Amerikaanse presidentsverkiezingen #27

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:03 schreef SuikerVuist het volgende:

[..]

Wedden van niet?

Misschien heb je gelijk, misschien niet. Het staat in ieder geval vast dat over zes dagen, ofzo, de Democratische Conventie begint en ik neem toch aan dat daarvoor al de vice-presidentskandidaat bekend is. Ik zou het niet te laat doen, net voor de Conventie. Of misschien ook wel. Ooh, ik weet het het niet, ik zie wel.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:09 schreef henkway het volgende:

[...]

Slechte berichtgeving door de Nederlandse media zoals gewoonlijk. Woensdag ligt ZEKER niet meer voor de hand dan donderdag of vrijdag. Niemand buiten het Obama-kamp weet het.

Kijken waar ze dit jaar mee komen...

quote:

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0708-11.htm

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 15:36 schreef henkway het volgende:

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Hijis wel een goede om Mc Cain de wind uit de zeilen te nemen.
De ervaring waar iedereen op geilt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden

quote:

Biden has served for the sixth-longest period among current Senators (fourth among Democrats) and is Delaware's longest-serving Senator. He is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 110th Congress.

McCain kan zichzelf wel opeten als Obama voor Biden kiest. Vanaf 1973 maakt hij al deel uit van de U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Biden heeft sowieso de juiste vertrouwde All-American ouwe lul uitstraling:

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:46 schreef pberends het volgende:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden
[..]

McCain kan zichzelf wel opeten als Obama voor Biden kiest.

Biden heeft sowieso de juiste vertrouwde All-American ouwe lul uitstraling:

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:37 schreef SuikerVuist het volgende:

[..]

Slechte berichtgeving door de Nederlandse media zoals gewoonlijk. Woensdag ligt ZEKER niet meer voor de hand dan donderdag of vrijdag. Niemand buiten het Obama-kamp weet het.

quote:

2:34pm UK, Tuesday August 19, 2008
Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama could reveal his running mate as early as tomorrow, according to reports in the US.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:50 schreef Monidique het volgende:

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Joe Biden: Noun + Verb + 9/11 = Giuliani Vocabulary

Rudi Guiliani the most unqualified man since George Bush

Mc Cain mag hopen dat hij die nooit tegen komt in a debate

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:50 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Joe Biden: Noun + Verb + 9/11 = Giuliani Vocabulary

Haha, geniaal, ik ben nu al fan van hem .

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:55 schreef pberends het volgende:

[..]

Haha, geniaal, ik ben nu al fan van hem .

Wat kan hij toch gevoelig geld verzamelen en voor hem geschreven teksten oplezen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:57 schreef Monidique het volgende:

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Biden-Rudy Smackdown

die blik!!!

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 07:17 schreef StefanP het volgende:

Mocht je willen. Samen met de rest van Europa. Zullen jullie even van een koude kermis thuiskomen.

Put your money where your mouth is.

http://www.intrade.com/

Als McCain wint verdien je binnen een paar maanden 167% op je geld.

Joe Biden is een zwaktebod. Kaine is de enige van de grote namen die niet een zwakke punt van Obama onderstreept, Joe Biden (foreign affairs en ervaring), Evan Bayh (ervaring, Clinton aanhang)

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 19:08 schreef Fokski het volgende:
Joe Biden is een zwaktebod. Kaine is de enige van de grote namen die niet een zwakke punt van Obama onderstreept, Joe Biden (foreign affairs en ervaring), Evan Bayh (ervaring, Clinton aanhang)

Foreign affairs is geen zwak punt van Obama, integendeel, het is er juist wel een van John McCain. De perceptie is misschien dat het een van de zwakke punten is van Obama, maar feitelijk is dat niet zo.

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 16:50 schreef henkway het volgende:
[..]

[..]

Er staat could. De Obama-campagne gaat dit zoveel mogelijk uitbuiten. Door telkens de indruk te wekken dat de VP-nominatie er bijna zit aan te komen is Obama nu al een paar dagen voorpagina-nieuws zonder dat hij er iets voor heeft hoeven doen.

