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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (12567)	12/10/2007 10:44:13 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25737

Obama And His Night At The Oprah By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY \| Posted Monday, December 10, 2007 4:20 PM PT Politics: The queen of daytime TV can make a book an overnight best-seller, but can she make Barack Obama our next president? The real question is whether her pick is ready for prime time. Speaking on behalf of the former state legislator and still-freshman U.S. senator from Illinois before a packed house of 18,500 in Des Moines' Hy-Vee Hall over the weekend, Oprah Winfrey assured her audience: "I know the difference between the Book Club and a free refrigerator. I understand the difference between that and this critical moment in our nation's history." We hope so, for this is indeed a critical moment in our nation's history, and we are voting for a president who can handle it, not for the winner of a Daytime Emmy. He, or she, will have to handle the likes of a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and fight the war on terror. Judging from his, and her, remarks, Barack Obama is not the one. One of her biggest applause lines came when she picked up on an Obama campaign theme — that his opposition to the war in Iraq was early and consistent. "Long before it was the popular thing to do, he stood with clarity and conviction against this war in Iraq," she said to an enthralled audience. Well, he stood with conviction anyway. Never mind that he was wrong. As for clarity, Obama assures us that, "Nobody is proposing a precipitous withdrawal." Yet in January of this year he outlined a plan to begin "redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007," and "remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008." Sounds "precipitous" to us. In August, Obama, who advocates talking to our enemies like Iran while invading our allies like Pakistan, told the VFW convention in Kansas City: "All our top military commanders recognize that there is no military solution in Iraq." "No military surge," he argued, "can succeed without political reconciliation and a surge of diplomacy in Iraq and the region. Iraq's leaders are not reconciling. They are not achieving political benchmarks." Gen. David Petraeus certainly didn't agree, and it was his surge that Obama said would not work that not only beat al-Qaida militarily but laid the groundwork for the political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites that Obama said wouldn't happen. It did — from the grass roots up. Before the surge succeeded, John Burns of the New York Times warned that the type of — what's the word? — precipitous withdrawal advocated by Obama would lead to "cataclysmic violence." Obama's response? As AP reported, "Presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there." Obama, who has said he thinks "it's a disgrace we haven't talked" to the likes of Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, Bashar Assad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, thinks our difficulties with these thugs are all America's and George W. Bush's fault. He promises to "engage in aggressive personal diplomacy with Iran" if elected president. But talking to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not like talking to Oprah on her show. Former Clinton guru Dick Morris thinks Obama is "a Jimmy Carter, running for president on his personal moral outlook, his background and making a virtue out of his limited knowledge of how American government works." Or American foreign policy. Obama may want to have Ahmadinejad for dinner, but mad Mahmoud would have Obama for lunch.