Posted on 12/02/2009 5:58:23 AM PST by Tolik
That was such a strange speech. Deploring partisanship while serially trashing Bush at each new talking point. Sending more troops, but talking more about when they will come home rather than what they will do to the enemy. There was nothing much new in the speech, yet apparently it took the president months to decide whether even to give it.
Ostensibly the talk was to be on Afghanistan; instead, the second half mostly consisted of the usual hope-and-change platitudes.
Still, the president, to his credit, is trying to give the best picture of the Afghanistan war. Obama started well in his review of why George Bush removed the Taliban. But that disinterested narrative lasted about two minutes. Then came the typical Obama talking points that characterize his reset-button foreign policy and don't offer a high degree of confidence that our commander in chief wants to defeat the enemy or believes that he can win the war:
1) Bush did it. Supposedly Bush neglected Afghanistan by going into Iraq, leaving Obama with this mess. (He does not mention why Iraq was largely won, much less why Afghanistan has been going backward the last ten months. If Bush was wrong in going into Iraq, exactly who was right in securing that country?)
2) Avoiding the V-word. Concluding the war seems to be the theme, as opposed to winning the war. "Breaking the momentum" of the Taliban, unfortunately, is not the same as crushing and humiliating the enemy. "Ending the war successfully" lacks the force of "defeating" the enemy and securing "victory." Rather than talk for ten minutes in soaring platitudes, we need 20 seconds devoted to the notion that we will win, the Taliban will lose, and Afghanistan will be secured. His emphasis on civilian and political strategies is fine, but those strategies are first predicated on security. If you are surging, then, darn it, tell the American people that we will secure a military victory.
3) Multilateral phantoms. The allies, contrary to the president's expectation, will not be escalating with us. They are afraid of another Suez, and think that this drawn-out decision does not inspire a great deal of confidence about Obama's desire to defeat the enemy. Our allies fear that we are fickle, and that Afghanistan is like Guantanamo —sorta closed, sorta open. When the multilateral, post-Western Obama ignores allies and reaches out to enemies, it is hard to galvanize allies in a traditional alliance.
4) Deficit. How strange on this military occasion to hear worries about fiscal responsibilities from a president who has just given the country its largest annual budget deficits in history, and who will, according to his own schedule, add more to the national debt than all previous presidents. In a speech intended to win support for more troops, Obama worries more about the $30 billion cost of Afghanistan, even while he borrows $1.7 trillion for everything from AIG bailouts to GM takeovers to "cash for clunkers."
5) Partisanship. How odd that this speech represents the first truly bipartisan outreach of his presidency and will get a fairer hearing from the Republicans, the town-hallers, the tea-partiers, and all those who have previously been demonized on every other initiative.
6) Stanley Baldwin, not Winston Churchill. Not a word about the horrific nature of al-Qaeda and their nightmarish Taliban sponsors, and why both of them are going to fail in the manner that the terrorists and their supporters lost in Iraq. Somewhere in this cerebral but flat speech there is the good news that we won't quit Afghanistan — at least for 18 months — but otherwise it was the sort of talk a college provost gives to the faculty at the September back-to-school assembly.
I am happy that for another 18 months, Obama will fight the Taliban. But I think that, in times of war, when troops are headed into battle, Americans would rather hear "smoke 'em out" and "dead or alive" than a Noble Peace Prize preamble.
Ping !
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It came to me this morning that this entire “production” over Afghanistan is nothing more than a smoke screen to permit Harry Reid and the democrat criminals in the US Senate conduct their takeover of the US healthcare system.
In other words, within the Oval Office David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett sat with Barack Obama to plot exactly how long they would let the “Afghanistan Question” simmer, to create tension and inquiry in the MSM; I can almost hear Axelrod and Emanuel telling Obama, “wait, until the timing is right, then we will create this spectacle at West Point in primetime, taking healthcare off the radar screen”.
They are playing politics with our national security, the lives of US miltary personnel, and our credibility as a nation in order to pass devastating legislation that will allow them to create a socialist state under cover.
Remember, it is not what Barack Obama says that has any meaning. Watch the left hand when he is gesturing with the right. This is sordid, despicable political maneuvering.
There's no indication that Zero considers Afghan (or other) jihadists to be "the enemy." "Enemies" to him are those who oppose his seizure of absolute power in the U.S. Terrorists are just a distraction.
Every word you posted looks exactly right to me.
Here’s my favorite line from the Obama “Surrender to Islam” speech:
“I see firsthand the terrible wages of war.”
Excuse me? Those less megalomaniac would problem concede that only those at the front, in the thick of battle, see “firsthand” the wages of war. This guy is a fruitcake.
......we need 20 seconds devoted to the notion that we will win.....
In liberal land, there are no winners or losers and everybody gets to play
I think those whose homes are destroyed; or those who are raped, starved, assaulted, or driven out; or those whose family members die also see “firsthand.”
None of those groups includes Zero, of course.
I didn’t think I’d ever see another President or human being that I despised more than Clinton - but Bambi wins hands down. He is the most worthless POS to ever come on the American scene. He’s a snake oil salesman with no morals and no love for OUR country. We can’t afford to leave him in office until the end of his term. Just look at the damage he’s done in one year. He needs to be impeached NOW - Biden can’t be as bad.
but I suspicion both he and his czars are scared sh*tless at the thought of going into harms way - they're nothing a bunch of lily-livered Chicago street thugs.
“O” is the Kabuki, brand X, paper mache, cheesy knock-off, unreasonable facsimile of a U.S. ‘President’ and the whole world knows it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When the yardstick shows Biden to be preferred to ANYone, it's an indication of just how bad it is.
I agree with you.
At least, if obumma goes, so do his Chicago Street thugs - and they are who are running this country.
No, we can not survive another 3 years of these cretins. We'll be lucky to be able to survive long enough to get to the 2010 election and retake both houses. That will, at least, free us from reedy and peel-face.
I agree - worse than Clinton. Bill Clinton was personally a creep, but Zero is a Cosmic Creep.
Not only is he a Cosmic Creep...what’s even more frightening is that he is President! Oy Vey!
I wish it could be done, but there is no way to impeach him.
Our only hope is to destroy the Dimwits in 2010 and remove his slavish House and Senate.
We MUST get people in who will stand on conservative principles and help save our country.
Biden will do what is best for America. Crazy Uncle Joe is a viewpoint that can’t be ignored but that crazy guy is an American and that crazy guy wants to win.
From AP via yahoo ... "Vice President Joe Biden said earlier Wednesday that the new surge-and-exit troop strategy in Afghanistan is aimed more at wringing reforms from President Hamid Karzai than mollifying a war-weary American public. He said the principal aim of the new policy is to protect the United States from further terrorist attack while also keeping the Taliban from overrunning the country."
God love ya, Slow Joe! There is the window into the real strategy. A Chicago strong arm approach to "wring reforms."
Next, note the horror expressed by the Army that Sarah Palin might actually write something nice to a GI in her book at a book signing while Obama uses the Military Academy at West Point for a stage backdrop.
Finally, again from the AP story ... "French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed Obama's speech as 'courageous, determined and lucid' but stopped short of pledging additional French troops." Lucid??? Maybe it was the translation from French but that sure sounds like a back-handed compliment to me. I guess we can add "lucid" to "clean and articulate" now.
The wages of the American Revolutionary War wasn't so terrible, but for the British it was a different story.
Obama can tell us about his first observations after he claws his way through a minefield, assaults a fixed position or bandages his buddy who has just been ripped by a IED.
BTTT
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