Tweet
Shorter Bill Kristol: McCain has better taste in movies than Obama, so elect him.
Seriously, that’s what he came up with for this week’s editorial. Kristol does, however, ask a question:
For all his talk of hope and change, when has Barack Obama ever shown a willingness to break with liberal orthodoxy or Democratic dogma? What bold decision has he taken, what unpopular idea has he embraced?
Asked and answered:
I suppose one could quibble that opposing the war isn’t really breaking with Democratic dogma, but that would ignore the Democratic politics of 2002, when the party acquiesced to the war and did all it could to silence its antiwar voices. As a bold decision and an unpopular idea, opposing the Iraq war in 2002 is irrefutable, vindicated in a way that nothing the Weekly Standard publishes ever will be. Of course, I say this as if Kristol is at all interested in intellectual honesty, so this is a fool’s errand.
3 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
This really amounts to nothing more than Kristol challenging someone to match him up to McCain’s catchphrase. But he does have a point, just not the one he poses.
You could search for anecdotes of Obama’s unpopular stances, but WTF would the point be ? To score a point against someone wholly uninterested in honest assessments based on facts ?
On the other you could examine just how realistic his popular stances are…
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/obamas_magic.html
There were actually a few liberal bloggers in the wake of the $700b proposal noting that with this and the economy and the defecit, there goes your health plan. Joining the dot (not plural) to the candidate making no modifications to those proposals…. not so much.
So yeah, he does have a point about Obama being a populist avoiding inconvenient stances.
Speaking of which, our (Oz) foreign affairs programs have featured interviews with Chicagophiles on the question of just how does a Chicago politician make it this far without being corrupt. When black democrat colleagues, who clearly don’t want to hurt him sit there in silence and say “you figure it out” in response, it tells you there’s a lot of people doing that same avoidance of the inconvenient.
Plus, you know he’s a Muslim cyborg, so there’s that too.
To be fair, that should say “…without being corrupt or looking the other way in order to get ahead”
You could of course be corrupt without validating Kristol’s point.
ABC Foreign Correspondent program transcript/video here…
abc.net.au/foreign/content/2008/s2341480.htm
Credit where due — don’t forget that one of the Dems who spoke out against the war was the senior senator from Illinois. Durbin was up for re-election in 2002, but that didn’t stop him. Not that this takes anything away from Obama’s record, but it does give some background to the tight teamwork between IL’s two senators.