How Obama is,& isn't different from previous Democrats.
Hercule Poirot once remarked that the difference between murder and attempted murder is not moral,it is that the attempted murderer is incompetent,whereas the murderer was successful.
In this analogy Bill Clinton would be the attempted murderer and Obama would be the murderer. Some time ago I had a argument with someone who was urging us to vote for Romney. He was arguomg that,essentially,Obama would destroy the United States. (fn1) I responded to this by noting that Republicans had been proclaiming that "this time it's different" at least since Bill Clinton vs Bush. They made the same argument against Clinton and against Kerry that they have made against Obama. I also noted that I knew some friends who had spelled Clinton with a K as "Klinton" to indicate that he was a Communist back during his reign.
To this he replied that I was ”committing a horrendous injustice" against Bill Clinton, since Clinton "backed down" and "listened". To this, I in turn responded :"No I really do not think that I have committed a 'horrendous injustice" against Bill Clinton by saying that he is morally no different from Obama,Clinton proposed Hillarycare,and he wanted to install backdoors into our computers and into our phones via the Clipper chip. Cowardice is not a virtue,the fact that Clinton was not as driven,and as ruthless, and as competent as Obama made him less dangerous than Obama,but there was no moral distinction between the two".
And it was that very last sentence that gave me pause,not because I was in doubt as to whether there was a moral distinction between the two,but because I had inadvertently named the main,real,distinction between Obama and Clinton,and between Obama and Kerry and between Obama and Dukakis,hell for that matter between Obama and Mcgovern.
Why do we call the Health Care bill Obamacare,instead of calling it Mcgoverncare,or Dukakiscare,or Clintoncare,or Kerrycare?
"Why that's obvious,Obama passed it"
Exactly,for decades Democrats have lusted after a bill that would destroy private insurance and who passed it?
Why did Obama not back down?
For that matter,why did Obama get elected?
Yes Bush and Mccain contributed to his victory,but Obama not only won, he won by large margins,at least part of this was due to the ruthlessness of David Axelrod (who should not be underestimated in 2012,see David Mendell's: Obama from Promise to Power), but part of the reason was simply due to the fact that Obama is a charismatic demagogue. (Charismatic to me? No. To his followers,yes,even now when many have become disillusioned,one need only show up at a moderately liberal campus to see that some people, particularly women, still swoon over the man)
And once Obama was elected,he was evidently prepared to sacrifice the House to ram through Obamacare,(hell if the claims about Fast & Furious are true,then he was willing to cause Americans to die to enact gun control).
This is not ”Jimmy Carter's second term”, Jimmy Carter,Clinton,Kerry etc were buffoons by contrast,(to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh)
Nor is Obama Peter Keating. Long ago,back in 2008 ,Robert Tracinski remarked that Obama was a chamelon ”like Peter Keating”,that statement,though wrong,was at least somewhat understandable in 2008.
This is not 2008.
There is no justification for that belief now,none,(and so far as I know, Mr.Tracinski himself jettisoned that belief around 2009) Can you picture Peter Keating ramming through Obamacare? Comparing Obama to Keating,or Obama to Clinton ,is as absurd as comparing the Republican Guard of Iraq to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran because "just as people told us that the Republican Guard was fearsome,and it wasn't,so they are now crying wolf about the Revolutionary Guard".
Ask the Israeli soldiers who fought both the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon whether Hezbollah--which was trained by the Revolutionary Guard--was "no different" than the PLO .
Morally they weren't.
Hezbollah,however,at the height of the conflict,nearly inflicted a one-to-one casualty ratio against the IDF. They were that well disciplined,and that tenacious.
They are not buffoons,and in the political realm,neither is Obama.
People sometime forget that the last time the boy cried wolf, there was an actual wolf. And speaking of the Islamic Republic of Iran,those who see no difference between Romney and Obama on foreign policy should note that it is Obama, and not Romney,who has leaked operational information which could cripple the one program--the cyberwarfare program--that has slowed down Iran's nuclear program. If that program is defeated, Israel will be forced to stage a strike alone,and absent American support, (indeed against ”American” opposition),it will be unlikely to succeed.
Who is Leaking About Cyberattacks? « Commentary Magazine
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/04/who-is-leaking-about-cyberattacks/ Also see
Obama, Gospel and Verse - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html
Should that occur we may face a nuclear first strike on the United States, or on Israel.
But Romney won't stop Iran?
Perhaps not,but I doubt that he will be trying to sabotage Israel's efforts,Obama by contrast,IS DOING THAT RIGHT NOW.
There is absolutely no reason why we must vote for Romney in 2016,certainly not if he betrays us,but it will take time to build up a alternative to the current choice of evils that we are offered.
But back to Obama.
Far from being Keating,if I had to name a Atlas Shrugged character that he is most like,it would be--at a minimum-- Walter Breckenridge,& at worst,one of the Starnes heirs, or Ellsworth Toohey,or Floyd Ferris. ( And yes I am quite serious) Footnotes:
fn1. I doubt that Obama will destroy the U.S., indeed the only possible way that I think that he could reasonably do so would be if he declared martial law after a terrorist attack ,or a nuclear first strike,and attempted to impose an Alien and Sedition like bill,that could be the trigger for massive civil unrest ( a "civil war" of a kind,though of "The Troubles" variety rather than the American Civil War) But I regard this as a improbable scenario.
