I think I'll let the Democrats define themselves more clearly at the convention before I comment on it. But I cannot help but regard Obama's choice of Joe Biden as a blunder. Hillary must be going nuts and thinking: "How many votes did I get and how many votes did this guy get? Is this affirmative action for white males or what?" Leave aside the fact that the choice is unimaginative, uninspired, banal. It seems that Obama is going after the hoi polloi by naming one of their undistinguished number to the ticket. Sure, Joe is a jovial character, but when is the last time he had an idea? To date his best lines have been plagiarized from others. Let's just hope he doesn't begin his convention speech, "Four score and seven years ago..."
Well, it's Obama who's at the top of the ticket and it's Obama we should be focusing on. So far it sounds like Obama is running not for president of the United States but for president of the world. Obama is a globalist, and in his Berlin speech at the Brandenburg Gate Obama decalred himself a "fellow citizen of the world." I guess this means that in conflicts between our world and other worlds, Obama is decidedly on the side of Planet Earth.
Sure, there's more to Obama's argument than his platitudes. Essentially Obama has been arguing that "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands alone." The problem with this is that there are competing ideals and competing interests in the world. China would like to be a regional bully and kick around the little countries that are in its neighborhood. Russia too would like to restore some of its czarist and later Communist hegemony. How exactly does our Chicago community activist propose to change these global realities?
Obama's answer is: through the power of prose. In his stump speeches Obama has been sounding a Robert Frost note, talking a lot about walls. According to Obama, the greatest threat in today's world is not terrorism or nuclear war. Rather, the "greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another." According to Obama, the walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic, or between natives and immigrants, or between races and religions, "cannot stand."
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," Frost wrote, and certainly we can all share the feeling. Perhaps the best example of an unloved wall is the Berlin Wall, which came down thanks to the efforts of people like Reagan, Thatcher, the Pope, Havel, Walesa and Solzhenitsyn. Yet Frost's poem ends with these striking lines: "Good fences make good neighbors." Frost's point is that the sentimental resistance to walls must be modified by the recognition of the utility and even indispensability of walls. I'm quite sure the Obamas understand the principle quite well: they would not be happy if their neighbors' kids crossed into their yard and treated it as their own. Good fences make good neighbors.
So when should walls be taken down? Consider a contemporary example. It's possible that the wall the Israelis are building is saving Israeli lives and protecing that nation's security. It's also possible that the wall is unncessary, and that it's fueling further Palestinian grievance. My point is that the correct position is going to derive from a careful analysis of the situation on the ground. Vague and lofty talk about the badness of walls isn't going to help. Yet that is precisely the level of analysis that we are getting from Barack Obama. Now will the press stop genuflecting before this man and do him--and our democracy--the dignity of critically examining his views?
Reader Comments ( Page 16 of 17)
226. History!
Tonight somebody other than a rich white guy has been officially nominated as the representative of a major party. After more than 200 years of talking about equal opportunity and equality, the reality is starting to catch up. I for one am going to celebrate!
Pliny-the-in-between at 11:57PM on Aug 27th 2008
227. For those of you who claim that science and religion are incompatible, I'd recommend the interviews with Freeman Dyson of Princeton, Owen Gingerich of Harvard, Arthur Peacocke of Oxford and John Polkinghorne of Cambridge.
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I'd recommend they spend five minutes talking to janesophie or observant....
Clif Kuplen at 12:09AM on Aug 28th 2008
228. More bush or sensible government that historically is smaller, more efficient and pays for itself. Not much of a challenge there.>>>
Did you just fall off the turnip wagon? If not you are either pathetic and nieve or a bad liar.
Take a look at any Bush budget, and compare it to what the liberals wanted to spend, then shut up about 'historically smaller government.'
The only thing historical about government spending is liberals ALWAYS spend more. ALWAYS ... IT'S AN HISTORICAL FACT, and you are either stupid or brainwashed.
