A Non-Debate
“Obama and Romney Bristle From Start Over Foreign Policy,” says The New York Times. The illusion that on Monday night a vigorous foreign-policy-centered debate took place in Boca Raton is being perpetuated by countless mainstream media outlets from coast to coast. We were treated to a choreographed, scripted conversation instead, with President Barack Obama and his challenger Governor Mitt Romney “bristling” over peripheral details but not disagreeing on a single issue of substance.
Romney looked faintly ridiculous, sitting there with a contrived smile to match Obama’s contrived anger. He was out of points worth making and out of his depth, letting Obama get away with numerous lies and distortions. Compared to his supine challenger, the President looked almost presidential.
The litmus test of the entire show was Benghazi. Romney never went after Obama on the one subject that could (and should) bring this Administration down like a house of cards. Asked about the attack on the night of September 11, he inexplicably waffled about better education and gender equality. In a real debate, Obama’s opponent would blast the President for his team’s gross ineptitude, and—more egregiously—for the subsequent cover-up. In a real debate Obama would be asked if Ambassador Stevens was indeed brokering some heavy weapons shipments to Syria with his jihadist contacts in Benghazi when the deal turned sour and they murdered him. Romney praised Obama’s record instead, saying—incongruously—that “it’s wonderful that Libya seems to be making some progress.” It was like two members of the Soviet Politbureau discussing Hungary in the fall of 1956.
Iran came up a few dozen times, with Obama’s bellicose rhetoric out-Romneying Romney: “As long as I’m president of the United States Iran will not get a nuclear weapon… A nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security, and it is a threat to Israel’s national security… We are going to take all options necessary to make sure they don’t have a nuclear weapon.” Romney responded with the inane notion that Ahmedinejad should be indicted under the Genocide Convention for advocating Israel’s destruction. It was surreal. Postmodern American politicians engaging in postmodern discourse.
In a real debate, Obama would be put on the spot: Does “all options” include an all-out war? Air strikes alone, or occupation, partial or total? With what objective, timetable, and end-game? Why is Israel’s national security mentioned in the same breath with that of the United States? What is the calculus of Obama’s perceived costs and benefits in this scenario? If he does not include an all-out war in the said scenario, why make empty threats? If he does, what is the “threat to our national security” exactly? What are, specifically, Iran’s delivery capabilities? How does the threat to America of an Iranian bomb differ from that of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
In a real debate, when Obama boasted that during the Arab Spring uprisings “we have stood on the side of democracy,” his opponent would challenge him on two obvious points:
- Has the American interest been served—and in what way exactly—by Egypt’s transformation into a Muslim Brotherhood fiefdom, in which “democracy” came handy as a single-use device in the one-way street to Sharia? Or by Libya’s descent into Hobbesian failed statehood?
- Has democracy been served, and how, by the continuing Administration support for the Islamo-Stalinist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Emirates, or for the deliveries of U.S. arms to the dictatorial Sunni monarchy in Bahrain when it battled the country’s Shia demonstrators last year?
Far from venturing into such tricky issues, when asked about Egypt Romney eccentrically started dwelling on the need for a strong U.S. economy. Perhaps this was wiser than repeating his insane October 8 statement that there was “a longing for American leadership in the Middle East.”
On Syria the only difference was on how to help the rebels bring down the regime. Their statements were carbon-copies of each other. “We are going to do everything we can to make sure that we are helping the opposition,” Obama said, “and we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping; that we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or allies in the region.” “The right course for us, is working through our partners and with our own resources,” Romney replied—meaning Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey under “partners”—“to identify responsible parties within Syria… We do need to make sure that they don’t have arms that get into the—the wrong hands. Those arms could be used to hurt us down the road.”
The identity of views became grotesque when both men declared that Israel and Turkey—whose mutual relations are at the lowest ebb in history—are our key regional partners. “Everything we’re doing, we’re doing in consultation with our partners in the region, including Israel and… coordinating with Turkey,” Obama declared, to which Romney retorted, “We need to make sure as well that we coordinate this effort with our allies, and particularly with — with Israel. But the Saudi’ and the Qatari, and the Turks are all very concerned about this. They’re willing to work with us.” Obama then asserted that we are “making certain that we knew who we were dealing with, that those forces of moderation on the ground were ones that we could work with.” Romney concurred: the key task is “to find responsible parties.” Like in Afghanistan, back in the 1980s, like in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and in Libya last year.
