Hugh Hewitt brings to our attention the reaction of Peter Wehner over at Contentions to, after seeing firsthand the success of The Surge, Barack Obama’s one word answer to ABC’s Terry Moran asking, “If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?”

Barack Obama: “No.”

This must surely rank as among the most misinformed, ideological, and reckless statements by a presidential candidate in modern times.
{…}
It turned out that Iraq was redeemable and that the President’s strategy, brilliantly executed by General Petraeus and the American military, worked faster and better than anyone thought possible. To say that he would oppose a military plan that one day may well rank as among the best in our history is stunning. Whatever would motivate Obama to say what he did — political cowardice, willful denial, astonishing blindness to the facts, or the mindset of an ideologue — it ought to cause Americans to rethink, in the most fundamental way, whether Obama is responsible enough to be President.

No? Barack said NO? Why, no? Barack answered:

“These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult. Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is at that time we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with and one that I continue to disagree with is to look narrowly at Iraq and not focus on these broader issues.”

The view of the Bush administration, the military and the majority of Congress was a view that Barack says, “[W]as one that I just disagreed with[.]” There’s that big ol “I” again — par for the course for this self-absorbed Democratic supposed nominee. Aren’t the collective “we” getting a bit tired of this yet? Of course, in the same interview he had trouble responding to the question of what Iraq would look like today if the powers that be had pursued his strategy of not doing the surge and bugging out ASAP. Barack answered:

“That is a hard thing to speculate,” Obama said, “The Sunnis might have made the same decisions at that time. The Shii’as might have made some similar decisions based on political calculation. There was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down. And so, as I said before. Nobody has a crystal ball. If we did you just hire the guy with the crystal ball.”

Sure! Right! Without any intervention Al Qaeda would have just stopped cutting off heads, stopped blowing up markets, stopped killing civilians and stopped feeding children to their parents, because — well, just “because”. Moqtada al-Sadar would have told his militia to put down their arms and stop kidnapping and killing Sunnis — well, just “because”. Sunni re-integration would have happened — well, ya know. Gee — wouldn’t it just be peachy if the world would actually function like the world in Obama’s mind? Well . . . (shudder!)

In a further examination of Obama’s Middle East Tour on the ABC News website, Obama reacts to his meeting with General David Petraeus and to the General’s concern over a premature pullout of troops from Iraq without consideration of conditions on the ground. Obama made himself crystal clear:

“My job is to think about the national security interests as a whole and to weigh and balance risks in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Obama said. “Their job is just to get the job done here, and I completely understand that.

Put aside for a sec. the fact that in the above quote Obama totally brushes off the opinion of the General that will be taking over Central Command — which will make Petraeus responsible for the entire Middle East, not just the war in Iraq — with a flip comment like, “Their job is just to get the job done here[.]” And, about the first part of that statement, wouldn’t that actually be, If elected as President, [m]y job is to think about the national security interests . . .” ? Methinks he constantly portends way, way too much.

And, I’m certainly not alone in that regard. Today The Anchoress gets a big case of the heebie geebies over the Obama jet and his posters urging Germans to come out in mass and meet the great one in Berlin. Funny, not funny ha ha, is that you need some bifocals to see the American flag on Barack’s plane compared to his ubiquitous “O” symbol, and there is no U.S. flag in sight on his German posters, leading her to opine:

Big O symbol on the paper, nary an American flag in site. He is an American running for the American presidency, right?

Say this for Obama: he’s being very upfront about his preferences and his ambitions. If he wins, no one can say we didn’t see megalomania from, well…say this moment:

Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. — Barack Obama, June 2, 2008

And his wife has already promised us that if Obama wins:

Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Every time I read that, I think of the opening of Orwell’s 1984[.]

What I keep wondering to ‘my own self’ is:

Are the collective “we” really going to follow this total narcissist down the rabbit hole?

It’s all about the ‘O’!

Technorati Tags: The Surge, General Petraeus, Barack Obama

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Iraq War, Obama & His Slow Joe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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