Wednesday, August 01, 2007

BARACK MY WORLD

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!...Look, up in the sky...It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...it's...Barack Obama ready to kick some serious al Qaeda and other such radical Islamic militant/terrorist operations' ass!"

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Obama's new Pakistan strategy, while I want to believe it's the right thing to do because I love Obama more than Jesus if I were a born-again Christian recovering alcoholic living in a FEMA trailer, just seems so strange and out of character. He's coming down way hard with the war-mongering all of a sudden.

Even through my rosy liberal glasses, I know war time may be all I will ever know for the rest of my natural-born life due to the fact that the world hates us, and will probably try to kill us on our home soil repeatedly because our government has robbed millions of their own. It's the great American existential crisis of our time. But still. He's going for a pre-emptive strike that even the Bush administration is too prudish to attempt. That kinda scares me, considering his lack of military experience. But if his ability to prove, by all outward appearances, that he's going to "fight for the Homeland" ultimately allows him to win the presidency, do your duty chief.

Some excerpts from this morning's speech:

"Just because the President misrepresents our enemies does not mean we do not have them. The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for...

The President would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al Qaeda's war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates al Qaeda in Iraq – which didn't exist before our invasion – and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan. He lumps together groups with very different goals: al Qaeda and Iran, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. He confuses our mission...

By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world's most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland."

4 comments:

Disobedient Deby said...

He turned 46 yesterday--Aug.4th.
You must not miss it next year, so put it on your calendar.

JOY said...

OMG. Is that picture for real? Okay, I'll go back and read the article now. I'm sure it is as spectacular as that picture.

Hip E. said...

I think he's talking about dedicating military resources to finding and blowing up the Al Queda (sp?) leaders and bases and training camps where they actually are, which is afghanistan and pakistan. Even sometimes if our friends the Pakistanis get annoyed by that. But I don't think he wants to preemptive strike the whole country. I liked this speech, he's making a preemptive strike on the republicans' inevitable intimations that a liberal president would not keep us safe.

Hip E. said...

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo on Hillary's criticism of this speech:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/016379.php