Biden op zich is niet het onderwerp van die weblog, maar toch:

quote:

Apparently, that's the way many Democrats believe they can and should answer the accusations that they're "weak" on national security -- not by contesting the underlying premises that starting wars is a sign of "strength,' but instead, by proving that they, too, want to prosecute wars -- just perhaps in different places or with different tactics. As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden also voted to authorize the attack on Iraq.

And Biden just returned from visiting Georgia, spouting all sorts of bluster towards Russia ("Russia's actions in Georgia will have consequences") and demanding that $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer money be transferred to Georgia to help them after they decided to start their own war (McClatchy: "Biden talks tough after Georgia visit"). As Billmon documented yesterday, Biden has been a leading proponent of passing legislation to demand NATO admission for Georgia and, even without it, to treat Georgia as though it is a full-fledged U.S. ally (Billmon: "There are times, it seems, when Joe Biden can be damned near as dangerous as Dick Cheney"). In Biden's mind, nobody will accuse him of being "weak" -- because he exudes the mandatory affection for using U.S. military force in a wide variety of situations far beyond self-defense.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/19/rice/index.html

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 19:23 schreef AlanSmitheeJr het volgende:

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Er staat could. De Obama-campagne gaat dit zoveel mogelijk uitbuiten. Door telkens de indruk te wekken dat de VP-nominatie er bijna zit aan te komen is Obama nu al een paar dagen voorpagina-nieuws zonder dat hij er iets voor heeft hoeven doen.

Obama heeft een heel sterk campagne team dat is mij al meer opgevallen, hij is dus goed in het verzamelen van een sterk team

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 19:22 schreef Monidique het volgende:

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Foreign affairs is geen zwak punt van Obama, integendeel, het is er juist wel een van John McCain. De perceptie is misschien dat het een van de zwakke punten is van Obama, maar feitelijk is dat niet zo.

Wat mij betreft is het lood om oud ijzer voor die twee, maar wat betreft Obama blijf ik erbij dat hij een hol vat is. Veel rhetoriek, weinig substantieels.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 19:22 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Foreign affairs is geen zwak punt van Obama, integendeel, het is er juist wel een van John McCain. De perceptie is misschien dat het een van de zwakke punten is van Obama, maar feitelijk is dat niet zo.

You're preaching to the choir. Wat een Joe Biden echter zegt is "Ja, ik weet niet veel over foreign affairs" maar mijn vice-president heeft voldoende ervaring op dat gebied". Daarom denk ik dat hij eigenlijk niet met Joe Biden kan gaan omdat het zeker met de Georgie conflict de aandacht met Biden helemaal op foreign affairs legt en de zogenaamde gebrek aan kennis van Obama en als we het over foreign affairs hebben dan is de perceptie dat McCain in het voordeel is of hij nou fout na fout maakt of niet. Met Kaine is het motto "change" en ondanks de media die het dan op te weinig ervaring zal gooien is dat in elk geval een betere stap en kan hij het in elk geval na een tijdje op de economie gooien, zeker gezien het feit dat Virginia een staat is die al meerdere jaren op rij de beste economisch klimaat wordt bedicht.

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 20:12 schreef Lyrebird het volgende:

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Wat mij betreft is het lood om oud ijzer voor die twee, maar wat betreft Obama blijf ik erbij dat hij een hol vat is. Veel rhetoriek, weinig substantieels.

Wil je substantie dan moet je niet zo zeer naar de speeches luisteren maar het economisch plan gaan lezen. Je verwacht toch niet dat hij in speeches het volk in slaap sust, aangezien ze de helft toch niet begrijpen? Benoem Obama's retoriek eens.

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Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 19:22 schreef Monidique het volgende:

[..]

Foreign affairs is geen zwak punt van Obama, integendeel, het is er juist wel een van John McCain. De perceptie is misschien dat het een van de zwakke punten is van Obama, maar feitelijk is dat niet zo.

Facts don't matter, perception matters...

running for president gaat je niet in de koude kleren zitten

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 20:22 schreef Fokski het volgende:
Benoem Obama's retoriek eens.

