Obama's Bombs Boo-Boos

Republicans and Democrats have one thing in common. A majority in both parties want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. Democrats want this because they are sure she can win. Republicans want it because, even though they also think she is most likely to win, they think it will rile their base sufficiently that it will amount to a Democratic Pyrrhic victory, and enable the Republican Party to regain Congress by 2010.

Because of this, Barak Obama can't catch a break. First, he is criticized for saying he would, in his first year in office, meet with Cubas's Castro, Venezuela's Chavez, Iran's Ahmadinejahd, Syria's Assad, and North Korea's Kim Jung Il.

Later on, he made the statement that if the US had actionable intelligence as to the whereabouts of Bin Laden in Pakistan, he would act without the permission or participation of President Musharaf.

Hillary Clinton criticized him especially over the first statement, but it is mostly Republicans that you hear engaging in rhetoric over both points, more so seemingly than Democrats.

Well, if the US receives actionable intelligence on Bin Laden, I would hope any President would act immediately.

As for him engaging in dialogue with Castro his first year in office-well, if anything that would be about fifty years too late. Ike should have done that, and though his inaction made it impossible for Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter to have done so, Reagan certainly passed up a golden opportunity, along with the first President Bush and Bill Clinton.

Way too many people of course jump to the conclusion that engaging in diplomacy with a nation is tantamount to kissing that nation's ass. That is simply not true on the face of it, though of course it can lead to that. Nor am I saying that Barak Obama is necessarily the best person to be leading these diplomatic initiatives. He is probably not. Nor is this post to be construed as support for the candidacy of Obama. It is most definitely not.

He does, however, have the generally right idea. Where I fault him for more than anything is his promise-a very ill-advised and naive promise-to never use nuclear weapons.

Somebody should gently take him aside and point out the fact that our use of nuclear weapons in World War II against the Japanese, in August of 1945, not only shortened the war considerably, but saved probably tens of thousands of American lives, and maybe, on balance, hundreds of thousands (if not more than a million) of Japanese lives.

Somebody should point out to him that, if not for the threat of nuclear weapons, there probably would have never been a Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. That is because, quite simply, the Korean War would probably have led to World War III in the early to mid nineteen fifties, where we would have faced not only the Soviets, but the People's Republic of China as well.

Without the threat of nuclear weapons, Russia probably would have overrun the European continent by the late nineteen sixties. They possibly also would have gone on to overrun the Middle East, and there may have eventually been a larger war with China that may have resulted in the greatest civilian massacre in world history.

Just the mere threat of nuclear holocaust has saved potentially billions of lives, and hundreds of billions (at least) of dollars worth of infrastructure. To say nothing of the potential environmental damage resulting from famine, pestilence, plaques, etc., that would have made what goes on in many parts of the world today look like a picnic in the park.

Nevertheless, politicians like Obama make these kinds of statements in an ironic attempt to come across as humane.

I would advise Obama to read his Neitzche. I'm sure Hillary has.

Still, make no mistake about it, the Democratic Party as a whole does not favor Obama. That's why you had Ted Kennedy, way before he ever announced for the Presidency (though he was touted publicly as a contender) going out of his way to introduce him at an event as "Osama Obama". Real cute.

Nor can there be any doubt as to why Republican activists like Ann Coulter refer to him habitually as "B. Hussein Obama" while suggesting that he is secretly a Muslim.

And that is why mainstream journalists go out of their way to trumpet Hillary's rise in the polls, six months before the first caucus and primary, as evidence that she is well on her way to sewing up the party's nomination.

What you have is a case of the doors to the Democratic nomination, and possibly the White House, held wide open for Hillary. One door is being held by the movers and shakers within the Democratic Party establishment, and the door on the right, by the Republicans.

I used to think she didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning the general election. Now, I'm not so sure.