Now, take a look at the Leftist empty suit and all the new spending he wants. Clue: Raising taxes on the rich aint gonna pay for it. Now you freaks can make such idiot claims is beyond reason!
thomas J gassett at 5:02AM on Aug 28th 2008
229. You've misinterpreted the whole poem, D. You're aligning yourself with the idiot neighbor Frost mocks:
"He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." "
This means it is YOU who also "moves in darkness/not of woods only."
Laura at 12:46AM on Aug 28th 2008
230. D'Inept,
Does your snarky peevishness have anything to do with the fact that the guy from the Chicago inner city speaks and writes better that than the guy from Yale with the English Lit degree? As far as dealing with Russian and Chinese aggression, what exactly has GW done? Oh yeah, he went to the Bejing Olympics, got told off, and he strongly objects to Russia's invasion of Georgia. Oooooh, they're all shaking. Maybe if we didn't use 45% of the world's gasoline Russia wouldn't be so fat on petro-dollars. As far as China goes, their human rights record is abysmal but what have GW or McCain done except for the occasional lip service whining?
Bob at 2:04AM on Aug 28th 2008
231. I'm not Brian but I must respond. . .
And who is torturing people? It's not the US military. It's the thugs and Baathists and Islamic radicals that were (the former) and are (the later) chopping and sawing people's heads off and blowing them up with bombs.
Not to mention raping women in front of their children and throwing people alive into wood chippers and acid baths. Saddam and Co. murdered between 600,000 and 2 million. The lower figure is confirmed.
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Okay, no one is excusing this but this is no justification for us torturing anybody. How about living up to any we're the greatest country in the world bravado and actually try to be better? Do you really think these assholes in the middle east should set our standards of behavoir?
And don't forget the 1.5-2 million Iraqis and Iranians, some as young as 12, that died in their horrific war in the 1980's. By contrast The UN has confirmed about 80,000 deaths in the Iraq/US war.
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A war we helped fund, remember which side we provided money and arms to? Remember how he was considered a good guy then? Do you really think he became a murdering thug only after the Iran-Iraq war? How many of the 600,000 to two million killed were done so on our dime? Oh yeah who was in office when we armed that murdering thug and what party did he belong to?
And who's killing the vast majority of these people? It's not our troops. Once again, it's the radical extremist thugs. Maybe you think Jesus would have wanted us to allow Saddam and his sons to just keep on killing. I think not.
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I actually completley agree with you on this part. How do you think Jesus would feel about the policy of pre-emptive strikes?
And you're wrong about Obama. Whenever the question is about any world problem, the man is a broken record and gives the same answer: America is always at fault. Whenever tyrants around the world murder people and enslave them it's always our fault because we made them do it.
I've never heard him say that, or anything close. It could be I just missed it so go ahead and send a link or something backing this up. I'm guessing you didn't hear this from him but some media pundit.
Brian, tell that to the people of Africa who are being overrun in places like Darfur by Islamic radicals, (euphemistically referred to as "militants" or "rebels") who continue to convert folks by the sword.
Since when has either canidate given a damn about Africa? Again I think we have common ground on this view but given that Bush had eight years to solve this and did nothing, so I fail see how this can all be the fault of Obama and the democrats.
And what did these people do to deserve to be slaughtered? What endless list of grievances against these animist and Christian peasants can the half-crazed Islamic jihadists produce to justify slaughtering hundreds of thousands, since Rumsfeld and Cheney aren't running the foreign policy of these third world African nations?
Dave at 9:14PM on Aug 27th 2008
They can produce none, what excuse can good christians Rumsfeld and Cheney give for doing nothing to stop the slaughter( I eagerly await a convoluted response pinning all this on the liberals).
tmo at 2:05AM on Aug 28th 2008
232. Obama is the most liberal senator in Congress.
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I wish that were true but it isn't.>>
You say it with such conviction one must assume you can give several examples where Obamy voted agianst the Far Left ... or how about just one? No? Then Obamy is the most liberal senator and Biden is number three though he smells like number two>>
Oh, and the quote from the Air America fool was just what I expect.