Both candidates declared that Assad’s days are numbered, but Obama warned sternly that we cannot “simply suggest that, as Governor Romney at times has suggested, that giving heavy weapons [to the Syrian opposition] would lead us to be safer over the long term.” As it happens a victory for Assad’s opponents, being an eminently jihadist victory, would make us less safe over the long term—heavy weapons or no heavy weapons. Mitt Romney is intellectually, experientially and morally unable to grasp this fact. He is worthy of his GOP predecessors over the past 16 years, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain.
On the question of all questions—America’s role in the world—Romney proudly talked of the achievements of 4th graders in Massachusetts during his governorship. It is beyond bizarre, it is frightening.
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Where Is Call For Jihad Against Chris Matthews Sharia Slander?
Our President, Barack Hussein Obama, spoke out vigorously against any "slander" of the man Mr Obama invariably refers to as "The Prophet" Mohammed.
We have been lectured by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that any speech offensive to Muslims will not be tolerated and that First Amendment notions must give way to the sensitivities and political correctness of multiculturalism.
Where are the cries from the White House against the "Islamophobia" of Chris Matthews?
Where is Congressman Keith Ellison? Congressman Ellison refused to swear his oath of office on a Bible and did so on a Koran. Is Mr Ellison outraged by the offensive manner in which liberals refer to the law of his Koran?
In nationally broadcast remarks Democratic commentator Matthews disparaged the Romney/Ryan position (and that of the Roman Catholic Church/Evangelical Christians) as "sharia.
This was intended as an insult.
The Left is denigrating Islam and Islamic law- are they not?
The Left argues that being Pro Life is absurd and "intolerant" and in that context refersto those who oppose abortion and Planned Parenthood as engaging in "Sharia"
This is not a rare instance. Michael Brown reports
"In comments made before the presidential debate this past Tuesday, Chris Matthews claimed that Gov. Romney’s position on abortion was “almost like Sharia,” stating, “You’re saying to the country, we’re going to operate under a religious theory, under a religious belief.” In doing so, Matthews repeated the common leftwing libel that conservative moral principles with a basis in religious beliefs are equivalent to radical Islam.
In May, Rev. Billy Graham took out full page ads in North Carolina newspapers stating in part, “The Bible is clear — God’s definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. I want to urge my fellow North Carolinians to vote FOR the marriage amendment.”
Gay activist Wayne Besen responded by asking, “Do we now make our civil laws based upon Christian Sharia?”
So anyone who fails to heartily endorse the radical homosexuals is a Taliban?
".. if you argue that a baby in the womb, upon conception, is entitled to personhood status, you are espousing a position “almost like Sharia,” which Matthews sums up by exclaiming, “This is extremism!” Indeed, for Matthews, in the early stages of pregnancy, we are certainly not dealing with a baby in the womb, let alone “a fetus,” but “rather an egg that had just been fertilized, right after sex, if you will.”
So, the high regard for life and the protection of the innocent that fuels the Republican platform on abortion is nothing more than Sharia-like extremism.."
Please note Chris Matthews and the homosexuals use "sharia" as indicia of something palpably awful.
Where are the cries of outrage from Obama?
http://elvisnixon.com/2012/10/19/where-is-call-for-jihad-against-chris-matthews-sharia-slander.aspx
Of the two slaves, Romney danced about happily clanging his chains, while Obama seemed to have a hint of suppressed insight about his condition. The Good Lord forgive us our heavy sins and have mercy upon us.
"Obama seemed to have a hint of suppressed insight about his condition."
Dr. Wilson,
After the first debate when all the leftist were in a rage about how he had let them down if not completly having abandoned them, this was my observation as well. I felt like after serving as President for four years, he had been given a glimpse into the duopoly that had cured him of any naivete he might have embraced campaigning for the job four years earlier and was merely reacting to this profound discovery as any man close to despair would react. I entirely agree with your observation. Governor Romney on the other hand portrays the personality of a man who knows going in there is little in the way of justice to be performed from the office but perhaps there is still some power and/or large sums of money that can still be had by occupying the office. And what else does he have to do for the next four years ?
The Barack Hussein Obama as jaded dreamer narrative has one devastating flaw: Obama got his start in Chicago community organizing. If he was truly unaware of the machine grinding around him, then 1. Harvard's affirmative action policies really scrape the bottom of the barrel worse than I had thought, and 2. he is intellectually unfit to be president of a dementia association, let alone the most powerful country on Earth.
When I mentioned slavery I had in mind particularly our Greatest Ally who dominated the debate. True about Obama, but tell me the name of anyone who has been within a thousand miles of the presidential mansion in the last fifty years who is intellectual or morally worthy.
Clyde: Nixon -- intellectually, at least...
