DOES OBAMA UNDERSTAND FOREIGN POLICY?

http://inyourface.info/ArT/Gamma/JuDG.shtml

Excerpt:

Obama is dangerously naive in failing to understand the need in international crises to blend tough diplomacy with the other foreign policy tools at our disposal to achieve a strong national security posture.

Judgment and leadership in foreign policy are not intuitive. They are learned through experience. Obama's long and close relationship with the anti-American hate-monger Wright, his inattention to his responsibilities in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his careless approach to Iraq all suggest that he would benefit from more experience. We should ask whether we want those lessons to be learned in the White House.

(Joseph C. Wilson IV is a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador. He was senior director for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. In 2003 he wrote a New York Times opinion piece, "What I didn't find in Africa," challenging the Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.)

Joseph C. Wilson IV
http://inyourface.info/ArT/Gamma/JuDG.shtml
[color emphasis mine. lw]

The Bad War?

By Victor Davis Hanson
Normandy, France

An excerpt:

. . . The thousands of Americans lying beneath the rows of white crosses at Normandy Beach, at Hamm, Luxembourg, and at St. Avold in the Lorraine probably did not debate the Versailles Treaty or worry too much whether a B-17 took out a neighborhood when it tried to hit a German railyard.

Instead, our soldiers were more worried that they had few options available to stop Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — other than their own innate courage and valor. The American dead in European cemeteries never bragged that they were eagerly fighting a “good” war; they were reluctantly finishing a necessary war that someone else started.

Those GIs and the leaders who sent them into the carnage of World War II knew that Americans could do good without having to be perfect. In contrast, the present critics of the Allied cause enjoy the freedom and affluence that our forefathers gave us by fighting World War II, while ignoring — or faulting — the intelligence and resolve that won it.

Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once scoffed at the peacetime wisdom of postwar critics that came across as mass-produced, feel-good “bottled piety.” Others might call it ingratitude.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.
© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzI5YjIxOTQ5NDQ2MmIwNDM2ZTk1ODFjYjc4YmQwY2M=&w=MQ==

Obama Rules

Ten new regulations for the 2008 election
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com

Barack Obama is a gifted politician who has led an exemplary life. His run for presidency for many offers redemption that America has finally moved beyond race. But that laudable proposition is beginning to foster surreal rules of campaigning from both the media and Obama himself that do no one any good.

1. The 2008 campaign must stick to concrete issues and detailed policies. That said, Barack Obama can continue to speak only in vague terms of “hope and change.”

2. Rev. Wright’s racist tirades must be contextualized and only understood in their proper historic milieu of white racism — that is, unless he suddenly turns on Barack Obama, in which case one is now free to deride him as “mean-spirited,” “malicious” and on a “vendetta.”

3. Rev. Wright is like “an old uncle” and his church “not particularly controversial.” Those who insist otherwise are using “snippets” and “loops” out of context for cheap political advantage. But should the Rev. repeat his serial lunacies at the National Press Club on national television, and insult the sympathetic liberal DC press corps, then he is suddenly expendable and inexplicably not the same pastor that Barack Obama knew for 20 years — and so now to be freely derided as a “spoiler.”

4. It is assumed that Barack Obama’s exotic middle name Hussein can provide authentic multicultural fides and hope of projecting a new, more globally sympathetic American image abroad, but to voice ‘Hussein’ aloud is assumed to be nefarious.

5. It is legitimate to appeal to, and thus win en masse 90% of African-Americans of all classes over a rival liberal candidate, but it is absolutely illegitimate and a sign of a racialist strategy should someone else win two-thirds of that total of the white working-class vote — and, worse, acknowledge it as such.

6. John McCain can be written off as “losing his bearings” and wanting U.S. troops in Iraq for “100 years.” But to repeat the fact that a Hamas advisor has praised Obama, or that one of his own foreign policy advisors has met with officials of that terrorist organization, is “divisive,” “a distraction,” and the “old politics as usual.” McCain’s fuzzy references to Shiite/Sunni terrorist cooperation are signs of his senility. Obama’s repeated confusion over how many states there are in the Union (48? or is it 58?) is proof of exhaustion and lack of sleep.

