President Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech Thursday is drawing praise from some unlikely quarters – conservative Republicans – who likened Obama’s defense of “just wars” to the worldview of his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.
It’s already being called the “Obama Doctrine” – a notion that foreign policy is a struggle of good and evil, that American exceptionalism has blunted the force of tyranny in the world, and that U.S. military can be a force for good and even harnessed to humanitarian ends.
Manichaeism as described by our beloved fake Christians, how predictable.
The remarks drew immediate praise from a host of conservatives, including former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
No surprise there. Warmongers tend to love war.
“I liked what he said," Palin told USA Today. "Of course, war is the last thing I believe any American wants to engage in, but it's necessary. We have to stop these terrorists."
War is the last thing Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol want. They don't devote every single column they write to pumping up non-threats and agitating for more wars do they?And this lady is the great white hope? Sending your sons and daughters (how emasculated have we become to send women into war?) to die for no reason is really conservative according to Buchanan brigade Sarah.
Gingrich told The Takeaway, a national morning drive show from WNYC and Public Radio International, “He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely, but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said: that there is evil in the world."
Why didn't he bomb Newt Gingrich then?
“I think having a liberal president who goes to Oslo on behalf of a peace prize and reminds the committee that they would not be free, they wouldn't be able to have a peace prize, without having [the ability to use] force,” Gingrich said. “I thought in some ways it's a very historic speech.”
"Historic speech" - in justification of anti-Christian wars after telling America that Obama is ushering in communism from Newt Gingrich. We know what Republicans are really about now.
The context was striking. The president is enormously popular in Norway – a crowd of several thousand waited at his hotel chanting “Obama. Obama. Obama.” And “yes we can. Yes we can. yes we can.” Still, he spoke to the Nobel committee in a room packed with European dignitaries – including the Norwegian royal family — on a continent where skepticism of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is strong. And despite the sentiments in the room, Obama defended the American war effort there and told the Europeans that their reflexive pacifism may be self defeating.
There are brainwashed Obamaphiles in Norway too?
Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms,” Obama said. “The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”
Mr. Obama speaks the truth. But the "global security" has become so entrenched that we now wage war against fake terrorists. Why don't we bring our troops home President Obama? There are people freezing and starving and global security doesn't really register with them. They crave survival and could care less about Germany and Korea. We used to call these folks the Democrat base, but now the Democrat base is found in Hollywood, Oslo, New York, and Tel Aviv. What ever happened to the working man President Obama?
And Obama’s comments came just nine days after the president stood before cadets at West Point and told them that American values are “the moral source of America's authority,” as he ordered an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. His decision to push for a surge also garnered Obama comparisons to Bush, who had done much the same thing in Iraq three years earlier. The Oslo speech, too, reminded some of Obama’s predecessor – with a twist.
Does George Bush or Michael Gerson write Obama's speeches?
“The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was a truly an American president's message to the world,” said Bradley A. Blakeman, a Republican strategist and CEO of Kent Strategies LLC who worked in the Bush White House.
Okay, they do write Obama's speeches.
“Wow. what a shift of emphasis,” said Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former policy advisor to McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Kagan said. “I don't know what to say about an ‘Obama doctrine,’ because based on this speech, I think we are witnessing a substantial shift, back in the direction of a more muscular moralism, ala, Truman, Reagan.”
Robert Kagan, a man who never met a war he didn't like, spouting off about a muscular moralism. How fitting for a warmonger writing for an international endowment for peace.
I close with this question: Is America a joke? Is Western Civilization finished?
"Muscular Moralism." Does it get any more Orwellian than that?
ReplyDeleteIf there is one thing that keeps the otherwise fracturing Republican Party together it's the lust for war. How else can it be explained that a president like Obama, who upped the ante in Pakistan and Afghanistan as soon as he was in office, could be considered "weak"? He'll have to formally invade a country before he can be considered a "great president" like Bush.
Exactly right Carl.
ReplyDeleteWith the neocons, nearly every Republican and a majority of Democrats on the bandwagon of demonizing Iran as another existential threat to America, Obama might just become another Great Leader like Bush.