Cheat Seeking Missiles

Posted by: Laer at 07:52 am

he Washington Post editorial page is not where you’d expect to see an essay that condemns the Dem prez nominee as hopelessly confused and wrong-footed, but there it is, Mr. Obama in Iraq.

The editorial stands out on a day that finds much of the media trying valiantly, but not too effectively, to cover their O-swoon - see Mo Doud’s Cocky or Commander-in-Chiefly? in today’s NYT for an example - or are focused on McCain’s criticism of Obama on the surge (that “he’d rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign”), like this from Joe Klein:

I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

What do you say we measure Klein’s criticism of McCain against WaPo’s criticism of Obama? The editorial winds up for several paragraphs before delivering this closer:

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.

Other than choosing the word “eccentric” when so many other words would have worked better (thick-headed, flabbergasting, laughable, cro-zo), that pretty much nails it. You have in Obama a candidate who is clueless regarding the threats we face and the best means to face them, who wants so much to not be Bush that he refuses to acknowledge reality.

I for one would rather have a president who makes the mistake of calling out a fool all by himself instead of assigning the task to a surrogate, than one who tramples over Pakistan - a nuclear-armed nation that’s just barely holding off an Islamist uprising - to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who latelyhas done nothing more threatening than issuing tapes that are, to borrow a word from above, cro-zo.

Photo: AP

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