One thing’s for sure: the Bumbler in Chief has succeeded in uniting the Democratic party. Even Hillary herself fell in line and condemned his statement. I mean, let’s look at just how profoundly stupid this was on so many levels.
He stood in the Israeli Knesset, directly in front of a holocaust survivor, invoking the Nazis and Hitler. That’s like going to a Cherokee council and making a speech invoking Andrew Jackson.
He broke centuries of precedent by carrying American politics abroad, after recently scolding Jimmy Carter for doing the same. Even Richard Nixon had the decency to refrain from something so lacking in class. Of course, Nixon had a higher approval rating than Bush.
He condemned Obama (or whoever you claim he condemned) for advocating the same fucking thing his own Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State are advocating, and his own administration is doing. It’s like a Pharisee condemning Jesus for breaking the Sabbath.
He inadvertenly smeared Ronald Reagan for talking directly with the Evil Empire (the Soviet Union) and — again — Richard Nixon for talking with mass murderer Mao Tse-Tung and his own fucking father, who negotiated directly with Soviet party Chairman Mikail Gorbachev as well as Chinese President Hu Jintao. What a fucking dumbass.
He energized the Democratic party by giving them a tangible contemporary event around which they could rally. In other words, it was a bad plan that backfired, which means it’s just another in a very long string of bad plans that have backfired like missions accomplished and soldiers walking into Baghdad on roads cushioned with rose petals.
He gave John McCain enough rope to hang himself, which he promptly did. Just hours before lashing out at Obama — by name — McCain gave an impassioned speech in which he said that personal attacks had no place in this campaign. The Republicans are once again counting on Americans to be as stupid as buckets of snot.
He destroyed the last tenuous advantage that Republicans have been holding this whole time, namely the appearance of consistency and resolute stability on terrorism and war. There will now be no way for any Republican anywhere to disassociate himself from Bush because Bush has staked out all angles of approach for the petty sake of his own laughable legacy.
When you put all that together, the sheer idiocy of one single smirk-faced loose-lipped addle-brained ill-conceived remark has had the effect of contributing a billion dollars to Obama’s campaign. The last problem that beset the Democratic Party is now cleared up. If I were Obama, I would look directly in the camera at my next speech and say, “Mr. President, where is Osama Bin Laden and why haven’t you brought him to justice?”
Thanks, but nothing new here. I’ve been bashing Bush for a long time, and now that the Democrats have brought classical liberal economists into the fold (Austan Goolsbee, for example) I can support their candidate.
I’m loving the way BO operates. You criticise him and he comes back at you straight away and with substance not bluster. It’s a fantastic MO IMO. Hopefully this time he’ll do as well as the past.
Sure it worked well but I didn’t particularly like having a gun pointed at my head all the time. There is no international second amendment right to bear arms so why grant that right to them.
The greatest danger of WMD is that someone other than the rightful leaders who we are taking our sweat ass time negotiating with might push the button. Oop’s, there goes Tokyo, Oops, there goes Kuwait (again).
My guess if that the Knesset is smarter than Bush (admittedly that’s my default assumption for most organizations). They can see that Obama is probably going to be the next American President and they’re not going to enthusiastically cheer a public condemnation of him.
It may be just me but I thought his stumbling and mispronunciations were like a man slightly inebriated. I have suspected he is back to drinking before but I thought he could read better than that,
For one thing, it used to be illegal. The United States is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The reason some countries decided not to develop nuclear weapons is because this treaty says countries with nuclear weapons cannot use them against a country without nuclear weapons.
This changed when the United States announced some unilateral policy changes. One was that in the event of a general war involving NATO forces, it would use nuclear weapons on behalf of its allies. The other was the announcement of an American policy that the use of chemical or biological weapons were the equivalent of nuclear weapons and any attack with them might be retaliated with by nuclear weapons (this was where the term Weapons of Mass Destruction entered general usage). At that point, it appears that several countries decided that if not owning nuclear weapons didn’t work as a defense then the best plan was to own nuclear weapons.
It was an excellent speech. He threw it right back in Bush’s face, pointing out the ways in which Bush’s foreign policy has failed the nation. He mentioned that Osama Bin Ladin is still at large. He repeatedly tied McCain to Bush. He remarked on the inappropriateness of launching a domestic political attack in front of a foreign audience. He even pointed out that according to Bush his own Secretary of Defense is an “appeaser”. Throughout he was calm and forceful.
Man, if he keeps this up John McCain will be toast … .