7. Racial generalizations of any type in connection with the candidacy of Barack Obama are out of order. Barack Obama is free to characterize his grandmother as a “typical white person” and to lump the middle-class voters of Pennsylvania together as nativists, racists, and superstitious in their reliance on religion and guns. Only endemic white racism — never anger over Obama’s overt racialist stereotyping of the white middle class and his Reverend’s slurs — can explain that group’s rejection of him at the primary polls.

8. Substantial campaign contributions and the money nexus in politics are pernicious, proof of the “old politics” with a long history of distorting campaigns. The record fund-raising and enormous war-chest of Barack Obama are instead proof of a healthy American democracy and preclude any need for public campaign financing.

9. If a zealous pastor endorses John McCain, then his past illiberal talk about Catholicism demands a formal rebuke. If Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor of some twenty years addresses a meeting of a branch of the NAACP and announces that blacks and whites have genetically different brain chemistries and learning abilities, then one simply keeps quiet about it.

10. For conservatives to have suggested that the media was biased in favor of the Clintons in the 1990s was McCarthyesque. For Clintonites to suggest that it is now even more biased toward Obama is even more McCarthyesque.

This is the new political landscape that we are in, and those who object to it should expect to face hysterical outrage — in the manner of anyone who suggests that a messiah should at least try to practice what he preaches. And the problem is that those he will face as President — whether an Iranian religious nut, a Hamas terrorist, a Chinese communist, a Castro, Chavez, or North Korean extortionist — will follow no such Obama rules.

©2008 Victor Davis Hanson

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson051608.html

COMMENT: Any opposition to Barack Hussein Obama is, and will be, considered racially motivated and politically incorrect.
Leslie White

Group Identity--Can we Roust Ourselves to Use It to Survive?

Despite being born an Arab in what is present-day Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) lived for a number of years in the city of Granada in Muslim Spain. In his master work, al Muqaddimah,(written in 1377) Khaldun describes the nature of the desert Arab in, what to us, would seem to be extremely uncomplimentary terms. Despite this, Arabs, generally speaking, identify strongly and proudly with the uncompromising “black and white” absolutist Bedouin outlook. This hard-line attitude of the desert was spread with the expansion of Islam. An Arabocentric emphasis with its seventh century Arabian values eventually came to be superimposed on the more contemplative religious, and tolerant cultural traditions of Asia.

Khaldun also suggests, and history appears to support him, that an advanced civilisation steadily loses its asabiyya, i.e. its group identity, filiations and cohesion, through leading a soft, sedentary lifestyle. The citizens no longer need to be constantly fending off invaders in order to survive, the over indulgent society, having lost its martial skills, then degenerates to a point where it becomes unable to defend itself from a determined attacker or “Trojan horse” insurgents. Civilisations then tend to become vulnerable, their group-identity becomes diluted and weakened and finally non-existent. The challengers succeed by retaining the wild-animal hunting pack ethos; they still have that most primeval sense of belonging to a common and cohesive identity, their asabiyyah, complete with a single-minded determination to further the self-interests of their tribe, and their tribe only. I would suggest that the Muslim world, despite its manifold schismatic divisions, is far more conscious of its asabiyya than we, in the West, are of ours. With indistinct, blurred, and polarised populations coupled with subversive and seditious fifth columnists, we no longer know what we believe in. Our common heritage and history are no longer taught in schools for fear of offending those late arrivers who do not share that heritage.

To what extent are we prepared to abandon and sacrifice those values that made us what we are, on the altar of inimical interlopers? The West will only recover its lost asabiyyah when nations recognise that whilst they can certainly prosper as multi-racial societies, an original core majority culture must be the dominant identifying factor and the divisive policy of multiculturalism will need to be abandoned as a flawed concept and failed experiment based entirely on how some utopian, well-meaning “progressives”, would prefer Western society to be, rather than accept, and more importantly, support and celebrate how it is in reality.

quote from http://www.islam-watch.org/Warner/Islam-West-Razzia.htm

NOTE: All emphasis--italics and color--mine

Prince Obama
by Bernie Reeves

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/06/03/prince-obama/

Barack Obama is an accomplished political actor who delivers his lines well, whether or not they contain substance. He manipulates platitudes like Laurence Olivier, calling for “unity” and the end of alleged divisions to create a better world defined by peace among nations and the end of class distinctions at home.

