It’s been a rough week (and year) for them. I expect Obama to want no-conditions negotiations with them any minute.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Don’t Know Much About History (Part Two)
Jack Kelly has more thoughts on Obama’s frightening ignorance of American history (hey, it would be nice if he could just figure out how many states there are):
Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.
Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.
“There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy’s measure in June 1961 and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions,” Mr. Abel wrote. “There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America’s power. He questioned only the president’s readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight.'”
…It’s worth noting that Kennedy then was vastly more experienced than Sen. Obama is now. A combat veteran of World War II, Jack Kennedy served 14 years in Congress before becoming president. Sen. Obama has no military and little work experience, and has been in Congress for less than four years.
If we elect someone as callow as Obama, maybe Khrushchev will be proven right.
[Update a little later]
Heh. Suitably Flip has a new lapel pin for Barack:
.[Late afternoon update]
Now he can’t even make up his mind. I guess he was for the unconditional meeting before he was against it.
Don’t Know Much About History (Part Two)
Jack Kelly has more thoughts on Obama’s frightening ignorance of American history (hey, it would be nice if he could just figure out how many states there are):
Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.
Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.
“There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy’s measure in June 1961 and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions,” Mr. Abel wrote. “There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America’s power. He questioned only the president’s readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight.'”
…It’s worth noting that Kennedy then was vastly more experienced than Sen. Obama is now. A combat veteran of World War II, Jack Kennedy served 14 years in Congress before becoming president. Sen. Obama has no military and little work experience, and has been in Congress for less than four years.
If we elect someone as callow as Obama, maybe Khrushchev will be proven right.
[Update a little later]
Heh. Suitably Flip has a new lapel pin for Barack:
[Late afternoon update]
Now he can’t even make up his mind. I guess he was for the unconditional meeting before he was against it.
Don’t Know Much About History (Part Two)
Jack Kelly has more thoughts on Obama’s frightening ignorance of American history (hey, it would be nice if he could just figure out how many states there are):
Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.
Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.
“There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy’s measure in June 1961 and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions,” Mr. Abel wrote. “There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America’s power. He questioned only the president’s readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are ‘too liberal to fight.'”
…It’s worth noting that Kennedy then was vastly more experienced than Sen. Obama is now. A combat veteran of World War II, Jack Kennedy served 14 years in Congress before becoming president. Sen. Obama has no military and little work experience, and has been in Congress for less than four years.
If we elect someone as callow as Obama, maybe Khrushchev will be proven right.
[Update a little later]
Heh. Suitably Flip has a new lapel pin for Barack:
[Late afternoon update]
Now he can’t even make up his mind. I guess he was for the unconditional meeting before he was against it.
Expelled Exposed
SciAm has an article on the six things that Ben Stein doesn’t want you to know about the movie. Just the first one is sufficient to me to think the whole thing a contemptible fraud.
Summits With Dictators
Tom Maguire says that Obama and his supporters don’t know much about history:
Obama’s supporters are too young to know any of this, but Roosevelt led the United States in the war against Hitler; the Allied policy was unconditional surrender, so there was very little for Roosevelt and Hitler to discuss, and in fact, the two did not meet at all (but they did exchange correspondence before the war).
So my guess is that Obama is thinking of the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin as talking to “our enemies”, although of course we were still allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan at that point. Beyond that, is the Yalta Conference something Obama and his advisers view as a success worthy of emulation? Puzzling.
Actually, one leader did have a talk with Hitler. His name was Neville Chamberlain. And we know how that worked out.
Or at least some of us do. But perhaps Obama and his supporters are unaware of that as well. Jim Geraghty has further thoughts.
Dhimmification
Sam Harris has a long piece at (of all places) the Huffington Post on the unwillingness of western civilization to stand up for its own values against radical Islam. And as others have noted (and he notes himself), this is particularly ironic:
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders’ film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a “kill fee.” I declined.
Criminals
You know, if there were some planetary version of Child Protective Services (not that I’m proposing such a thing–I’m sure that its primary focus would be Katrina “victims”), the Burmese people would be taken away from their rulers:
…with the clock ticking four days after the storm hit, Myanmar’s reclusive military rulers insisted foreign aid experts would still have to negotiate with the government to be allowed into the isolated nation.
Also, the army, which had plenty of manpower to come in and beat protesting Buddhist monks a few months ago, is nowhere to be found.
Movie Review Time
Over at Lileks’ place:
Their logo looks like a deformed octopus. We get the picture, though. It’s the Klan. This was still a touchy thing in ’36; this must have irritated the people who thought the film ignored all the good things the Klan did, like community outreach and neighborhood suppers and the occasional potluck where a fella could get together with like-minded Americans and talk freely about the Catholics.
Gee, to what or whom could he possibly be referring?
Two For One?
Christopher Hitchens is willing to ask the question that so many others are not, and the one to which the answer seems pretty obvious, at least to me:
What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright’s pews, and at Wright’s mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style–he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?
This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company–and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable–then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.
It’s looking more and more like 1992 all over again. Except this time, there’s no Ross Perot (at least so far) to save the Democrats from themselves.