We now know — thanks to events in the Honduras — the meaning of Obama’s gesture with respect to the Venezuelan dictator, and I would suggest that we must regard in a similar light the timing of Obama’s announcement of his administration’s shift in policy regarding missile-defense in Europe. For it can hardly be an accident that he chose the seventieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland as the occasion.
We must keep in mind the fact that Obama is not a yokel and that the State Department is there to prevent an ill-informed president from unnecessarily stepping on toes. What happened last Thursday was a deliberate gesture. It was aimed at our allies in eastern Europe and at Russia, and it was recognized as such in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia. Vladimir Putin spoke of Obama’s decision as a courageous act. Our friends in eastern Europe would not have used that adjective. A signal has been given, and they know the meaning.
We are living in a dangerous time. It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama will get his way in domestic affairs. The Democrats may control Congress, but they now fear a rout in 2010, and they are likely to tread with caution from now on. In foreign affairs, however, presidents have a relatively free hand, and this president has ample time to do damage to a country that, there is reason to suspect, he deeply hates.
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Comments 59
Isn’t it about time for the teacher to call OSlash and his posturing, taunting playground gang in from recess?
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:23 pm
This guy is serious?
reason to suspect he deeply hates.
Who is this yokel?
Why would anybody with a good education end up spending all that time teaching at something called the University of Tulsa?
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:33 pm
I still hesitate to go as far as Prof Rahe does in the last sentence – but then we’re back to “which is worse?” territory again… You might find some common ground between “he’s the devil” and “he’s a dunce” if you can conceive of an objective hatred, one that may or may not be experienced or understood as hatred by the person under its spell, but whose due responses to whatever stimuli come ideologically pre-conditioned.
In which case he really does have to fight and win a war with himself, his inculcated self, to overcome his “natural” disinclination in Afghanistan and elsewhere toward victory.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
@CK MacLeod – No.
That’s the type of BS that’s simply wrong.
You don’t get to drop a turd such as that without backing it up.
You would do well to think about deleting that line from your quotation.
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
What are you on about, fuster, with this University of Tulsa reference?
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:03 am
@J.E. Dyer -Making a joke about silly little kids and their schoolyards.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:05 am
Ø can’t be bothered with shitty little countries. Come Home America.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:08 am
Hey, he contended what he contended. I don’t agree with around 50% of the CotDs I put up, I’d roughly estimate, though I often agree with them in large part, as here. I think he could and in fact should have made his final statement more carefully – more objectively – but that’s because I’m not convinced on the level of intentionality, or the level of conscious intentionality, which is a different thing, informing BO’s tendencies.
The DVDs, the bust, the IPOD, the kow-tow, the Chavez back-slap, giving the finger to Hillary, the dust-off, the lipstick, the anniversary present, the lying opposition, the stupid police, Special Olympics, typical white person, bitter clingers, Burma vs Honduras, and on and on. If we’re paranoid, it’s because he keeps on coming up with new ways to impress us.
Anyway, you promised that if he retreats on Afpak, you’ll do some major re-thinking. I think he’s already exhibiting terrible leadership, as I’ve explained at length, and, if he keeps this up much longer, he’s going to create a crisis just by “deliberating.”
I think for a lot of us, how he handles Afghanistan is shaping up as a last chance for any benefit of the doubt. Even if you’re in favor of a withdrawal under whatever strategic justification, you can’t like the way he’s handling this. Same for NMD – even if you side with the technical justifications.
Sooner or later this pudding will prove itself beyond reasonable doubt. It’s harder to identify when exactly the lack of proof becomes a form of proof, but I think we may be getting there.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:18 am
Still don’t get what Tulsa has to do with this. Rahe’s at Hillsdale, which is in Michigan. Anyway, I’d rather look at the argument than the hominem.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 am
@CK MacLeod – If you’re gonna leave it up, I think that’s ample reason for thinking that you’re a traitor to this country.
I’m not really sure about the whole thing with souls and Zombies, but how good was it looking for you anyway?
Can I pass any messages for ya?