Ik laat dat over aan Jonah Goldberg en de National Review:

________
"Hear Me, Earthlings!’
Citizen Obama addresses the world

JONAH GOLDBERG

The joke about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech was that “it was better in the original German.” It’s tempting to assume that Barack Obama’s Berlin speech was better in the original Esperanto. Speaking near the Brandenburg Gate, Obama proclaimed that he was visiting Berlin not as a politician, but as a “proud citizen of the United States” and — this is the telling part — as a “fellow citizen of the world.” (That’s sampatriano de la mondo in Esperanto, for those interested.) Ronald Reagan used the same phrase, but there are no “citizens of the world.” Citizenship requires a state, and unless the United Nations has started issuing passports for all earthlings (can you imagine the lines at the office?), the world has no citizens.

It’s tempting to dismiss Obama’s Berlin speech as a gassy concatenation of sophomoric platitudes. The trouble is that this vision of world history — and the world’s future — wasn’t read by a postcolonial-studies major at Ithaca College, from a text illuminated by a lava lamp, with rhetorical flourishes punctuated by bong hits. It was delivered to a throng of some 200,000 adoring, glassy-eyed people by the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party. The Obama campaign billed the speech as a natural continuation of Berlin speeches by JFK and Reagan, two similarly gifted orators who at the time of their own speeches had the added advantage of actually being president, with reason to speak in Berlin more substantial than that they happened to be passing through. Meanwhile, a sycophantic global press corps hyped Obama’s speech, before and after, as something akin to an inaugural address from the first President of Planet Earth.

That this was no dorm-room discourse is in one sense a good thing, since Obama’s history of the Cold War was not the sort of thing you’d expect from anyone with even a little college history under his belt. In the senator’s telling, the Soviet Union was not defeated in a twilight struggle between billions of people; rather, it was defeated by global unity. The lesson of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, according to Obama: “There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

This is a bit like saying the lesson of the Crusades has something to do with the redemptive power of interfaith bingo nights. Were the millions of avowed Communists not part of the world? How about the belligerents in Korea and Vietnam, to cite just two of the many proxy wars during that age of global unity? And the billions who formed the Non-Aligned bloc? Or the numerous states that bartered their allegiance with the West and the Soviets — were they part of this global unity? What of the hordes of left-wing activists and agitators here in the United States who blamed America first, last, and always? The Sane Freezers who took to the streets of Berlin to denounce America, not the Soviet Union? How about Obama’s friend, former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers? Didn’t he plot bombings of American — not Soviet — troops? With unity like this, one shudders to wonder what divisiveness might have looked like.

Obama’s blithe revisionism is similar to Bill Clinton’s famous claim in 1993 that Americans were unified during the Cold War. “We had an intellectually coherent thing,” he effused. “The American people knew what the rules were.” Clinton even joked, “Gosh, I miss the Cold War” — because things were so much easier during that time of consensus and unity. This, of course, was the man who described the war in Vietnam as “a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I have reserved solely for racism in America.”

But you have to give Bill Clinton some credit. Even in his gauzy fiction, there was still a Cold War. It was still America and her allies against an actual enemy, fighting for something. In Obama’s telling the Cold War was a universal human endeavor, the whole world united for the sake of unity, hopeful in the cause of . . . hope. We tore down “walls” — real and figurative, or figuratively real — and now the world is threatened again, not by bad people but by those terrible walls. Not real walls, like the barrier that once stood in Berlin, but the even more frightening metaphorical ones. “The greatest danger,” Obama declared, is not terrorism or global warming or even nuclear war. No, the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.” Then he added: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

Okay, so: Walls are bad according to Barack Obama. Got it. Of course, when Obama talks of walls, he often sounds like he’s really talking about differences — differences between nations, peoples, religions, and their not-always-harmonious interests. But these differences are real. Tear down the walls between Israelis and Palestinians and you won’t have peace; you’ll have a lot of dead Israelis or dead Palestinians, or both. Dismantle all distinctions between natives and immigrants, and sovereignty — along with real citizenship — evaporates.