A scene in the film The Queen keeps coming back to me as Democrats scrum to choose a presidential candidate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The world, it seemed, had erupted in emotion over the death of Princess Diana in August 1997. Newly-elected British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who engineered the removal of socialist clauses in the Labour Party constitution to win under the banner of New Labour, represented a political party steadfastly opposed to the monarchy. Yet Blair knew in his British bones – and to his everlasting credit – that the Queen, for her own good, must react in public to the tragedy. Blair understood she represented an elemental strand of DNA in the country’s national psyche as “head of state,” a fine differentiation for non-Brits, but essential to the self-identity of the kingdom.

Blair harried the Queen to respond to the grief her subjects felt while she was away from London, in residence in her Scottish redoubt at Balmoral. In circumstances weirdly reminiscent of the efforts of 19th century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to entreat Queen Victoria to remove herself from Balmoral – where she was hiding in her grief over the death over her husband Prince Albert – Blair peppered Elizabeth with reports of the reaction to Diana’s death.

Blair told the Queen her subjects demanded that she and the royal family make a gesture and come down to London to address her subjects to assuage their grief that he saw was reaching a fever pitch and undermining the efficacy of the royal family. The Queen was irritated and baffled. Diana and Prince Charles were divorced and the former princess was not of royal blood. Why, she seemed to ponder, should I react to her unsavory death in a car accident with Dodi Fayed, the son of an Arab noveau riche parvenu who had the gall to purchase Harrods department store, a symbol of the British nation?

The Queen also made it clear that she understood her subjects better than Blair. After all, following service in World War II, she had been on the job as Queen since 1953 in her early 20s at the death of her father King George VI, who reluctantly took the job at the abdication of his frivolous brother Edward VIII who chose marriage to the divorced American Wallis Simpson over the duties of state. She emphasized to Blair that her subjects expected her to display detachment and a stiff upper lip – the credo of the British character the world knew and respected.

Another call from Blair caused her to think again. Walking with the Queen Mother along a pathway at Balmoral, she said she now sensed a change in her subjects, a “subtle shift” from the old values to a mode comprised of compassion, outward expression of emotion and kinship with a new breed of public figures defined by celebrity. The world had changed.

Immediately, her Daimler limousine burst through the gates of Balmoral. With her husband, the crusty Prince Phillip, at her side, the Queen viewed the enormous display of flowers and messages placed by Diana’s mourners. She flew to London and addressed the nation as a grandmother sharing the grief of the loss of Diana – and as a reconstructed queen who understood the old values were gone.

Does Barack Obama then represent a “subtle shift” in the American public Elizabeth discerned in her subjects in the reaction to the death of the Diana? Candidate Obama clearly personifies the vision of a New America prophesied and created by the social activists on campus, in politics, in the mass media — and, fittingly, Hollywood.

Obama is a product of black and white heritage running more as a celebrity than a credible leader. He is an accomplished political actor who delivers his lines well, whether or not they contain substance. He manipulates platitudes like Laurence Olivier, calling for “unity” and the end of alleged divisions to create a better world defined by peace among nations and the end of class distinctions at home.

This brew of idealistic slogans – a modern version of the ideals of the utopians of the 19th century and the radicals of the 20th in a “voters of the world unite” manifesto – defies logic, as the outpouring of grief over Diana did to Queen Elizabeth. The question is, have Americans shifted from the volatile, yet grounded politics of the past and embraced the theatrics of a presidential candidate riding on the wings of race revenge and superficial emotion, lifted above the fray of scrutiny by a transfixed national media?

Or, as the frumpish old-line candidate Hillary Clinton hopes, is this Obama phenomenon another suicidal Democrat tempest in a primary teapot heated by a mentally enfeebled media that reports party news releases as truth? If so, Hillary could still pull it out at the Convention, or Obama will be whipped soundly by John McCain.

Or Obama wins. Either way this wind blows, you can still feel the subtle shift.


Bernie Reeves is the editor/publisher and columnist for Metro Magazine, a four-color city-regional magazine covering the Raleigh-Research Triangle-Eastern North Carolina region.

http://www.metronc.com/
Read more articles by Bernie Reeves


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http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/06/03/prince-obama/

Stop Islamic Conquest: "Against All Enemies"

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

Stop Islamic Conquest: <i>"Against All Enemies"</i>

stealth jihad

The Insidious Insinuation of Islam into Western non-Islamic Societies

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http://islamicdanger2u.blogspot.com/2008/05/insidious-insinuation-of-islam-into.html