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
@CK MacLeod – Rahe spent a lot of years at University of Tulsa. It’s a place where they drink Koolaid.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:31 am
@fuster – wtf? See if you can find someone to second your motion – doesn’t even have to be an avatar’d regular!
In this country, it’s permissible to suggest that the president appears to hate his own country. And it’s permissible to point out that someone has made such a suggestion.
Treat it as a symptom of extremist mania infecting the hard right. I might even be persuaded to see it that way.
Calling me a “traitor to this country” over refraining from deleting someone else’s controversial statement strikes me as a bit bizarre.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:40 am
@CK MacLeod – It was supposed to strike you that way. The suggestion about you wasn’t bizarre, it was plainly nuts.
(I tried throwing in all that other stuff so that it would be broad enough for you not to take me seriously for more than a couple of seconds.)
Rahe didn’t even say the Obama “appears” to hate his country, Tsar.
He’s deep into McCarthy territory.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:50 am
cluck, saying that you suspect someone of something connotes even less certainty than saying that someone appears to be something. What you’re objecting to, and what I’m at least ready to criticize, is raising the subject in such a way at all.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:11 am
@CK MacLeod – Tsar, I’ll stop bothering you and this after one last attempt.
There’s no doubt that he means that Obama hates the country.
The fig leaf doesn’t cover anything once he throws in the final adjective.
You might suspect that somebody hates something.
Once you’re talking about deeply hates, it’s only a matter of how much, not if.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:19 am
Well, what I think Rahe wanted to say, or should have said, or should have wanted to say, is that “a conservative cannot help but suspect that on some deep level, maybe even too deep for intentions (or tears), the big Ø hates this country, or has such a different vision of it and of his office that he might as well.”
Maybe they don’t teach pscyhoanalysis, cybernetics, semiotics, or linquistics at Hillsdale.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:38 am
@CK MacLeod – It’s good old timey rhetoric and you can’t much help but learn it if you take a degree in Classics at Oxford.
The guy who taught it to me was a visiting for two years before returning to his regular job as Prof of Classical Phi at Oxford.
He was an interesting guy, came over here to stay with his dad, a pretty famous sci-fi writer named Fritz.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:49 am
Fritz Leiber? Read a book or two of his a zillion years ago.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:00 am
Yes. I liked some of his short stories a bit, not much of his novels.
I’m gonna fold on you for the night, Tsar.
You can reign o’er me some more on the morrow.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:16 am
Well, that assertion that O is no yokel seems to me pretty much unsupported. He hasn’t shown much grasp of American history, and European history might be a big blank.
It’s true that he’s too arrogant to bother to set up and follow procedures to look it up, double-check, etc. Plus he has a secretary of state who is very inexperienced and probably is not consulted in any real way. I think that can account for lots of stupid moves.
It’s true that his natural arrogance is increased in that he seems to be very much thinking that he’s on a roll in foreign policy, correcting this country’s horrible past faults. I guess if ignorantly thinking your country has a lot of past faults and ignorantly thinking that you can correct them this way equates to hating your country, Rahe is correct.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:23 am
@fuster –
Are you familiar with the works of the late great Oxford Don (Merton), AWH Adkins who wrote the book, “On Virtue?”
A question I often pose to the people who want to continue giving the 0bamists and their allies (SEIU/UAW/Teachers Unions/pointy head intellectuals) the benefit of the doubt is:
How much arrogance, how much corruption, how much waste and how much hypocrisy does it take for you to recognize you’ve made a great mistake in ever backing most Democrats over the past 35 years?
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:10 am
The interesting thing is if you look at all of BO’s acquaintences, those people for whom he must have had some admiration and respect, they all hold this to be true. They do hate America. It is not treason to hate America, but I don’t find it that far of a logical leap to say you are angry with America, and that you would like to remake it into something it has not been. Wright, Ayers, Phegler, his wife, etc. all are on record as being none to happy with their nation. While Obama has been much more discreet with his comments, if you take his actions (and the Honduras thing is really mindboggling, I just have no understanding why he is doing that) it doesn’t take much to say he hates America. Of course I am nobody, not a professor of anything anywhere. But his statement on the whole is pretty accurate. What has Obama done to suggest he has any pride in country, and respect for what she is and that he doesn’t hate her? I realize that it is tough to prove a negative, but I am not using it as a rhetorical flourish. His associations and his actions lead to that conclusion. What would counteract that?