Reagan’s universalism was of a different sort, and his argument was that liberty is not a uniquely American possession: “And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the world: Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children.” Reagan’s universalism was a mark of confidence in American values. In Obama’s rhetoric, by contrast, you hear a deeply romantic cosmopolitanism: He says the world won’t tolerate our eating to our hearts’ content and air-conditioning our homes as we please, and argues that we should stop caring whether immigrants learn English and instead make sure our kids learn Spanish. He has agonized like Prufrock (“Do I dare?”) over whether to wear a flag pin. His presumptuous and quickly withdrawn mock presidential seal had no room for E pluribus unum. He explained to San Francisco fat-cats that rural Americans bitterly “cling” to their bizarre rituals, unnecessary weapons, and ancient sky god, all because they’ve been left out on globalization. There are many problems with the worldview that these statements bring into focus. Let us concentrate on three.

First, there’s what could be called Obama’s arrogant Manichaeism. “My rival in this race,” he said early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” Cynics are, naturally, those who disagree with Barack Obama. Again and again, he dismisses critics and criticism by castigating “divisiveness.” Then there’s his slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” part of his persistently messianic rhetoric, which seems to suggest that those who are not onboard are not just divisive, but un-anointed: the ones we haven’t been waiting for. Obama himself is never “divisive” for disagreeing with people. “Us” are those who rally to Obama the Unifier; “them” are forever the divisive ones. (Perhaps the GOP should adopt the slogan: “We Are the Ones You’re Tired Of.”) In short, Obama leads the bridge builders in the glorious struggle against the wall builders.

Second, what about those walls? It’s not surprising, given how recycled it all sounded to Americans who’ve been paying attention, that much of Obama’s Berlin rhetoric was merely an extension of his obsession with unity for its own sake, as though this were the highest good. But not only is unity between nation-states not the same thing as unity between individuals, unity for its own sake in foreign affairs has led to cataclysmic confrontations (see “World War I”). Moreover, if the “greatest danger” we face is the possibility of “new walls,” then the upshot of Obamism is that the War on Terror — or, if it’s more your style, a War on Climate Change — must take a backseat to the more pressing War on Walls. Such a foreign policy would entrench the liberal fetish for collective action: Remember John Kerry’s “global test”? The overarching principle of Democratic foreign policy seems to be that it’s better to be wrong in a group than to be right alone.

Third, Obama the Cosmopolitan seems to have a real problem distinguishing between the domestic and international spheres. If in his ideal world there would be no “walls” between foreigners and citizens, between Country A and Country B, then why have anything like nations in the first place? If we’re all citizens of the world, what is the point of being a citizen of anyplace else? He speaks not of America’s burdens, but of the burdens of global citizenship.

Already, Obama has made it clear that his view of the Constitution is entirely open, and can be molded to whatever conception of justice fires the hearts and illuminates the minds of transnational progressives. He says he agrees “with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution — that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” That’s one reason Breyer is the Supreme Court’s leading advocate of invoking foreign laws — even foreign polls — to glean the Constitution’s latest meaning. Obama has also confessed that his foremost criterion for selecting judges will be that they have “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” Given such a standard, how difficult would it be to add empathy for fellow citizens of the world who, by no more than an accident of birth, aren’t citizens of the United States? (Not too hard, it seems, given Obama’s enthusiastic support for granting constitutional rights to foreign terrorists captured abroad and held outside the United States.)

All of this might be defensible, even laudable, if it were the musings of a philosopher describing the best possible world. But we aren’t electing a philosopher; we’re electing a commander-in-chief who is supposed to be a zealous defender of our nation, our Constitution, and our interests — in the world in which we live. There’s nothing wrong, and much that is right, in trying to do good for the rest of that world, in whole or in part. But it would be nice if Obama could make it clear he understands that that’s a fringe benefit of being president, not the first line of the job description.
__________

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 21:46 schreef Lyrebird het volgende:

[..]

Ik laat dat over aan Jonah Goldberg en de National Review:

________
"Hear Me, Earthlings!’
Citizen Obama addresses the world

JONAH GOLDBERG

The joke about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech was that “it was better in the original German.” It’s tempting to assume that Barack Obama’s Berlin speech was better in the original Esperanto. Speaking near the Brandenburg Gate, Obama proclaimed that he was visiting Berlin not as a politician, but as a “proud citizen of the United States” and — this is the telling part — as a “fellow citizen of the world.” (That’s sampatriano de la mondo in Esperanto, for those interested.) Ronald Reagan used the same phrase, but there are no “citizens of the world.” Citizenship requires a state, and unless the United Nations has started issuing passports for all earthlings (can you imagine the lines at the office?), the world has no citizens.

