Anyway, the College Repubicans in Minnesota did a masterful job of demonstrating to Minnesota voters (and evening news viewers) what Obama’s energy plans are: a couple of inflated tires and a tire guage.
While Barack Obama’s plan encourages everyone to inflate their tires, turn down the temperature, and turn off your lights early, John McCain is proposing an “all of the above” solution to our energy crisis: drill now, invest heavily in alternative fuels, and get off foreign oil.
Very interesting. I thought maybe this had begun to die down, but that is certainly not the case. The heavy-handed Obama machine continues to disrespect and exclude former supporters of Hillary Clinton.
So there’s this argument going on now as to whether we can attribute the ongoing success in Iraq to the “surge” strategy or whether it was simply a product of the domestic Anbar Awakening. The basic premise of the question is way off because the Sunnis who stood up to become the Sons of Iraq (SoI) that began the Anbar Awakening never would have done so unless they had know the US was coming over the hill with reinforcements.
But the media seems to think that they have caught Sen. McCain in some sort of foreign policy flub because he contends that the SoI would’t have been sustainable were it not for the surge in US troops. They point out that the additional surge troops did not arrive in country until after the SoI had begun to stand up. However, this ignores some fairly important facts. We had announced well before then that we were recommitting to securing Iraq, and we had begun to implement the new strategy surrounding the additional surge troops before they arrived. Both of these things provided a pretty strong signal to the SoI that we weren’t about to abandon them (like Barack Obama would have done and still plans to do), and that they were safe to begin operations against AQI.
Not everyone in the media seems to have bought into the liberal line of attack however. Joe Scarborough over at MSNBC concludes that history is on McCain’s side:
“After Senator Obama’s own advisors and supporters backtracked from his stated desire to hold summit meetings with the leaders of the world’s worst regimes, Senator Obama himself has begun to reinterpret his stand. He now claims that some ‘fear’ to ‘negotiate’ with the likes of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a ’stinking corpse’ or Ayatollah Khamenei, who called Israel a ‘cancerous tumor.’ I have news for Senator Obama: I have met some very bad people before in my life. It is not fear that drives my opposition to unconditional meetings with Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, Kim Jong Il, and Raul Castro; rather it is my clear understanding that such a course will fail to eliminate the threat posed by these rogue regimes. I don’t fear to negotiate. Instead I have the knowledge and experience to understand the dangerous consequences of a naive approach to Presidential summits based entirely on emotion.”
Senator John McCain on having the experience necessary to be president…and how Barack Obama lacks it…
Give me a break! This guy (Barack Obama) is now trying to court the Jewish vote by attempting to relate his losing a Congressional race in Chicago to what the people of Israel endure everyday in horrible acts of terrorism. Take this passage:
When I ran against Bobby Rush [for Congress], the perception was that I was Hyde Park, I’m University of Chicago, I’ve got all these Jewish friends. When I started organizing, the two fellow organizers in Chicago were Jews, and I was attacked for associating with them. So I’ve been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends, so when I find on the national level my commitment being questioned, it’s curious. [Emphasis mine]
Really Barack? You enduring some politics by association hardships in your failed candidacy for Congress is comparable to innocent people in Israel being blown apart by savage terrorists? Your inexperience is showing…
On top of this, Barack was widely known in his early days in Chicago to have been associating with radicals on the Palestinian side of the argument and only came around to support Israel when he realized it would be politically advantageous for a future life in politics. (See this article about Barack’s ascent in Chi-Town’s machine politics).
Now, if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, Barack then trains his perceptive foreign policy analytical skills on the current situation in Israel with this earth-shattering, bold observation:
The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that[…] [Emphasis mine]
Are you joking?! Is that supposed to be some sort of bold proclamation condemning terrorism - that Israel probably can’t sustain itself if it continues to be bombarded by rocket attacks, suicide bomber, and radical jihadists of all stripes into perpetuity?
That Barack Obama is just now stumbling onto these facts should be very disturbing to anyone interested in national security and foreign policy, its domestic impact, and the impact on allied nations like Israel who is engaged in a fight for their very survival against these monstrous and cowardly terrorists.