True about Obama, but tell me the name of anyone who has been within a thousand miles of the presidential mansion in the last fifty years who is intellectual or morally worthy.
Of course it is unremarkable that a U.S. president should be unintelligent, hence why I also pointed out that he is unfit even to be the first among the demented, because that level of cretinism actually IS kind of impressive.
Nixon -- intellectually, at least...
Morally, too, at least in relative terms. Nixon's crimes were surely far lesser than FDR's, Truman's, Kennedy's, Johnson's, Reagan's, Clinton's, Bush II's,... at any rate.
As I said in response to an earlier post elsewhere :
"The great Silent Majority has been replaced via open borders.
California,the state that gave us a President who dared utter the words "Silent Majority," now gives us Harvey Milk Day
How did that radical change occur?
By flooding California and the American Southwest with illiterate illegal aliens with absolutely no interest in assimilation or civil society. Replacement of the old California with a people who view schools as simply "daycare" for their anchor babies and emergency rooms as free clinics. The Hollywood "gay" community uses these folks to ensure a permanent political elite that conforms to their vision- no mas John Schmitz or William Dannemeyer but lots of Tony Villaraigosa and Jerry Brown redux.
They did it in the home state of Reagan and Nixon and they are doing it to the entire country now.'
* Yes I know Reagan and Nixon are hardly paragons of republican virtue but they are far preferable to what we have now.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Plato
Shipmate,
I'm pretty sure all here can read. No need to copy & paste your posts.
Fair Dinkum
" If, fifty years ago, there were a country that is doing things like the U.S is doing today, we would declare war upon it."
- Joseph Sobran
Reagan and Nixon are hardly paragons of republican virtue but they are far preferable to what we have now.
Ronald Reagan signed the first No-Fault Divorce bill in the country's history and instigated the first general amnesty for the illegal aliens you yourself lament have been useful idiots for converting his state into a nightmare of sprawl and sleaze.
Yes, the GOP is almost always if not always quite disappointing to those who wish for a truly sane vision for our country, but Reagan was a particularly pernicious figure with his conservative posturing. In no other country on Earth do you find a popularly-appealing right-wing apparatus as intellectually vapid and morally bankrupt as the American LI/Fox News/Heritage Foundation cabal. Reagan, of course, is the patron god of this American "conservative movement," and a fitting one indeed in light of his heavy style and light substance.
All fair points. My only quibble is that there are a few countries with even worse "right wing" politicians
David Cameron's Tory group
ALL German political parties are vapid,morally bankrupt and self loathing
Canada's "right-wing" pretty much takes the cake- also they outflank the leftists on censorship/islamophilia and pandering to homoxuals
I don't think you can really compare political parties to the sort of right-wing punditry that goes on Stateside. Even then, the Cameronians (to clarify, I am NOT speaking of "Cameroonians"), "Christian" Democrats do not pretend to be small "c" conservatives standing up for the little man and the Canadian Conservative Party, only slightly so. Reagan did, and that made him all the more dangerous. Believe me, you have to live in another country and make a serious effort to integrate to really appreciate how shrill and stupid the American "conservative" world is. Stupid people are everywhere, but for a sheer circus of talking points, nothing quite matches American right-wing punditry.
Either way, however, it is correct to point out that it all comes down to talking points, and I readily concede that it's largely a question of whether you prefer to listen to politicians lie all the time, as is the case in Europe (and which does happen very regularly in the U.S., as well, though unless you're Bill Clinton usually the lies are less polished), or to listen to cretins spout out a bunch of garbage they actually believe in, as is the case with most pundits.
The point was that "conservative" with a small c has become an adjective no self-respecting American would want applied to himself, lest he be lumped in with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson, and that the Reagan presidency was the crowning legitimation of this dreadful movement. Catholic legitimists in France may have pulled the switch for Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round this year, but very few would claim him as a symbol of the "old France" they fantasize of restoring, and one does not have to be mistaken for a UMP machiner to identify with "the right." Most Americans seem unaware that "conservative" and "Republican" are anything but synonyms for one another.
Anyway, we're really digressing far. To get us back on topic, this movement threw its heart and soul into the GOP and look what it got us: four years of Barack Hussein Obama. And with a little imagination they'll give us four years yet.
Mr. Moses, right on target with Reagan, the President with a toe-dancer son, a Playboy daughter and the empowerer of Neoconservatives in the federal govt.
Mr. Moses--I second Dr. Wilson about your comments. Although I was rather a leftist (communitarian anarchist) in 1980, I said then--heck, before then--that Reagan wasn't a conservative, he was an opportunist or, more precisely, the stalking-horse for opportunists and opportunism.
