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.
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