Barack Obama – Page 8 – Antiwar.com Blog

Tell Obama: Dump Gates

Dear Antiwar.com Supporter,

Please let the incoming presidential administration know that you demand real change in our interventionist foreign policy. Ask President Elect Barack Obama to make a stand for peace by dumping Bush appointee Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. You can easily let the transition team know your thoughts on this matter by calling 202-540-3000 or pasting the letter below into this form.

Dear President Elect Obama:

You sailed to victory on the promise of change and hope. For those of us who love peace, a change in foreign policy must come with a change in the key personnel who supported and argued for the continued occupation of Iraq. President Elect Obama, we want change in the Pentagon. We ask you to not to give former CIA Director Robert Gates another term as Secretary of Defense.

Respectfully,

[Antiwar.com Reader]

John McCain: “I’m a Terrorist”

Well, OK, he didn’t say that explicitly. But he did say it implicitly.

A basic logic lesson and please forgive me if you think I’m talking down to you. I’m really not. It’s just that I’m shocked at how many people, including McCain, don’t seem to get logic. If I say, “All crows are black” and I also say, “That bird is a crow,” then I’m saying that that bird is black even if I don’t say so explicitly.

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, John McCain called William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist.” What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent peopleâ€¦” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

Now McCain could argue that that’s different because, as he said elsewhere in the interview, “I had a reconciliation with the Vietnamese, when we normalized relations.” Did he apologize to them? He didn’t say. If he did, that would make him a “repentant terrorist.” Too bad Stephanopoulos didn’t challenge him.

Obama Gets PC

Patriotically correct, that is, the most common and most oppressive form of political correctness in our post-9/11 world. From this morning’s speech:

But the remarks [by Rev. Jeremiah Wright] that have caused this recent firestorm werenâ€™t simply controversial. They werenâ€™t simply a religious leaderâ€™s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country â€“ a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Pure PC piffle. As for the rest of the speech, eh, not so bad. As Jesse Walker noted,

If you don’t have a friend — a real friend, someone who means something to you and sometimes influences your decisions — who occasionally expresses a nutty opinion (“The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color”) or an impolitic truth (“a country and a culture controlled by rich white people”), then you really, really need to get out more.