Obladee, Obama, Life Goes On

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
February 12, 2008

Well, pretty much everyone was stunned by Hillary Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary. Even her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, offered - at five o'clock in the afternoon of election day, no less - that a loss by less than ten percentage points would be construed as a victory by the Clinton campaign. And so, as the results trickled in, and as Hillary's lead stayed at between two and four points, and as Fox News waffled about calling her the winner, apparently in some attempt to save face for its analysts, who had been holding out for an Obama "surge" in the college towns, a victory of sorts was gained, perhaps the result of her newly and accidentally discovered "trail of tears" strategy, perhaps also due to hubby Bill's describing Obama's campaign as a "fairy tale." I, for one, am not distressed at the post-partisan depression I hope Obama's experiencing in the wake of this January surprise.

For once, Bill was right. But looking at the qualifications of the two Democratic front-runners to be President, especially in the area of foreign policy, one has to hope that the Republicans suddenly find a vigorous conservative candidate who can actually take the election away from two arguably unelectable Dems.
Let's take a look, for starters, at Hillary Clinton's executive "qualifications." The fact is that the only thing Hillary knows how to do is yell at the help. She's proven adept at this during the "travelgate" affair, one of the many scandals that dogged Clinton's presidency and compromised his ability to effect meaningful policy.

Never mind that she botched egregiously her "15 minutes of fame" when hubby Bill threw her the "bone" (sorry) of presiding over the development of a federalized health care program for America's "subjects" - er, I mean "citizens" - in the early years of his administration. And never mind further that Hillary not only botched that opportunity by proving herself to be a nightmare administrator, nor that in doing so she also botched the perfect opportunity to further implement the leftist agenda of insuring that the federal governmental bureaucracy take even more control over the important personal decisions, in this case regarding our health care, regarding your and my, indeed, of every American citizen's, lives. My take is that we can all be thankful that Hillary didn't have her way with American health care.

But let's get to more important issues, particularly foreign policy, and more particularly the war against terrorism that we're waging in the Middle East. When asked to comment on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Hillary Clinton responded that she was sorry that Bhutto wouldn't be able to run for the office of President of Pakistan in the upcoming elections. In other words, she didn't know that Pervez Musharraf had recently been elected to that position and that the upcoming elections were for seats in the Pakistani Parliament. Bhutto was not going to be a candidate for any political office: she had returned to Pakistan to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the elected president of that country, and not as a "candidate."

And let's talk about Barack Obama's nearly non-existent take on the situation in the Middle East: Obama credits the election of Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate for the subsiding of violence in Iraq! His logic goes something like this: Well, since the Iraqis realized that the with the election of a Democrat legislative majority, they decided that they'd better get their house in order and use the U.S. military to help get rid of the al Qaeda terrorists in their provinces while they had the chance to do so. The threat of the withdrawal of U.S. troops that the 2006 election brought about was the determining factor in the Iraqis attempts to oust the terrorists who had brutalized them.

Not a single word about the David Petraeus-led troop surge in Iraq. Not a single word about the fact that Iraqis, in the wake of the surge and with their new-found confidence that American troops were in it for the long haul, began to cooperate with U.S. forces in identifying and flushing out terrorists, and that they took a lead role in the military operations that have proven so successful.

The only positive thing that can be said about Hillary's victory is that it puts in doubt the ultimate viability of Obama's campaign for the nomination. That's something of a pyrrhic victory, but it's a victory nonetheless. Hillary's problem is that she doesn't know what's going on in the Middle East; Obama's is delusional about it. If there has to be a Democrat candidate at all, I'll take Hillary's ignorance over Obama's insanity any day.