Obama's judgment and not explaining the facts that Obama can't do squat against this agreement that was engineered by the Bush Admin that Obama will not touch. That would make it look like Obama is following in Bush's footsteps.
“Over at DU they are eating their own”
Even before the election I predicted the following:
-Obama pulls the middle class tax cut because the deficit is too big
-Obama defers all his big spending programs because the deficit is too big.
-the Bush tax cut is temporarily extended because the economy is bad
-pay or play health mandate is deferred because it hits small business employment when unemployment is high
-Obama mismanages the mortgage crisis with foreclosure holidays etc and causes more financial market turmoil
-Obama surrenders on some foreign policy crisis
-Obama continues to fund Iraq as one of the few successes he can preside over
-Obama throws the liberal base some bones on symbolic cultural issues like gays in the military and UN abortion funding
-Democrats in congress fight amongst themselves and with Obama over taxes, war funding, health care, mortgage crisis, foreign policy crisis
So far Obama looks less leftist than even my cynical prediction. With so many wall street democrats on his econ team, not much has been said about helping struggling homeowners with mortgages. And gays in the military appears to be deferred to some future date.
No wonder DU has buyers regret.
I will be relieved if this guy runs out to be a moderate
As it would have to be in order to function at all.
turns out
Its time to make the Pacifist stand up to the rules that they have set for themselves. Those impossible standards that would surrender this country to our enemies without firing a shot.
How possibly can anyone in this country allow the idiot Obama to send our young soldiers into the meat grinder of Tora Bora.
Obama a man who has never served this country in uniform, who lied about his signing for selective service, a Liberal whom 75 percent of our military do not recognize as a leader, a pacifist who has committed his existence to those that display nothing but contempt for the military.
Nice.... So now I am going on the anti-war bandwagon because any war waged by a milquetoast idiot has no chance of success and therfore is not worth fighting.
The GOP will support good foreign and military policy because that's what they do.
Most of the Democrats will support the same policies, possibly very similar to those of Bush, because the prez is now a Democrat, and also he's black. Opposing him would be racist.
The Left always does. Eventually, the purges come, where the unstable, and the possibly competitive are winnowed like chaff by the Party elite. I only wonder when and how, not if. Will Obama crucify them upside down? Enquiring minds want to know exactly how precisely history is about to repeat itself.
Absolutely! San Fran Nan and ol' Harry sees the motivational-speaker-come-president as their enabler, not the other way around. The daily grind of the presidency will wither this rookie to a timid waffler. Even the advisers among his staff will have tug-o-wars for their own agenda.
I think its delicious that the guy isnt even in office yet, and already the bloom is off the rose L0L!
Not sure Obama can depend on the left for votes again. Remember these are the most angry of people-not sure they will vote for a dem just to have one. Not to mention some blacks are die hard liberals, not sure how this is going to play out with them.
Obama is out for Obama, he doesn't want to be remembered as the black president in history that screwed everything up.
People on the left will find out that Obama is following Bush, not to mention anybody can figure that is two years down the road longer than Obama said.
Another example:
After Carter's naive financial policies led to an 18% prime rate and other economic disasters, he was forced "kicking and screaming" to appoint a monetary hardliner in the person of Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Fed. Volcker came too late to save Carter, but he was instrumental during the Reagan years in taming the inflationary beast.
Fast forward 32 years, where the Big 0 is now getting CIA and Pentagon briefings -- plus realistic economic advice from none other than Paul Volcker!
In other words, The 0ne is now forced in no uncertain terms to confront the daunting tasks ahead of him -- and mirabile dictu, he's mugged by reality!
Lesson learned:
In critical areas like finance ("the bond market," to quote Carville), military affairs and foreign relations, reality is gonna trump campaign rhetoric almost every time.
“he’s got to take the heat from his base”
I still think he’s making all the right moves. He will make Pelosi, Reid and Biden, etc. his scapegoats when things go wrong. He’s counting on a socialist Congress to move things ahead so he will “just be signing what the people want” when legislation is passed along to him. He WILL do Presidential executive orders if things are not moving along fast enough for him, but in the meantime, he will be able to blame everything else on someone else.
Agreed. I was just reading last night about Stalin, Trotsky and the Great Terror of 1937-38. It was precisely the leftwing "purists" like the followers of Trotsky who suffered most at the hands of Stalin during the Great Terror.
So if 0bama should turn out to play the role of Stalin, then Pelosi will be exiled to Mexico à la Trotsky, and Reid will go to the Gulag as an "enemy of the people."
At least one can dream!
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