I had expected to write an analysis of last night’s presidential debate today. But I had trouble watching it, never mind figuring out what to say about it.
What is obvious is that Romney was advised to play it safe: not coming out against Obama too strongly, so as to avoid appearing “aggressive” or “war-like.” Undecided voters might be afraid of him if he were to be too “strong,” might worry that he would lead the country into war. So went the thinking, which is not exactly my thinking.
But this most decidedly does not make Obama a “winner,” though some would have it as such. For what counts in the end is the content of what was said. That Romney may not have countered Obama as strongly as he might have in no way mitigates the hypocrisy and the wrongheadedness of Obama’s statements.
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What I would like to do here is provide commentary on the debate from Daniel Greenfield (emphasis added):
“…Barack Obama came to the debate with a roster of prepared speeches, few of them about foreign affairs and most of them about the economy. Even while his Secretary of Defense has given an unprecedented order to top military officials to stonewall the congressional investigation into Benghazigate, even as it has become known that his administration watched four Americans be murdered in real time and did not lift a finger to save their lives, talking points prepared by highly paid speechwriters fell out of his mouth assuring the American people that everything was going well. There was nothing wrong except for a few non-optimal bumps in the road made up of dead Americans.
“Anyone listening to Obama would have to conclude, like Voltaire’s Pangloss, that we truly live in the best of all possible worlds. During the Bush administration, liberal pols like Obama liked to claim that they were part of the reality-based community. But as Calvin of ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ said, ‘I’m not in denial. I’m just very selective about the reality I accept.’ Obama would appear to have joined Calvin’s selective reality community.
“Instead of discussing foreign affairs and national security, the Contender-in-Chief did his best to divert the debate with a talking point that he called ‘Nation Building at Home.’ ‘Nation Building’ is usually a term reserved for the reconstruction of backward or broken nations. That Obama insisted on applying it to the United States was telling…
“…As he does in every speech and at every campaign event, Obama patted himself on the back for ending the Iraq War on Bush’s timetable, without conceding that it was Bush’s timetable, while accusing Romney of wanting to keep troops in Iraq. In reality, Obama’s own Vice President and Secretary of Defense had tried to negotiate an agreement to keep troops in Iraq. Obama lied about it then and has continued the proud tradition of lying about it now.
“Once again Obama repeated his claim that the move to Afghanistan was an attempt to refocus the fight against Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda continues to carry out far more terrorist attacks in Iraq, than in Afghanistan.
“This week Al Qaeda bombmakers in Iraq supplied the explosives for a plot that would have killed thousands in neighboring Jordan…demonstrating that Al Qaeda in Iraq remains a far more dangerous and destabilizing presence than in Afghanistan.
“Obama showed his cluelessness again by boasting of having wrecked Iran’s economy while assuring the audience that this would make the Islamic Republic give up its nuclear program. North Korea’s economy is even more wrecked than Iran and its nuclear program remains on track. Given a choice between guns and butter, fanatical dictatorships will choose guns.
“’One thing Americans should be proud of,’ Obama said, chin held high, ‘when Tunisians began to protest, this nation, I, stood on the side of the protesters.’ And as a result of Obama’s stand, Tunisia, a formerly free nation has been taken over by genocidal Islamists, Sufis are being persecuted, tourists assaulted and rape victims put on trial. Perhaps that is something that Obama could be proud of, but few Americans would be.
“’In Egypt, we stood on the side of democracy,’ Obama continued, and that is true. The outcome of that stand on the side of democracy has been another genocidal Islamist takeover, an attack on the US Embassy in Cairo…
“…From Iraq to Libya, from Afghanistan to Egypt, and back home where the nation building program never stops and the beneficiaries are his own bundlers and donors, Obama could not point to a single success. Even in Obama’s state of selective reality, there was nothing there. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are all violently unstable danger zones and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And the homefront is divided between those who are looking for work, those who have given up looking for work and those who expect to have to begin looking for work at any time.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/insecure-obama-insecure-world/
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Got the picture, folks? So it doesn’t matter if some polls and some commentators declared Obama the winner of the debate. The nation will be the loser if he wins the election.
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On final thought here: Greenfield’s comments about Obama’s selective reality echoed a similar thought by another writer — Craig S. Karpel. He has written The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter, a deeply insightful analysis of a very serious subject — addiction to Obama — that manages to be funny at the same time.
Karpel writes:
“Denial is our inner mind saying to our outer mind, ‘Nothing to see here. Move along.’. . . Even when we realized that this president was incompetent, we were in denial about our own incompetence as voters.”
“Obama’s election was the triumph of biography over achievement. We allowed ourselves to become Obama-news junkies, in the grip of lack-of-substance abuse.”
“We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault — it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”
So true, so true. You can get this at Amazon (in Kindle format).
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© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.