It’s tempting to dismiss Obama’s Berlin speech as a gassy concatenation of sophomoric platitudes. The trouble is that this vision of world history — and the world’s future — wasn’t read by a postcolonial-studies major at Ithaca College, from a text illuminated by a lava lamp, with rhetorical flourishes punctuated by bong hits. It was delivered to a throng of some 200,000 adoring, glassy-eyed people by the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic party. The Obama campaign billed the speech as a natural continuation of Berlin speeches by JFK and Reagan, two similarly gifted orators who at the time of their own speeches had the added advantage of actually being president, with reason to speak in Berlin more substantial than that they happened to be passing through. Meanwhile, a sycophantic global press corps hyped Obama’s speech, before and after, as something akin to an inaugural address from the first President of Planet Earth.

That this was no dorm-room discourse is in one sense a good thing, since Obama’s history of the Cold War was not the sort of thing you’d expect from anyone with even a little college history under his belt. In the senator’s telling, the Soviet Union was not defeated in a twilight struggle between billions of people; rather, it was defeated by global unity. The lesson of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, according to Obama: “There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

This is a bit like saying the lesson of the Crusades has something to do with the redemptive power of interfaith bingo nights. Were the millions of avowed Communists not part of the world? How about the belligerents in Korea and Vietnam, to cite just two of the many proxy wars during that age of global unity? And the billions who formed the Non-Aligned bloc? Or the numerous states that bartered their allegiance with the West and the Soviets — were they part of this global unity? What of the hordes of left-wing activists and agitators here in the United States who blamed America first, last, and always? The Sane Freezers who took to the streets of Berlin to denounce America, not the Soviet Union? How about Obama’s friend, former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers? Didn’t he plot bombings of American — not Soviet — troops? With unity like this, one shudders to wonder what divisiveness might have looked like.

Obama’s blithe revisionism is similar to Bill Clinton’s famous claim in 1993 that Americans were unified during the Cold War. “We had an intellectually coherent thing,” he effused. “The American people knew what the rules were.” Clinton even joked, “Gosh, I miss the Cold War” — because things were so much easier during that time of consensus and unity. This, of course, was the man who described the war in Vietnam as “a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I have reserved solely for racism in America.”

But you have to give Bill Clinton some credit. Even in his gauzy fiction, there was still a Cold War. It was still America and her allies against an actual enemy, fighting for something. In Obama’s telling the Cold War was a universal human endeavor, the whole world united for the sake of unity, hopeful in the cause of . . . hope. We tore down “walls” — real and figurative, or figuratively real — and now the world is threatened again, not by bad people but by those terrible walls. Not real walls, like the barrier that once stood in Berlin, but the even more frightening metaphorical ones. “The greatest danger,” Obama declared, is not terrorism or global warming or even nuclear war. No, the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.” Then he added: “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

Okay, so: Walls are bad according to Barack Obama. Got it. Of course, when Obama talks of walls, he often sounds like he’s really talking about differences — differences between nations, peoples, religions, and their not-always-harmonious interests. But these differences are real. Tear down the walls between Israelis and Palestinians and you won’t have peace; you’ll have a lot of dead Israelis or dead Palestinians, or both. Dismantle all distinctions between natives and immigrants, and sovereignty — along with real citizenship — evaporates.

Reagan’s universalism was of a different sort, and his argument was that liberty is not a uniquely American possession: “And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the world: Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children.” Reagan’s universalism was a mark of confidence in American values. In Obama’s rhetoric, by contrast, you hear a deeply romantic cosmopolitanism: He says the world won’t tolerate our eating to our hearts’ content and air-conditioning our homes as we please, and argues that we should stop caring whether immigrants learn English and instead make sure our kids learn Spanish. He has agonized like Prufrock (“Do I dare?”) over whether to wear a flag pin. His presumptuous and quickly withdrawn mock presidential seal had no room for E pluribus unum. He explained to San Francisco fat-cats that rural Americans bitterly “cling” to their bizarre rituals, unnecessary weapons, and ancient sky god, all because they’ve been left out on globalization. There are many problems with the worldview that these statements bring into focus. Let us concentrate on three.