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:30 am
Well said, JEM. I guess I just usually go for the “stupid, ignorant” explanation because there’s so much of that out there.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hate is a poor choice of words. President Obama doesn’t hate America. He regrets our clumsy constitutional system, as Julius Caesar regretted Rome’s clumsy republican system and as men whose names shouldn’t ever be uttered regretted Czarist Russia’s system and Weimar Germany’s systems (just to prove I’m taking a value neutral approach).
In this regret he shares Thomas Friedman’s opinion and that of much of the so called “liberal” establishment, present and past. FDR we might recall tried to pack the Supreme Court when it proved an inconvenient institution, before he used the excuse of war to make himself president for life.
Which gets me to fuster’s all too typical and common snark about Tulsa University. Most of its graduates in political science would have had the common sense to check the “on this date in history” calendar before making a major foreign policy speech even though few of them would style themselves as sensitive multiculturalists.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
I don’t think you can hate something subconsciously. You either feel the heat or you don’t. I don’t think Ø feels hated for America. If he gets vicarious pleasure from Ayers’s and Wright’s rantings, that’s a more complicated phenomenon. I also think there’s room in his psyche for a version of America that’s, um, likable enough. It’s just not necessarily the same version as most of ours.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:52 am
Freudian slip there! “Feels hatRed….”
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 am
@Sully – Don’t take the U of Tulsa thing seriously.
It was very much like when I described Stuyvesant HS as a trade school.
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Thanks, Sully. I was trying to remember if I had ever mentioned being a graduate of the University of Tulsa in this forum. Or, in fact, my TOC blog, where fuster sometimes lurks. Wouldn’t put it past cluckster to pull my chain, but researching Rahe seemed like going an uncharacteristically long way out of his way.
And yes, as a TU graduate with a BS in Economics and a BA in Poli Sci, I can vouch for it that we do, as a rule, check our “on this date in history” calendars before making major foreign policy speeches.
Golden Hurricane rules!
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:01 am
@J.E. Dyer –
Golden Hurricane ???!!!!
Is that serious?
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
Check it out, fuster.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:11 am
Did you think it funny when you were a student?
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:16 am
Well, after the speech, I think loathe would be a better description.
Thank you president Obama. The House will flip in 2010 – and you will vie with Carter as the worst US president of the modern era. Americans do not like what he made them out to be. As Patton said – America hates a loser – and folks, we elected a big one. You just cannot say what he said, and expect anything else.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Tulsa sounds great to me. I’ve enjoyed everyone I ever met from Oklahoma.
Anita Hill is a professor somewher in Oklahoma. How can you beat that, Fes?
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
@scientific socialist – And I was a big Leon Russell fan, too.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Yep, the UN speech is a mindbender. O has taken his place as a third-world ideologue, but he doesn’t have the excuse of third-world greed for the spoils.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:10 pm
fuster – “Don’t take the U of Tulsa thing seriously.”
I knew you were joking; but still, it goes to worldview. Bitter semi-literate clingers is all the left can imagine graduating from any but a few select schools. But no lefty politician would ever be so stupid as to say such a thing on camera. . . er.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The US will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements.
Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way needed for the security of Israel
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
@Sully – Yup, ya got me. Me and the other guys all think that if you didn’t attend Patrice Lumumba U. you’re like squaresville.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Careless fuster, or else you didn’t get the memo. All graduates of Patrice Lumumba U are beyond criticism under special category exception one.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
You really meant to say that? I mean, you really think that? Can’t wait to engage you in a negotiation in the future! Easy pickins!
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Me? I’m just repeating what some unAmerican doofus said. Normally any sane person wouldn’t say things like this, but I hear echoes of him in Obama’s remarks.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
I used to live two blocks from Leon Russell’s house.
