Obama Admires Bush

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 16, 2008

Hezbollah is one of the world’s most radical terrorist organizations. Over the last week or so, it has staged an armed assault on the democratic government of Lebanon.

Barack Obama issued a statement in response. He called on “all those who have influence with Hezbollah” to “press them to stand down.” Then he declared, “It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.”

That sentence has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement. Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?

If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

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Obama said he found that the military brass thinks the way he does: “The generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

I asked him if negotiating with a theocratic/ideological power like Iran is different from negotiating with a nation that’s primarily pursuing material interests. He acknowledged that “If your opponents are looking for your destruction it’s hard to sit across the table from them,” but, he continued: “There are rarely purely ideological movements out there. We can encourage actors to think in practical and not ideological terms. We can strengthen those elements that are making practical calculations.”

Obama doesn’t broadcast moral disgust when talking about terror groups, but he said that in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration. He said he would do more to arm the Lebanese military and would be tougher on North Korea. “This is not an argument between Democrats and Republicans,” he concluded. “It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

In the early 1990s, the Democrats and the first Bush administration had a series of arguments — about humanitarian interventions, whether to get involved in the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In his heart, Obama talks like the Democrats of that era, viewing foreign policy from the ground up. But in his head, he aligns himself with the realist dealmaking of the first Bush. Apparently, he’s part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker.

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Gus: hummmm...? 

They’re all playing stupid games Gus ….. 

For weeks, McCain and his campaign have been accusing Obama of being Hamas' favourite candidate and, too, of wanting to negotiate with the Palestinian group. A position, by the way, that Obama has NEVER advocated. Still, it was a too-cute-by-a-mile lie that McCain believed he could exploit for political advantage. After all, Obama is a black man and everyone in Republican fantasyland knows that American black men are Muslim and support terrorists. So, without thought, McCain whipped out his wee-pee and started directing his stream of Hamas-related lies toward Obama. 

While McCain was standing there, legs splayed, pants down around his ankles, Wee-Willy in hand, and crossing his stream of political urine with Obama's before disengaging and pointing it toward the heavens to see just how high he could make it go… the political wind gusted and an on-camera interview of the GOP nominee surfaced, which showed McCain stating the need to hold formal talks with Hamas. 

Boys Will Be Boys

ABERDEEN, S.D. — Senator Barack Obama has resigned his membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, which he attended for nearly two decades, following months of controversy about pastors and their political views.

Mr. Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, wrote a letter on Friday to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss, explaining that their estrangement from Trinity took root in controversial remarks by the church’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who once was Mr. Obama’s spiritual guide.

“Our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views,” they wrote. “These controversies have served as an unfortunate distraction for other Trinity members who seek to worship in peace, and have placed you in an untenable position.”

But at a news conference after a town-hall-style meeting here on Saturday, Mr. Obama sounded pained as he confirmed his decision to leave the place he had considered his spiritual home. A sermon by Mr. Wright, a longtime pastor at the church, even provided the phrase — “the audacity of hope” — that became Mr. Obama’s campaign theme and the title of his latest book.

June 20, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

The Two Obamas

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

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Gus: usually David Brooks, a conservative republican scribe, has some elegant restraint. And I respect that. Here in this article on the split personality of Dr Obama, David Brooks shoots from both barrels with fast n' furious flak fire hoping to hit sumpthin' fleshy at the OK corral... David's problem is that basically no-one has been able to see Obama's foibles. All have been taken care off and swept swiftly away with a magic rhetorical perfect broom and not even a speck of dust can be seen under the carpet.

One thing for sure worries me slightly about Obama. His affinity with Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian who spent some of his life supporting the socialist ideals, then some of his life fighting communism with a vengeance and also supporting the use of nuclear weapons. Reinhold Niebuhr became also an advocate for "welfare capitalism"... Many of the big enterprises in the US benefited greatly from this and became giants using "paternalistic control" of the working population. Welfare capitalism had his good points in raising standards of living for employee, including reducing child labour. But the "firms" were after greater productivity, which was one of the trade offs. No real altruism here.

So, I may be wrong, but I feel Obama likes driving with the right foot full on on the accelerator pedal with the left foot flat out on the brakes, while singing "praise the Lord" at the same time, as a Saint Sulpicious figurine dangles alongside a pair of fluffy dices, masking the rearview mirror... the whole fully loaded truck going through twists and turns downhill with stones falling from a rock face on the left and a grand canyon on the right... It's only a feeling...

Mind you, it could be better than praying "mishun accumplished" every two seconds while going down at an accelerating speed in an elevator cabin, the cable of which broke on the 72 nd floor. See the Mythbusters for the result...

The world needs a great mind at the helm of the US presidency to manage a sustainable future in an uncertain environment without plundering or killing people, nor using the crutch of religious beliefs that taint a proper understanding of this planet. Can Obama be that man?...

Matthew Norman: Prepare for the second wave of Obamania

Friday, 20 June 2008

Barack Obama took another stride towards Pennsylvania Avenue this week, or so it seemed to this ignorant observer at a remove of several thousand miles, and for once he didn't even have to open his honeyed mouth. The Senator has been on cracking form lately, giving a wonderful Father's Day speech about the evil of absentee fatherhood, but that may have rather less electoral impact than a television appearance by his wife Michelle.

Several months ago, you may recall, Michelle unwittingly handed a tactical nuclear weapon to the Republicans when she declared, of the warm reaction to her husband's candidacy, that this was the first time in her adult life she had felt "really proud of my country". Stripped of that qualifying "really" in reports, and harnessed to the Rev Jeremiah Wright, the remark was a gift from God to Obama's enemies.

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A vast armada of Swift Boat captains rejoiced at the prospect of using Michelle to do to Obama what they did to John Kerry, and you have to assume that prototype 30-second television commercials, featuring that comment juxtaposed on a split screen with flag-draped coffins of US marines coming home, have already gathered some dust in Washington safes.

This in mind, Michelle went on the daytime show The View and spent 25 minutes chatting with Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters and other presenters. We have a pallid replica on ITV, by the way. It's called Loose Women and Joan Rivers was on it the same day Michelle appeared on The View, although she didn't last as long. That 75-year-old Jewish grandmother was bundled out of the studio by security during an ad break after calling Russell Crowe, with what close students of the actor will regard as laudable restraint, "a fucking shit".

It is highly unusual for any American, let alone a septuagenarian, to cuss in full media view, especially in daylight. There is a useful precedent, however, and it comes from John McCain. Once, when his wife Cindy referred to his thinning hair, the salty old sea dog unleashed a tough, no-nonsense counterstrike. Had he not made it in front of three Arizona reporters, he'd have denied it. But he did, so he can't. "At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you cunt," he said.

What a lovely, cuddly gramps the Republican nominee is, and while Michelle talked about her wedlock, the contrast spoke for itself. Mr McCain, born into privelege, divorced his first wife after she became disabled and wed the tall, blonde, frosty-looking Cindy, who happened to be the heiress to a colossal fortune. The Obamas, he from that famously diffuse and confused food stamps background, she the daughter of poor but ever-present parents in Chicago, will strike some as the more engaging manifestation of the American Dream.

Whatever the McCains call each other in private, it is abundantly clear that the Obamas ... but no, that's arrant gibberish, even by my standards. You can seldom see half an inch beyond the façade into the marriages of close friends, so it would be idiotic to claim insight into the union of two complete strangers. All any outsider can say is that Michelle and Barack convincingly appear to adore each other in the least schmaltzy of ways, and on this she touched in the interview.