As Jews prepare to celebrate the eighth and final night of Hanukkah, I will make another attempt to teach the virtually unteachable about war.
Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day, which led America into World War II and eventually into V.E. Day. America won the war and preserved the America way of life.
This whole week has been Hanukkah, a celebration of Jewish military victories over enemies bent on destroying them and wiping them off the face of the Earth forever.
Some nations follow the “rules of war.” America is one of those nations. So is Israel. Great pains are made to minimize collateral damage. We liberate people, and spread freedom. Sometimes war is hell, and decisions have to be made that no decent person would want to make. The ultimate decision was made by Harry Truman. People can debate his decision, but admit that he did not decide lightly or cavalierly.
Then there are those not obeying the rules of war. Al Qaeda has people who deliberately target innocent civilians. They cut off limbs and heads. They torture prisoners in ways that leftists in America yelling about torture could never fathom. These terrorists seek to destroy life.
President Obama has never served in the military. I do not condemn him for this. I did not serve either. Yet my problem with the president is that he does not understand the difference between an enemy and an opponent.
Football players competing against each other are opponents. The Ravens and Steelers beat the daylights out of each other a couple nights ago in one of the great slugfests of all time. Afterward, the players hugged. When a couple players were injured and laid motionless on the field, players of both teams called for the medical staff and prayed. These players are opponents, not enemies. They are friends with the families of the opponents and often break bread in the offseason at each others’ homes.
Politicians in theory should be opponents. Some of them break bread, but it seems this happens less and less as the climate becomes more and more polarized.
Enemies try to kill each other. Opponents simply disagree with each other.
Barack Obama cannot understand this. He told Iranian President Armageddonijad and the Iranian leaders to “unclench their fist.” He does not understand that his desire to see the Iranian leader as an opponent cannot happen because Armageddonijad has declared us the enemy. The relationship can only be one of opponents if both sides agree to this. Once one side declares the other an enemy, that is how it is.
Barack Obama considers his enemies to be Republicans. This is destructive, and frankly, insane.
He truly believes that disagreeing with him is an act of war.
Before the 2010 elections, he made it clear that Republicans have to “sit in the back of the bus.” Latinos should “reward their friends and punish their enemies.” This racial bombthrowing came from a man who should know better.
Now he has crossed the line of decency and civility again.
In his press conference where he whined and cried that the American people agreed with him despite that not being the case, he referred to Republicans wanting to cut taxes as “hostage takers.”
Leftists will say that this is just “rhetoric” and “hyperbole.”
No. This is poison. It is another tested slur, now that “racist” has become boring. Maybe hostage taker is the new racist.
This is not about the fact that the president and his party are unadulterated liars on the issue itself. The left is trying to raise taxes while claiming that they are fighting for tax cuts. Again, they are trying to raise taxes and Republicans are trying to stop them.
The issue to me goes to heart of who the president is. I am now at the point of questioning his character.
The Republicans got in trouble when Richard Nixon pursued the “Southern Strategy” and Lee Atwater gave us Willie Horton.
(The truth is that both of those issues were brought on by Democrats, George Wallace and Al Gore. That is for another time.)
How is Barack Obama any different? He pits people against each other by race, gender, and income.
Republicans are not hostage takers just because the crybaby president after losing an election still got most of what he wanted and complained because he did not get everything.
(I will cover the actual deal when it is finalized. The left is too stupid or greedy to realize it is a great deal for them, and Republicans gave away way too much too quickly. I can live with the deal, but I do not like it very much. We surrendered again.)
Maybe Barack Obama needs to be educated on who represents a real hostage taker.
In 1981, a young Armageddonijad took part in kidnapping American citizens in Iran. The hostages were held for 444 days while a feeble Jimmy Carter tried to sing Kumbaya while accusing Americans for expecting too much (just like Obama today). Ronald Reagan came in and magically the terrorists freed the hostages.
Barack Obama wants to reach out to a real hostage taker while attacking Republicans for merely having a different philosophy on how to fix the American economy.
Simply put, Barack Obama is leading the verbal equivalent of a civil war. He is attacking a large plurality (let’s be honest, a majority) of his own citizens. He cannot see that the Chamber of Commerce and Christian Evangelicals are not enemies of America. He cannot stop attacking the motives of anybody disagreeing with him. He demonizes dissent as unpatriotic.
The Civil War of the 1860s was fought to preserve the union, with abolishing slavery as another moral deed.
Barack Obama is simply interested in preserving one thing…himself.
His presidency is failing. People have tuned him out. He refers to the War on Terror as overseas contingency operations. Yet he has no such restraint when it comes to describing American political conservatives.
He is a misguided presidential warrior. The 2010 election did not wake him up. It just made him more emboldened. Perhaps if he is fired in 2012 he can become the angry guy in the nursing home complaining to anybody who will listen. He will ramble incoherently that he was once a powerful man who was cast aside because lesser people could not appreciate his greatness due to evil influences.
He needs to stop waging war on his own citizens and spend his time focusing on the real enemies of America who want to kill us all.
eric
If you’re intoning that somehow the GOP does not employ over-the-top rhetoric, then you live in a dream world.
Yes, “hostage taking” was over-the-top and I’d prefer the president stay above that sort of rhetoric.
The presidents problem is that he’s trying to win over people that he’s simply never going to be able to win over. The bomb-throwers on the Right and the Left will never be fans of Obama’s.
Of course, Obama is most ertainly NOT atttacking the majority of Americans. The majority of Americans mostly want what he wants. The trouble is that the majority of Americans are all over the place politically and can easily be swayed by a variety of issues to one camp or the other even if that camp is mostly against their wishes.
JMJ