Is there anything at all in your head that's longer than fifteen words
thomas J gassett at 5:06AM on Aug 28th 2008
233. Dave; you prove my point. What people said Jesus said about self defense was so wrong that Paul had to correct it.
Ryan Anderson at 6:44AM on Aug 28th 2008
234. The only thing historical about government spending is liberals ALWAYS spend more. ALWAYS ... IT'S AN HISTORICAL FACT, and you are either stupid or brainwashed.
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You are of course completely flat out wrong. Look at Reagan, Bush Sr and W's spending and it is THEY (cause you like the all caps thing) that spent the money and drove up the deficit. Knowing this makes one neither stupid nor brainwashed but merely informed.
Pliny-the-in-between at 9:08AM on Aug 28th 2008
235. Botts post 222 - No that is pathetic... the link was JM's father-in-law, and Kennedy were both bootleggers. I do not have a dog in this race. They are politicians and they are liars. I do think that Obama’s judgment with Bill Ayers, a home grown terrorist and murderer, Wrong Wright a hateful bigot, and the other crooked Tony Rezko pal that helped him buy his house and raise funds was bad judgment on his part. He is a convicted felon, I do not think JM’s father-in-law was. I think that 20 years under the ministry of Wrong Wright has made him a racist bigot, and unfit to be an American President. With his Veep choice there certainly will not be a change. Biden is a career liar and same old same old politics. McCain, and Biden both are as guilty as sin for our nation being in the shape it is in. They should have been saying drill here and drill now 20 years ago. We should have more nuclear facilities, as do many of our counter parts. We should be leading the way on alternative energy sources 20 years ago.
Clif post 224 – Who is more to the left than Obama?
Tmo post 229 – Why haven’t the do nothing UN done anything? We try to give them a chance to take action and they do not. I say get out of the UN, kick them to the curb, and let them office out of Iran, or China…
Man_in_Wilderness at 10:39AM on Aug 28th 2008
236. Take a look at any Bush budget, and compare it to what the liberals wanted to spend, then shut up about 'historically smaller government.'
xxxxx
take your own advice.
Look at any republican budget, not just Bush, who is the worst and compare it to the GDP, gross domestic product for the same year.
You can find all the data at .gov sites so it's non partisan.
What you will find is that we borrowed over 50% in EVERY year that a republican has been in office after 1980.
Carter was in the thirties, Reagan shot into the high 50's bush I got into the 60's, clinton got it back down to high 40's and bush blew the top out.
This year, we'll be borrowing about 68% of the GDP! Most of it will come from our ideological enemies - arabs and communists.
Every republican government since 1980 has been the largest government in history with the greatest debt.
Your ignorance or denial or turd tantrums doesn't make any dent in this -it's fact and not in contest by any sane person.
Taxes went up six times under Reagan, twice under Bush I, Clinton HAD to raise taxes to pay for the half trillion dollar savings and loan scandal, and Bush cut taxes EXPONENTIALLY.
That means if you make twice as much money you get FAR more than twice the tax break.
Why is this wrong? Very simple, and before you shoot the messenger, this is Teddy Roosevelt's thinking, not mine. He was a republican, by the way.
If you have more wealth you put an EXPONENTIALLY greater stress on the Commons, the physical infrastructure and supporting economic structure of the nation that we all use and all must pay to support.
That is simply cost of operations for your family or your business and what you owe the government for your use of what it provides you.
You or your company exist because of the terms of government you exist under, no other reason, and the cost of operations is both internal and external in getting your raw material and employees and services and hardware to you, built for you or leased to you, and your product out for promotion and distribution.
If you earn from that system, true conservative philosophy, like T. Roosevelt or the 21st century Democratic party says you must be taxed to cover your fair share or the system will fail as it's doing now.