Hercule Poirot once remarked that the difference between murder and attempted murder is not moral,it is that the attempted murderer is incompetent,whereas the murderer was successful.
In this analogy Bill Clinton would be the attempted murderer and Obama would be the murderer. Some time ago I had a argument with someone who was urging us to vote for Romney. He was arguomg that,essentially,Obama would destroy the United States. (fn1) I responded to this by noting that Republicans had been proclaiming that "this time it's different" at least since Bill Clinton vs Bush. They made the same argument against Clinton and against Kerry that they have made against Obama. I also noted that I knew some friends who had spelled Clinton with a K as "Klinton" to indicate that he was a Communist back during his reign.
To this he replied that I was ”committing a horrendous injustice" against Bill Clinton, since Clinton "backed down" and "listened". To this, I in turn responded :"No I really do not think that I have committed a 'horrendous injustice" against Bill Clinton by saying that he is morally no different from Obama,Clinton proposed Hillarycare,and he wanted to install backdoors into our computers and into our phones via the Clipper chip. Cowardice is not a virtue,the fact that Clinton was not as driven,and as ruthless, and as competent as Obama made him less dangerous than Obama,but there was no moral distinction between the two".
And it was that very last sentence that gave me pause,not because I was in doubt as to whether there was a moral distinction between the two,but because I had inadvertently named the main,real,distinction between Obama and Clinton,and between Obama and Kerry and between Obama and Dukakis,hell for that matter between Obama and Mcgovern.
Why do we call the Health Care bill Obamacare,instead of calling it Mcgoverncare,or Dukakiscare,or Clintoncare,or Kerrycare?
"Why that's obvious,Obama passed it"
Exactly,for decades Democrats have lusted after a bill that would destroy private insurance and who passed it?
Why did Obama not back down?
For that matter,why did Obama get elected?
Yes Bush and Mccain contributed to his victory,but Obama not only won, he won by large margins,at least part of this was due to the ruthlessness of David Axelrod (who should not be underestimated in 2012,see David Mendell's: Obama from Promise to Power), but part of the reason was simply due to the fact that Obama is a charismatic demagogue. (Charismatic to me? No. To his followers,yes,even now when many have become disillusioned,one need only show up at a moderately liberal campus to see that some people, particularly women, still swoon over the man)
And once Obama was elected,he was evidently prepared to sacrifice the House to ram through Obamacare,(hell if the claims about Fast & Furious are true,then he was willing to cause Americans to die to enact gun control).
This is not ”Jimmy Carter's second term”, Jimmy Carter,Clinton,Kerry etc were buffoons by contrast,(to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh)
Nor is Obama Peter Keating. Long ago,back in 2008 ,Robert Tracinski remarked that Obama was a chamelon ”like Peter Keating”,that statement,though wrong,was at least somewhat understandable in 2008.
This is not 2008.
There is no justification for that belief now,none,(and so far as I know, Mr.Tracinski himself jettisoned that belief around 2009) Can you picture Peter Keating ramming through Obamacare? Comparing Obama to Keating,or Obama to Clinton ,is as absurd as comparing the Republican Guard of Iraq to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran because "just as people told us that the Republican Guard was fearsome,and it wasn't,so they are now crying wolf about the Revolutionary Guard".
Ask the Israeli soldiers who fought both the PLO and Hezbollah in Lebanon whether Hezbollah--which was trained by the Revolutionary Guard--was "no different" than the PLO .
Morally they weren't.
Hezbollah,however,at the height of the conflict,nearly inflicted a one-to-one casualty ratio against the IDF. They were that well disciplined,and that tenacious.
They are not buffoons,and in the political realm,neither is Obama.
People sometime forget that the last time the boy cried wolf, there was an actual wolf. And speaking of the Islamic Republic of Iran,those who see no difference between Romney and Obama on foreign policy should note that it is Obama, and not Romney,who has leaked operational information which could cripple the one program--the cyberwarfare program--that has slowed down Iran's nuclear program. If that program is defeated, Israel will be forced to stage a strike alone,and absent American support, (indeed against ”American” opposition),it will be unlikely to succeed.
Who is Leaking About Cyberattacks? « Commentary Magazine
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/04/who-is-leaking-about-cyberattacks/ Also see
Obama, Gospel and Verse - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html
Should that occur we may face a nuclear first strike on the United States, or on Israel.
But Romney won't stop Iran?
Perhaps not,but I doubt that he will be trying to sabotage Israel's efforts,Obama by contrast,IS DOING THAT RIGHT NOW.
There is absolutely no reason why we must vote for Romney in 2016,certainly not if he betrays us,but it will take time to build up a alternative to the current choice of evils that we are offered.
But back to Obama.
Far from being Keating,if I had to name a Atlas Shrugged character that he is most like,it would be--at a minimum-- Walter Breckenridge,& at worst,one of the Starnes heirs, or Ellsworth Toohey,or Floyd Ferris. ( And yes I am quite serious) Footnotes:
fn1. I doubt that Obama will destroy the U.S., indeed the only possible way that I think that he could reasonably do so would be if he declared martial law after a terrorist attack ,or a nuclear first strike,and attempted to impose an Alien and Sedition like bill,that could be the trigger for massive civil unrest ( a "civil war" of a kind,though of "The Troubles" variety rather than the American Civil War) But I regard this as a improbable scenario.
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