I have more than once drawn parallels between Reagan and Chirac, who ran for president around the same time and played roughly the same fiery neoliberal/right-wing/Thatcherite discourse. Both were raised in fairly liberal families and married women of the right. That's a pretty superficial channel for conversion, and the parcourse of both in their respective presidencies shows just how little either one actually changed over the course of his life.
Mr. Moses, you puzzle me when you say Reagan married a woman of the right. Surely not so?
Further, I believe he did change. That was the problem. His pre-election rhetoric was that of an old conservative state rights Democrat. As President, like Andrew Jackson, he was past his prime and manipulated by people representing two innately evil forces that had come together to form our present reegime---the traditional Republican plutocracy and the Trotskyites. The latter knew their opportunity when they saw it. It was child's play for them to take over people as dumb as the Republican operatives and electorate. They could never have taken over the Democrats where there was still a remnant of intelligence and leftist sincerity.
Dr. Wilson, perhaps it depends on the angle you look at the issue from, but I was under the impression that the major worldview-drilling force in Ronald Reagan's childhood was his cheery, believe-in-the-good-of-mankind Disciples of Christ (this, remember, is a denomination that has ordained women at least in some capacity since the 19th century) mother while Nancy Reagan was more heavily influenced by her conservative stepfather. That makes for the sort of stuff that is much more difficult to change than rhetoric and which, when the going gets rough, is much more likely to inform important spontaneous reactions.
On the other hand, a friend and fellow anti-revolutionary Catholic of mine, a prominent psychiatrist in Tuscany, has chided against looking into history in the frame of a sort of psychoanalytical (and I am cheating here and speaking in a broader sense than the Freudian one, simply because I do not know of a better word) voyeurism. Nevertheless, talk is cheap, and words aside, I am at a loss to figure out what Reagan actually ever did that was "conservative."
This has been an enjoyable discourse to follow, but getting back to Dr. Trifkovic's insightful look at this "debate," I'm also surprised that neither Obama nor the moderator - unless I missed it - called on Romney to explain his recent remark that he considered Russia to be the number one enemy of the US at present.
I think such a remark deserves some serious scrutiny given that it would logically follow that our foreign policy would largely be shaped with that premise in mind. I'm assuming in addition to displaying his ignorance of foreign policy and history that Romney was also trying to appease interest groups that have a stake in keeping Russia on the bogeyman list. This despite the help Russia is providing in getting our troops out of Afghanistan and their own fear of such "democratic" movements in the region such as the Moslem Brotherhood; movements aided greatly by Obama administration ineptitude in dealing with the Middle East.
The presence of RomneyBama on stage for a presidential debate certainly highlights Prof Wilson's remark about the intellectual/moral bankruptcy of candidates for the office.
Ronald Reagan certainly had his flaws, but he is a giant compared to everyone who succeeded him in the White House, each of whom has been worse than his predecessor. As Peter Brimelow pointed out in his obituary of Reagan, Reagan succeeded in solving the two major problems he was elected to deal with, double digit inflation and Soviet Communism. None of his successors has succeeded in solving any problem, much less problems of that magnitude.
Yes, but it was Reagan who bequeathed us the Bushes when he did not have to.
Yes, Reagan made his biggest political mistake before he became President, when he chose the distant runner up in the 1980 primary contest, George H. W. Bush, as his running mate.
On inflation: Reagan also gave us Greenspan. It was Carter (whom I di not particularly care for) who gave us Volcker.
So Reagan is another example of the lesser of two evils? Was he really responsible for reducing inflation and slaying Communism? Are we better off or worse off because he was elected?
Reagan's choice of Bush was not a "mistake." It was an abject surrender to the plutocrat Republican establishment by the one man who had the power to defy them at the one moment when it was possible.
It guaranteed even before the election that there would be no halt in business as usual, even though Reagan had promised that over and over and that promise was the source of his popularity.
" . . . there would be no halt in business as usual, even though Reagan had promised that over and over and that promise was the source of his popularity."
My goodness. That makes Reagan sound a lot like Obama! Which he was/is, I believe.
My goodness. That makes Reagan sound a lot like Obama! Which he was/is, I believe.
You know, Mr. Olson, I didn't even have Reagan at all when I posted my quip about Obama being "intellectually unfit to be president of a dementia association," but your comment seems to bring about an incredibly literary resonance to this discussion.
if there was a real debate going, Obama would have challenged Romney on the idea that Russia was our no.1 enemy by saying: " The 20 million Russians who have died fighting Nazism and thus enabled us to enjoy the imperfect world that we know should disabuse you of harboring such notions, governor."