Didn’t think “Golden Hurricane” was especially funny when I was in college. It’s certainly better than being the Stanford “Cardinal.” Not quite as good as being the North Texas “Mean Green.”
Being between the ages of 17 and 21, I was among the majority who thought it was kind of cool to have a mascot name that wasn’t just an animal or Indian icon. The guy who hopped around the sidelines in a costume is called “Captain ‘Cane,” and is dressed like a cyclone funnel on legs.
BTW, Tulsa is the smallest school that plays in the NCAA “IA” in major sports, including the Football Bowl Subdivision.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
In some ways, I’m with uncle fester, er, I mean fuster, here. I don’t for a minute think the The One hates America. I think he hates our messy system of government and the fact that people actually challenge him. Many people mention Carter or FDR as Presidents they find him most like.
For my buck, he seems to be Woodrow Wilson reincarnated. Already he’s got as good a propaganda apparatus as ol’ WW had.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm
@J.E. Dyer – Golden Hurricane isn’t as humorous as Scottsdale CC’s Fighting Artichokes, but it is suggestive of sport other than football.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
@Bruce NV – Very illuminating, Bruce.
http://www.addamsfamily.com/addams/light.jpg
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Bruce – I don’t think Wilson liked America. So it doesn’t do much to link to him as some Obama break. I do not think Obama likes America. Whether it is loathe, hate, resents, does not accept her founding, thinks it is wrong all the time, I haven’t a care.
Fuster my friend – there is only one thing the Palestinians want from Israel, to disappear- nothing else. They haven’t kept a single promise, not one, in 20 years of talks. I have a solution. Next time the Gaza decides to start lobbing missles, just declare war. Lets acknowledge what already exists, and quit dancing around it. They don’t like each other so lets just solve it. Have a war, winner wins, loser disappears.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm
@J.E. Dyer – Good thing they play Oklahoma only once every 4 years or so.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:28 pm
@JEM – JEM, old buddy, war has been tried repeatedly. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are going to disappear, instead they’re breeding the population up.
There’s gotta be a deal.
(did you find out that I was quoting the Tsar’s favorite president, aside from Jimmy Buchanan?)
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Inaccurate quote; you should have either includedthe phrase “duing the transition” or inserted an ellipsis after “the purpose of settlements”.
Disingenuous, mon ami.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:49 pm
@Bruce NV – I typed it just the way I found it. Wouldn’t have dropped out the middle without notice.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090703/FOREIGN/707029862/1011/NEWS
Put up your version.
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Israeli Council on Foreign Relations
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:02 pm
@Bruce NV – Bruce, the remark was inserted by someone and doesn’t appear there in the text.
http://www.bitterlemons.org/docs/address.html
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Come on, Bruce. Take that disingenuous off me.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:45 pm
CKM — it’s every other year, an in-state tradition. Easy win for the Sooners, opportunity for the GH to punch above their weight.
Of course, in Oklahoma, no matter where the Sooners play, they have the home-field advantage.
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Oklahoma has sports teams? Oh,yeah, didn’t one just lose to the Mormon school from up the street?
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Fuster–all the links I find to RWR’s quote has the “during the transition” phase, but not the parenthetical about elections. I will take away the possibly scurrilous charge of disingenuosness.
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Thank you.
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Bruce NV — yep, Oklahoma lost Sam Bradford and the game. USC, down the street from here, had a remarkably similar reckoning this past weekend, up in the People’s Republic of Washington. Their problem was “difficulty picking the least-inexperienced newbie QB” as opposed to losing their Heisman-winning QB in the first half, but the outcomes proceeded along the same lines.
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Until the Palestinians want a deal, there is no deal to be had. The right of return isn’t going to happen. Israel isn’t going to willingly disappear. These appear to be gotta haves for the Palestinians. So what are they willing to do? Lob rockets and blow up innocents. There is a war happening right now, so why not the next time it flairs up, lets see if someone can just finish it (obviously if either the Bush or Obama admins had any idea of how to handle Iran it would be helpful). There is such a wonderful clarity in a decisive military win.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:12 am