First, there’s what could be called Obama’s arrogant Manichaeism. “My rival in this race,” he said early in 2007, “is not other candidates. It’s cynicism.” Cynics are, naturally, those who disagree with Barack Obama. Again and again, he dismisses critics and criticism by castigating “divisiveness.” Then there’s his slogan “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” part of his persistently messianic rhetoric, which seems to suggest that those who are not onboard are not just divisive, but un-anointed: the ones we haven’t been waiting for. Obama himself is never “divisive” for disagreeing with people. “Us” are those who rally to Obama the Unifier; “them” are forever the divisive ones. (Perhaps the GOP should adopt the slogan: “We Are the Ones You’re Tired Of.”) In short, Obama leads the bridge builders in the glorious struggle against the wall builders.

Second, what about those walls? It’s not surprising, given how recycled it all sounded to Americans who’ve been paying attention, that much of Obama’s Berlin rhetoric was merely an extension of his obsession with unity for its own sake, as though this were the highest good. But not only is unity between nation-states not the same thing as unity between individuals, unity for its own sake in foreign affairs has led to cataclysmic confrontations (see “World War I”). Moreover, if the “greatest danger” we face is the possibility of “new walls,” then the upshot of Obamism is that the War on Terror — or, if it’s more your style, a War on Climate Change — must take a backseat to the more pressing War on Walls. Such a foreign policy would entrench the liberal fetish for collective action: Remember John Kerry’s “global test”? The overarching principle of Democratic foreign policy seems to be that it’s better to be wrong in a group than to be right alone.

Third, Obama the Cosmopolitan seems to have a real problem distinguishing between the domestic and international spheres. If in his ideal world there would be no “walls” between foreigners and citizens, between Country A and Country B, then why have anything like nations in the first place? If we’re all citizens of the world, what is the point of being a citizen of anyplace else? He speaks not of America’s burdens, but of the burdens of global citizenship.

Already, Obama has made it clear that his view of the Constitution is entirely open, and can be molded to whatever conception of justice fires the hearts and illuminates the minds of transnational progressives. He says he agrees “with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution — that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” That’s one reason Breyer is the Supreme Court’s leading advocate of invoking foreign laws — even foreign polls — to glean the Constitution’s latest meaning. Obama has also confessed that his foremost criterion for selecting judges will be that they have “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” Given such a standard, how difficult would it be to add empathy for fellow citizens of the world who, by no more than an accident of birth, aren’t citizens of the United States? (Not too hard, it seems, given Obama’s enthusiastic support for granting constitutional rights to foreign terrorists captured abroad and held outside the United States.)

All of this might be defensible, even laudable, if it were the musings of a philosopher describing the best possible world. But we aren’t electing a philosopher; we’re electing a commander-in-chief who is supposed to be a zealous defender of our nation, our Constitution, and our interests — in the world in which we live. There’s nothing wrong, and much that is right, in trying to do good for the rest of that world, in whole or in part. But it would be nice if Obama could make it clear he understands that that’s a fringe benefit of being president, not the first line of the job description.
__________

Wat heeft de speech van Obama in Berlijn hier nou mee te maken? Ik zie ook weinig richting in Goldberg's column.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 augustus 2008 21:46 schreef Lyrebird het volgende:

[..]

Ik laat dat over aan Jonah Goldberg en de National Review:

________
"Hear Me, Earthlings!’
Citizen Obama addresses the world

JONAH GOLDBERG

Samengevat: Oh my god! Obama noemde zichzelf een “fellow citizen of the world.”, en dat bestaat niet want de VN deelt geen paspoorten uit!!!! Obama is niet op de hoogte van zulke simpele feiten, het zou dus waanzin zijn om hem president te maken.

Dat McCain de Amerikanen vertelde dat ze allemaal Georgiërs waren kunnen we best negeren.

En ja, ik heb inderdaad niet het hele artikel gelezen. Toen ze over lavalampen en "bong hits" begonnen dwaalde m'n aandacht af...

[ Bericht 6% gewijzigd door Drijfzand op 19-08-2008 22:54:48 ]