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Scott Johnson of Power Line is in the Weekly Standard with a remedial history lesson for Obama.
BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America’s foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates’ debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America’s national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious college undergraduate who finds himself granted a vision that has eluded elders whose befuddled reckoning has brought them to an impasse.
In Portland on May 18, Obama cited John F. Kennedy’s 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America’s triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Vienna summit, however, disproves Obama’s assertion regarding the unvarying value of meetings between enemy heads of state about as decisively as any historical episode can refute a thesis. In addition to poor judgment, Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ….
Karl Rove notes the many revisions of Obama’s thoughts.
This week’s minor controversy about Barack Obama’s claim that an uncle liberated Auschwitz was quickly put to rest by his campaign. They conceded that it was a great uncle whose unit liberated Buchenwald, 500 miles away.
But other, much more troubling, episodes have provided a revealing glimpse into a candidate who instinctively resorts to parsing, evasions and misdirection. The saga over Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Exhibit A. In just 62 days, Americans were treated to eight different explanations. …
Ann Coulter says,”Who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?
After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That’s the only world leader we’re not allowed to compare to Hitler.
President Bush’s speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals’ Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: “Ahmadinejad is Hitler!” Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.
Suspiciously, Bush’s speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama’s foreign policy — and that’s according to Obama’s supporters.
So to defend Obama, who — according to his supporters — favors appeasing madmen, liberals expanded the rule against ad Hitlerum arguments to cover any mention of the events leading to World War II. A ban on “You’re like Hitler” arguments has become liberals’ latest excuse to ignore history. …
James Taranto writes on some recent Jimmy Carter remarks.
David Boaz makes a good point about McCain and Obama.
On Sunday Barack Obama urged graduates of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University to devote themselves to “collective service.” This is not an unusual theme for a commencement address. But it was interesting how long he went on discussing various kinds of nonprofit activism without ever mentioning the virtues of commerce or of individual achievement.
He also did not cite the military as an example of service to one’s country. This is a surprising omission in a Memorial Day weekend speech to college-age students by a man seeking to be entrusted with the defense of the U.S.
Sen. Obama told the students that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.” He disparaged students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy.”
The people Mr. Obama is sneering at are the ones who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. It’s an attitude you would expect from a Democrat. …
Vaclav Klaus has a book out, Blue Planet in Green Shackles.
… I see the current danger in environmentalism and especially in its strongest version, climate alarmism. Feeling very strongly about it and trying to oppose it was the main reason for putting my book together, originally in Czech language, in the spring of 2007. It has also been the driving force behind my active involvement in the current Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York City openly and explicitly challenged the undergoing global warming hysteria.
My central concern is – in a condensed form – captured in the subtitle of this book. I ask: “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” My answer is: “it is our freedom.” I may also add “and our prosperity”.
The book was written by an economist who happens to be in a high political position. I don’t deny my basic paradigm, which is the “economic way of thinking”, because I consider it an advantage, not a disadvantage. …
John Stossel writes on “windfall profit” nonsense.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to raise the price of oil, as well as most everything else, and lower the value of the pension and mutual funds that union members and retirees depend on.
Of course, they don’t describe their plan that way. Instead, they call for a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies.
But it’s the same thing.
Taxing a “windfall” sounds appealing, but stock prices are based on expected profits. Throw a new tax on profits, and retirement portfolios of regular people take a hit.
“Hillary will impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to temporarily suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax and the 24.4 cent per gallon diesel tax during the upcoming peak summer driving months,” says her website (http://tinyurl.com/3jtlfp).
“They sure can afford it,” she told an audience in Indianapolis.
Whom does she think “they” are? …
David Warren takes off after junk mail.
… This is the principal environmental problem in our democracy today: the idiotization of the general public. It is the inevitable result of the bureaucratization of our public life. As the Nanny State expands, it sucks all the clean air out of civil discourse, and replaces it with the stench of “settled science” and institutional priorities, enumerated by persons who in turn have no idea what they are talking about, because the nonsense they are spouting is never challenged.
This is a terrible, and potentially fatal, environmental problem, for sleepwalking hardly ever ends well. It is why my own number one priority is to find new ways to cut through all the crap..