Obama is the Republican candidate
I’ve said elsewhere before that possibly the most irritating thing about Republican attacks on Obama is that they’ve spent 8 years putting him in the oval office. They’ve been way over the line by even the standards of mainstream politics for a long time — and they know it. While they were all cheerleading this torture stuff and agreeing among themselves how cool it would be if they eavesdropped on every single phone call, email and IM on a global basis — did they not imagine a Democratic landslide might result? Let’s face it — Obama is the Republican candidate.
Now it turns out that former Bush spokesman Scott McClellan agrees with me, in a roundabout way. This article discusses his backing of Obama’s campaign and in it we find:
“It’s a message that is very similar to the one that Gov. Bush ran on in 2000,” McClellan said in May about Obama’s campaign.
Well, yeah. And how’d that one work out, by the way?
The difference between us is that McClellan probably thought he was saying something ironic.
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I live in Chicago–the very epicenter of Obama Country.
Mark my words: Bush’s blindly loyal fundamentalist, Stone Age-minded, evangelical, bible-thumping disciples will look positively progressive compared to the Obamacrats if Obama wins the election.
The U.S. military will be able to slaughter every woman and child in Afghanistan under Obama’s watch, and haul off every dissenter in this country to Guantanamo to boot, and the Obamacrats will still praise his grand humanitarian vision as nothing less than the salvation of all mankind.
Some of them can barely see an inch in front of their faces through their rose-colored glasses, and the rest of them are filled with a religious fervor that scares the shit out of me.
We’ll see about that, Robert. Many Obama supporters are definitely blinded by “hope,” but I can’t imagine Obama enabling the slaughter of every Afghan woman and child or the hauling off of every dissenter in this country to Guantanamo, especially since he opposes Guantanamo.
I tell you what, though, Robert. Let’s have a bet. I bet you $100 that by the end of the Obama administration, there will be no large-scale imprisonment of dissenters in the United States. Let’s see you put your money where your mouth is. You game?
And yes, I’m dead serious about the bet. You can email me at cielomobile AT gmail DOT com and I’ll provide you with my real contact info, which you can provide to the authorities if you’re right ;).
Belinsky: I should have typed “would” instead of “will.”
I’m not predicting that Obama really will have dissenters dragged off to Guantanomo en masse, nor that he actually will have every Afghan man, woman and child slaughtered by the U.S. military.
My point is that considering the extent to which many of his supporters are willing to overlook some of the fuzziness of many of his positions, I have no doubt that he COULD do those things and many of them would yet rationalize their messiah’s actions.
For example: Many of them seem to be under the impression that he wants to withdraw from Iraq, which is simply not true. He’s always talking about “drawing down” the number of troops in Iraq, not withdrawing the entire intervention. His own web site explicitly states that he will leave a “residual force” in that country. What “residual force” means is anybody’s guess. Maybe he’ll draw that force down to 20,000, 40,000, 70,000 troops? 80,000? 90,000? And he takes every opportunity he can to promote his idea of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. (He’s been calling for an additional two or three brigades.)
As for civil liberties, I don’t recall him mentioning the issue on the stump in any meaningful way one single time. (Though I guess I could have missed it if he did, but it sure doesn’t look like he’s drawn much attention to it.) He’s made no mention of the PATRIOT Act or government spying that I can recall. And he voted for that awful bill granting retroactive immunity to big telecom companies who have participated in electronic eavesdropping in the past.
So I won’t take you up on that bet. I’m not predicting that there will be any “large-scale” imprisonment of dissenters under the Obama regime. But if you don’t think ANY dissenters will be imprisoned on his watch, I think you give him much too much credit, but we’ll see. And he may not enable the slaughter of every Afghan woman and child, but if he goes through with his proposal to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, that certainly means MORE Afghan women and children will be killed, and we’ll see if the Obamacrats get as exercised about Obama’s warmongering as they did about Bush’s. I’m not holding my breath.
But you’re right to call me out considering how my comment was worded. My intention, however, was to draw the uppermost bounds of Obama’s potential actions as president without his flock losing faith in him, not to claim that he actually will cross those lines. You’re right that there’s certainly no need for hyperbole, especially considering that Obama adequately damns himself enough with his own words.