WaPo calls Obama's Iraq views 'eccentric'

The Washington Post editorial board also is finding Barack Obama's logic on Iraq bordering on nonsensical.

Yet Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

This is not the right-wing talking—it's the Washington Post.

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2008 election, al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Iraq, John McCain, terror

The audacity of gibberish

Barack Obama's answer on the surge here is so bad I expect to see it again and again in coming weeks. When the MSM slips up and presses him on one of his fluffy and illogical answers, the curtain starts to come off and an incoherent babbler emerges.

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2008 election, al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, John McCain, journalism, liberals, terror

Obama's Iraqmire

This video is an example of Republicans turning the MSM's fascination with Barack Obama into a strong positive for John McCain. Because the media was so star struck with Obama and his anti-war stance, they elicited statements from him on Iraq seemingly three times a week for the past two years. Because Obama was and is so eager to please his MSM cheerleaders and play to the politics of the moment, he has left a trail of video that dramatically underscores his fecklessness.

He's willing to play politics with war and peace. That's the undeniable conclusion.

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2008 election, al-Qaeda, Barack Obama, Iraq, John McCain, terror

He already brought us change!

From the liberal New Yorker today, revealing that Barack Obama was one of the architects of that reform-minded, change-oriented administration in Illinois run by the man we (and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald) like to refer to as "Public Official A."

That year, he gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich's campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich's victory. He and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor," Emanuel said. "We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel's account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama's role. "There was an advisory council that was inclusive of Rahm and Barack but not limited to them," Wilhelm said, and he disputed the notion that Obama was "an architect or one of the principal strategists."

David Axelrod, the preëminent strategist in the state, declined to work for Blagojevich. "He had been my client and I had a very good relationship with him, but I didn't sign on to the governor's race," Axelrod said. "Obviously he won, but I had concerns about it. . . . I was concerned about whether he was ready for that. Not so much for the race but for governing. I was concerned about some of the folks—I was concerned about how the race was being approached." Axelrod's unease was warranted. Blagojevich and people close to him have been tied to a seemingly endless series of scandals. The trial of Tony Rezko revealed that Rezko used his influence in the Blagojevich administration to profit from companies seeking business with the state. There is speculation that Blagojevich will be the next governor to be indicted, and the Democratic Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, has raised the issue of impeachment.

No wonder Barack has been silent about Blagojevich's corruption. Why condemn what you helped create?

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2008 election, Barack Obama, Chris Kelly, corruption, Illinois, liberals, Rod Blagojevich, Tony Rezko

Obama's dance a refrain

Barack Obama's cynical dance to portray himself as a moderate is nothing new for the man with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.

In his book, "Obama: From Promise to Power," Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell titled one of his chapters, "Dash to the Center," referring to his 2004 election to the Senate.

Once the party nomination was in hand, Obama was gingerly stepping toward the center—Bill Clinton famously called it the "vital center"—in an effort to court independent and swing voters in the fall general election. When I posed this shift-toward-the-middle scenario to Obama, he insisted that he would remain true to his core beliefs. "I think you will see consistency in my message from the primary through the general election," he told me. "I don't think you are going to see me tacking toward the center, because I never feel like I left what I consider to be the mainstream of American thinking and mainstream of Illinois views." However, when I wrote a story for the Chicago Tribune in late April 2004 that flatly stated that Obama was moderating his message and dashing toward the center, I heard nothing from him or his campaign disputing this assertion. My article delved into the unattractive political motivations behind this move, but in truth, the story most likely did more to alleviate concerns about moderates that Obama might be a liberal firebrand than it did to anger true believers on the left.

This is the oldest dance in politics—in other words, "the old politics." He's mocking the public with wholesale reversals of policies he stated just a few months earlier—not in the name of "nuance" or "new facts" but political positioning.

And he's doing it on an issue as important as Iraq, which obliterates any lingering belief that he stands for anything other than his own election.

Old-time cynicism lurks behind his fresh new face.

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2008 election, Barack Obama, Iraq, journalism, liberals