When it comes to evaluating Barack Obama’s fitness to be president, a lot more than Georgia needs to be on our minds. But we are obligated to give the situation in Georgia plenty of serious thought because how the candidates have reacted to it provides a very important insight into their attitudes regarding government’s most important function: keeping the nation safe through maintaining a strong military and implementing a realistic foreign policy.
In his reaction to Russia’s invasion of a sovereign state that poses no threat to Russia or any other country, John McCain has acquitted himself with wisdom and honor. He didn’t turn to his foreign policy team to help him comprehend the nature of the act. He didn’t pause to see how Europe would respond. Nor did he wait for polls to reveal whether this or that response would gain him an edge in the race. Instead, he immediately denounced Russia’s “path of violent aggression” and reminded Medvedev and Putin of “severe, long-term consequences.”
But McCain is not a man who accepts the “situational ethics” of the sixties. Moreover, he understands that leaders such as Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, and Hu Jintao are not human beings of deep moral substance, who can be counted on because of their rock solid friendship with America.
It is true that like most other prominent politicians, McCain doesn’t fully grasp the truth that the Putins and Jintaos of the world are engaged in an economic war with the United States. (Roger Cohen spoke far too hastily when he announced “the end of the era of the white man [and] the white woman, too.” But he was absolutely correct to report the “fierce culture of education and achievement in the Far East” as well as the fact that “China is bent on beating the U.S.A.”
However, on military issues, the man who is the polar opposite of liberal sixties icon Jane Fonda understands fully that from the Balkans to Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Iran, Iraq, and Darfur, Russia, China, and Chiracian France do not serve as a positive counterbalance to America and American interests but represent an odious, reactionary threat to everything good associated with the fundamental human right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In contrast to McCain, Barack Obama no sooner received the news about Georgia than he knee jerked the standard liberal line — “I think it is important at this point for all sides to show restraint and to stop this arms conflict” — despite the fact that the “new” Russia has clearly revealed its thoroughly old, imperialist self with acts that range from Putin’s mad comment that the breakup of the USSR constitutes the greatest tragedy of the 20th century to threatening a peaceful neighbor with cutting off its gas supplies. (How shocked Obama must have been when Russia recently threatened Poland with nuclear oblivion.)
Aware of the truth about Russia and faced with the latest instance of its signature behavior (that is, the behavior of a constantly besotted bully), Barack Obama’s stream of consciousness ran off to the idea that all involved just need to cool it. What a perfect example of dangerous sixties nonsense that always stands ready to condemn the victim as a criminal.
Yes, Barack Obama’s natural instinct is to form a solidarity with the kind of perverse thinking exemplified by sixties liberals who reacted to a Pennsylvania statute solidifying the right of citizens to use deadly force in protecting themselves from intruders in their homes by condemning it as the “shoot your neighbor law.”
No wonder, then, that Obama failed to forcefully condemn Russia and firmly align himself with formerly enslaved Eastern European nations that have exhibited bravery and a devotion to principle in their responses (no mush-mouth liberal politispeak from Poland, that immediately announced it would accept a U.S. missile shield, or from Ukraine, that restricted the movement of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and offered European nations its early warning missile systems).
So, while the Russian invasion of Georgia burdens the world with yet another foreboding cloud, that cloud — at least to my mind — has a silver lining whose reflected light exposes the fraudulent post racial, post partisan, post everything Barack Obama as the reactionary he is; for he is nothing but a perfect retread of a dogmatic American leftist, a fact certain to be fully amplified when the campaign begins in earnest next month and “other [issues] reach out to me.”
Those issues, including his love of the dictators called liberal activist judges, his Pollyanna energy “plan,” his money-grows-on-trees spending plans, his unyielding support of partial birth abortion, and his astonishing belief that fetuses born alive as a result of botched abortions ought to be left to die, joined with his dangerous ideas about national security, will convince millions more Americans that Barack Obama doesn’t drive on the hope-filled highway of the future but can always be found on “the road [that] leads back to” an era of sleazy styles and even sleazier thought, an era that was dangerous yesterday and is infinitely more dangerous today.
Copyright by A.J. DiCintio
