Two Articles - Two Candidates

Two articles in today's NY Times ("The McCain Doctrines" and "The Long Run: The Story of Obama, Written by Obama") should illustrate, for any objective observer, the chasm between the qualifications of the two prospective candidates for the presidency this year. Obama is all biography, while McCain has given long and deep consideration to one of the most pressing issues in this campaign. foreign policy and the place and obligation of America in the world.

Of course, in keeping with current political and intellectual fashion, the Times and the rest of the mainstream media have given their collective hearts to Obama, the candidate of "change" and the man who "looks like the rest of the world" and who will make us loved everywhere. The irony is that the"intellectual" Obama, the darling of the self-selected "intelligentsia" - Harvard-educated, expounding in mellifluous tones - is considered the intellectual candidate, while "old as dirt" McCain is derided as the Bush-clone military know-nothing - all patriotism and gore, and no thought.

The two articles, by the leftist Times, taken together, show that the opposite is true. Obama is running on his biography; no one can be certain what his true beliefs are and what his policy will be - except that it will be pleasing to the (often anti-American) pacifist Left. He will do whatever it takes to avoid taking hard actions displeasing to the academics and Liberal think tanks. How he arrives at his policies, beyond being true to the ideological biases of the Left is unknown. There is not even any exposition on what exactly he proposes to do beyond "get out of Iraq" (how? what will happen when we leave? does it matter?) and to "engage our adversaries". His defenders have taken every shameful intellectual short-cut (even resorting to non sequitur and false analogies) to hide the shallowness of his thinking and the lack of his experience and record on the issues: WHAT exactly is he going to require Israel to do to "accommodate" the "rights" of the Palestinians? How is he going to engage Iran? What incentives is he planning to offer Iran beyond what the pusillanimous Europeans have already offered? Bush was right: Any further talks with Iran can only be the basis for appeasement!

The Times' magazine article discusses in depth how McCain arrived at his beliefs, from his education in the military, through his personal experience of war and defeat, to his participation in decision-making on world crises over the last 20 years. Nothing in Obama's background, education or intellectual musings come close to matching the deep thought that McCain has given these issues. McCain's opinions and conclusions may not please the one-world, feel-good, hard-left, but that is more the fault of their constricted theoretical world-view than it is the fault of McCain's realism and hard-learned lessons.

It is sad and extremely dangerous that the electorate, in their short-term desperation and dislike of Bush and the Iraq war, will be bamboozled into handing America's foreign policy and national interests to Obama and his leftist clique. Shades of 1976, when America turned the presidency over to Carter, as a reaction to Nixon and Ford, which led us into the current world of fanatic Muslim power run wild. Carter's inaction in the face of the overthrow of the Shah and the humiliation of the hostage crisis validated the Iranian "Islamic Revolution", which became the model for all the follow-on Islamic radicals' successes. The Iranian revolution should have been strangled in the cradle, as an object lesson to the crazies of the world of the fate that would await them if they dared to move against America's interests or to attempt to humiliate us by terroristic actions.