Monthly Archives: June 2008

Barack Obama, John McCain

McCain should explain why Obama wants to talk about his race and name

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Last week, Senator Obama made this assertion:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?'”

Senator McCain should have responded this way:

“Barack Obama wants you to think about his race and name.

“He does not want you to think about his lack of preparedness for the Presidency of the United States or managing billion dollar government programs or serving as Commander-and-Chief in time of war.

“Mr. Obama is still that kid in college who said:

“…We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure…” [Barack Obama writing in ‘Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance’]

“They were indifferent and careless and insecure.

“Barack Obama is still insecure and with good reason; his record in Congress is as thin as his innuendo. Running the United States of America is not railing against ‘the man and the system’ and street organizing.

“Oh, if you have a problem, he has an unworkable, trillion-dollar new government program, new taxes, and will hand you back a few dollars of your money and your children trillions of dollars of new debt.

“That is the real change he has in store for you, a change for the worse to a man whose only clue as to how to run a government is to throw your money at you like a bone to chew on.

“America is better than that. We walk out the door each day and go to work with hope, not a handout.

“When times are bad, we step up; we don’t step on our neighbor.

“He wants to talk about his race because he cannot win on either the issues or his record.

“My name is John McCain. I’ve worked hard with Conservatives and reached across the aisle to get things done.

“Yes, I have also been to college, and sown wild oats.

“Yet I have grown up since. I have gone to war, spent 5 1/2 years in a communist prison cell being tortured, served 23 years in the Navy and 26 more years in the United States Congress fighting for you.

“The Presidency is not OJT, the Oval Office is no place for on-the-job training. Your children’s futures are too important and our nation’s challenges are too great.

“You know me, I will keep the faith. I’ve been through the fire.

“This election is not about color, it is about hitting the ground running on January 20, 2009, and America’s future.”

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Editor — The above advice was unsolicited. John McCain can use it or lose it, just as he can win or lose the coming election and Barack Obama can talk about his race and name.

9/11, Osama bin Laden, World Trade Center

‘A dead terrorist is a good terrorist’ and a fine example

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We are better than the terrorists are. But do we need to do them one better by committing national suicide to prove it?

In the New York Post this morning, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in part writes:

Recent events should have made it clear — again — that captive terrorists are overwhelmingly a liability. The meager intelligence we get interrogating them is rarely commensurate with the array of financial, moral and legal costs involved in keeping them locked up.

Worst of all (as I’ve repeatedly argued), a jailed terrorist, not a dead one, is the true “martyr.” Incarcerated terrorists become celebrated causes for our domestic left and rallying points for foreign fanatics. The dead just rot.

Later, Peters adds:

A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. Keeps costs down, too.

To be clear: I do not advocate executing prisoners. We should treat any terrorist we capture rigorously, but with basic decency. I would only condone forceful interrogation methods in the most exceptional cases (there are always exceptions in real life, once you leave the rarefied air of the law library or the campus).
…
And killing terrorists doesn’t put us on a “slippery slope.” Killing Osama or Ayman al-Zawahiri wouldn’t inevitably mean that our Special Forces would then turn to assassinating Iowa aldermen or Alabama church deacons.

Or the families of American lawyers (my words added to Mr. Peters’ latter thought).

It seems noble to assert that non-American, unlawful enemy combatants on kinetic battlefields and aiding them — even those targeting civilians — should be afforded the very rule of law they would deny us.

Among those pulverized on 9/11 were eight precious children 11-years-old and younger, including one toddler of which nothing was found. We placed those wee souls at greater risk when we provided due process to the Landmark bomb plotters and those who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. If we now unilaterally provide foreign terrorists caught on foreign ground full legal rights, we will reap many smaller funeral plots on that moral high ground.

Our light to the world’s children now flickers in a growing gale of political crosswinds.

Perhaps that means many suspected terrorists must be destroyed and some greatly discomforted. We should not choose to lose this war and let our distaste for their misfortune extinguish liberty’s brightest flame, for their children’s sake as well as our own.