Republicanism still insists that infrastructure can magically pop up out of the ground and be perpetually self maintaining.
This is obviously absurd, but it's still part of libertarianism, which is equally absurd and for that reason is Utopian - i.e. no libertarian governments have ever existed nor will they ever.
Republicans always spend more on defense and so far have cut and run from every engagement they have been involved in.
Their gigantic budgets are for gigantic cost plus no bid profit margins, so it's easy to spot the drain. It's about profit, not defense. Under libertarianism, EVERYTHING is about profit.
War is about the most profitable venture a corporate controlled nation can undertake.
Democrats advocate and practice PAYGO government as the Clinton years surplus proves. If you don't have it you can't borrow it from the communists. You can't spend it.
As a prime directive, get over the idea of 'small' government unless you have a very small number of people to govern.
There are NO small governments. Nature abhors a vacuum.
In this country you have two choices.
First, you can have a government of appropriate size where the heads are ELECTED and accountable to YOU, the individual, the voter. They exist to serve YOU since you voted and paid their way into office and will pay taxes to support the government you hired them to become part of.
OR you can subcontract government function to a for-profit corporation, which is in global competition with other for-profit corporations, and it must as PRIME DIRECTIVE earn a profit.
How it does it in a truly 'libertarian' or unregulated marketplace is irrelevant and will often be secret.
If it is wrong, it will, after coverups and millions spent in public relations fails, eventually be changed by 'market force' if the bottom line is finally compromised.
However, we've seen the reality time and time again under bush, and the fact is when market forces bring a company crashing down, the taxpayers are tapped to shore it up again!
This is COMMUNISM FOR CORPORATIONS since they get whatever they need, but for the wealthy only. Republicans hate social safety nets for poor people.
This was particularly offensive with Bear Stearns, where the hedge fund minimum investment is around a MILLION dollars. You have to be big and know what you're doing to play.
You're not going to be told this by fox or rush or michael wiener or ann coulter or bush or cheney or mcsame. They would prefer to have people like you who don't look at things analytically and in your case simply overload and outgas until people stop noticing you.
There is a balance between corporate encroachment and assimilation of government, which Mussolini defined as Fascism, and the concept that the government owns everything, defined as Socialism.
It's our constitution.
Our constitution was framed to balance between the two functions, populism and royalism.
Essentially, it's been our history, and historically the political parties have taken turns being liberal or conservative.
Now we have a genuine struggle with a republican party gone metastatic.
Everything that has made us strong for two centuries has been compromised by the need to put profit before national security and the well being of the citizens of the nation that has enabled cancerous corporate growth by not enforcing 100 year-old laws that outlaw restraint of trade, price fixing and corporate collusion.
As a result, price fixing, restraint of trade and corporate collusion have run rampant and we see the results.
I took the time to write this because at least in the digital biology age you were able to acknowledge the reality of 21st century science and modify your religious beliefs accordingly.
I hope you're able to do this with economics and political philosophy too, but it won't be possible if every liberal is a communist or every conservative is a nazi to you.
There are degrees of sanity in between, but you have to have an internal rheostat of some kind to detect degree. If all you have is off-on, a flipflop switch, you won't heed this at all and go straight into your usual sea cucumber defense of blowing your guts out into the media and grossing out predators.
Well, read it if you're up to it and consider what I say if possible, and if not, we know the drill already.
Good luck.
Clif Kuplen at 1:31PM on Aug 28th 2008
237. Clif post 224 – Who is more to the left than Obama?
xxx
Any canonical republican. You. I'll illustrate:
Take Dick Cheney. He and GW bush trade and bank openly with communists.
They believe in a small totalitarian government with a rubber stamp Diet and an all powerful executive politburo like the USSR had.
They believe that the state should be forced to shrink, or 'wither away', straight out of Marx's Communist Manifesto.
The reality is it just gets bigger. Republican governments are always the biggest in history since 1980 at least and perhaps before. Don't take my word for it. Find it on a .gov site.
Their favored trading partners are the Chinese, currently communist, and the Vietnames, former communists and particularly dear to John Mccain, who was at one time a major ADVOCATE of communism.
There is a gigantic white hot controversy growing as to how much coercion and how much reward was involved in his pro communist film performances and propaganda appearances.
The 'reds' as you ironically call yourselves believe in destruction of the middle class and replacement with a proletariat that is politically disenfranchised, unhealthy and uneducated, spied on and perpetually denouced as traitors.
The military commissions act and fisa amendments ensure the ubiquity of the state.
You trade with commies. You bank with commies. You imitate commies with domestic repression. You have communist inspired expansionist plans, attacking countries on made up pretexts to seize their assets like the Soviets did all across Eastern Europe.
You believe in party control of all media, just like Pravda was a wing of the government. NBC, for example is owned by GE which has over 3.5 trillion in government contracts so the media is literally a wing of government, but he government is privatized.
You practice distribution according to need if the needy are multimillionaires as the Bear Stearns bailout proves - communism but only for millionaires.
On two occasions I've seen your mainstay talking heads advocate violent overthrow of the government. Pat Robertson says 'nuke foggy bottom' and ann coulter says pat robertson doesn't go far enough. I've heard both with my own ears.
To put it another way, you're so far right you're left.
this is what happens if our Ship Of State is perpetually course corrected off the True North of representative government that generally is satisfactory to the governed into the situation you have now where the course corrections to the right haven't been balanced in eight years.
Sooner or later you're headed south.
At that point there's no left, no right, just wrong.
That's what happened when neoconservatism ran both houses of congress and the exec branch for 8 years, it's where we are in the world now, and that's what we're voting to change.
If your head can't hold more than a bumper sticker, this won't make sense to you.
This is grown up political science, not babymama fistjab rev hussein crap. It takes a little study and focus. Are you up to it?
Clif Kuplen at 2:02PM on Aug 28th 2008
238. You say it with such conviction one must assume you can give several examples where Obamy voted agianst the Far Left ... or how about just one? No? Then Obamy is the most liberal senator and Biden is number three though he smells like number two>>
xxxx
you're talking to yourself.
Besides, far left to you means anything left of Hitler or slightly to the right of him.
You're an extremist in practice right here as you know. One of the exploding turds that come with the territory and you sought that level on your own. I even know you're capable of something else, but posting the way you do apparently gives you a thrill of some kind.
Obama's cosponsored over 400 senate bills as I told you earlier, about seven with Sam Brownback. Ever heard of him? Many bills he has sponsored are non partisan. You haven't spent ten minutes on this.
As to not far left, his vote on the recent Fisa amendment is one I particularly don't like but I hope it will be changed with a better congress.
If you want to talk voting records, we can look at McCain and servicemen and women, or that he voted against minimum wage about 15 times.
I LIKE that Obama is LIBERAL!!
Liberalism is Americanism. Without it we'd still be a colony.
Neoconservatism, and the entire republican party with maybe the exception of Lincoln Chafee IS NEOCONSERVATIVE. It is simply fascism restated. Don't believe me? Ask RON PAUL.
If you want to have a rational conversation I don't mind, but if this is your usual shit fountain, I'd rather not, thanks. This is too serious for that, but you can cavort solo if you want.
Obama or more bush. There aren't any other choices this time.
Clif Kuplen at 2:22PM on Aug 28th 2008
239. Obama also supports faith based initiatives. That's supposed to be far left? Get some facts, thomas. I know you can if you want to. I hope something motivates you to study this a little bit.
Clif Kuplen at 2:24PM on Aug 28th 2008
240. As to not far left, his vote on the recent Fisa amendment is one I particularly don't like but I hope it will be changed with a better congress.
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almost forgot. He supports faith based initiatives. How left is that?
Clif Kuplen at 2:51PM on Aug 28th 2008