PJB: How Obama Won — and May Win

[Warph]

As you probably know, I'm a nut on politics.  While on the Pat Buchanan site I found this article which I thought was quite interesting:

http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/06/pjb-how-obama-won-and-may-win/


June 10, 2008
PJB: How Obama Won — and May Win
posted by Linda


by Patrick J. Buchanan

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. ... I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Thus did Joe Biden famously describe his rival for the nomination, Barack Obama, to the The New York Observer, a year ago.
Biden, however, thought Obama might not be able to win the fall election, as he is "a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate. ... I don't recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic."

Biden was forced to apologize, but was dead on in discerning Barack's strengths as a candidate in the primaries, which might prove weaknesses in the fall.

A new face in the game, Barack opened with three aces. He opposed the Iraq war, the defining issue in a party that had come to detest the war. He was an African-American. Thus, as the hopes of millions rose that he could be the first black president, there were surges of black voters whom he begin to sweep 90-10.

Lastly, Barack is a natural, a Mickey Mantle, a superb political athlete like JFK, who has looks, charm, youth and a speaking style that can move crowds to cheers or laughter.

Barack was thus able to unite the McGovern wing — young, idealistic, liberal, anti-war — with the Jesse Jackson quadrant of the party, black folks, and defeat Hillary's coalition of working-class Catholics, women, seniors and Hispanics.

As of today, by the traditional metrics of national politics, Democrats should roll up a victory this fall like FDR's first in 1932.
Bush's disapproval is near 70 percent, and 80 percent of the country believes the nation is on the wrong course. Unemployment is rising. Surging gas and food prices compete for the top story not only on business pages but front pages, with home foreclosures and the housing slump. Family incomes of Middle Americans have ceased to rise, as millions of their best jobs have been outsourced overseas.

Yet, national polls show McCain-Obama a close race, and the electoral map points to critical problems for Barack.
He seeks, for example, to target Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. But in all three the Hispanic vote may be decisive. And Barack was beaten by Hillary two to one among Hispanics, and between these two largest of America's minorities, rivalry and tension are real and rising.

Barack must hold Michigan and Pennsylvania and pick up Ohio or Virginia. Yet, his weakness among Southern and working-class whites and women is remarkable. By two to one they rejected him.

After his string of primary and caucus victories in February, Barack proceeded to lose Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, then West Virginia by 41, Kentucky by 35, Puerto Rico two to one and South Dakota by 10. That last one Barack was supposed to win.
The longer the campaign went on, the more reluctant Democrats seemed to be to embrace his nomination.

What is Barack's problem?

Middle America knows little about him, and much of what they know they do not like. When West Virginians were asked what they knew about Barack, a plurality said the Rev. Wright was his pastor. In Pennsylvania, a goodly slice of Democrats knew Barack had said they were "bitter" about being left behind and were clinging to their bigotries, Bibles and guns.

By June, resistance to Barack's nomination in the party that he now leads was extraordinary, stemming from a belief that he is too naive to be commander in chief in wartime and too far left, and does not like or understand Middle America or its values.
"He is not one of us."

And if Barack cannot erase this hardening perception in the American mind, he will not be president.
Democrats may talk of making the economy the issue this fall, but Republicans are going to make Barack the issue. Story line: We cannot entrust our beloved America, in a time of war, to this radical and exotic figure who has so many crazy and extremist associates.

Barack's problem is thus Reagan's problem.

As the country wished to be rid of Jimmy Carter in 1980, so the nation today wishes to be rid of Bush and his Republicans. But America is apprehensive over a roll of the dice, in Bill Clinton's metaphor.

How did Reagan ease the anxiety? In the debate with Carter, he came off as conservative, yes, but also traditional, mainstream, witty and the more likable man. The real Reagan came through.

With his persona, Barack may be able to do the same — in the debates. The problem is that he had two dozen debates with Hillary and, by the end of the primary season, five months after it began, he was still losing ground.

[sixdogsmom]

I have always liked Pat Buchanan, back from the days of Cross-Fire. That was a great show IMO, and we need more like that to discuss the issues at hand. It is doing nothing to help the cause of the republicans by trashing the other candidate. Most people are more sophisticated than that. I do however think we need to start discussing issues between the candidates. What say you?

[Warph]

I say a big "Right On"       

[frawin]

SixDogs, I would like to ask you a question but I don't want to offend you. 
Frank

[sixdogsmom]

I am not easily offended Frank, ask away!

[frawin]

SixDogs, here is my question, and as I said I don't want to make you mad, I just can't understand why and how this happening.

I can understand if you are a dedicated Democrat, but I can't understand how any American can defend or be in favor of Barack Obama for President when you consider that he shows  so little respect for the American Flag and the National Anthem. So many people have given their life for the Flag and what it stands for and this man shows no respect for it. Doesn't that bother you and what the future under this man holds for your Country and for your family. In addition, it is very disturbing the comments his wife has made about America and her past feelings for it. Don't you wonder what past Democrat Presidents  would think about this man and his attitude on America and the Flag. I think Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would be appalled that this man is the Democratic party's nominee for President. HOW DO YOU GET PAST THIS AND SUPPORT AND HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR THIS MAN.
I just want to understand how this man can possibly be where he is, given his threat to the future of America and the Freedom and Principals that America has always stood for.
Frank Winn

[Wilma]

Frank, I am not saying that I agree or disagree with you, but you at least sign your name and we all know who you are.  Can't say that about everybody.

[frawin]

Thanks Wilma, I am just trying to understand how this is happening. I fully respect SiXdogs and her rights to her choice and everyone else's rights as well.
Frank

[Jo McDonald]

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I find this article lengthy but frightfully enlighting - - I wish it's concepts could be embraced by the U.S. as a whole sooner rather than later. It is the only way to create hope for a future for ourselves, our children, & our grandchildren in America.

To my family and friends, I am sending this to you as I believe this article should be read by all. The author is apparently a scholar.

Those who experienced WW2 know what a perilous time it was and how close we were to losing. I believe God helped
us to win against the despots


TAKE YOUR TIME AND READ THIS A COUPLE OF TIMES TO LET THE FACTUAL TRUTH SINK IN, THIS ATTORNERY
WROTE THE MOST HONEST AND MEANINGFUL ARTICLE I'VE READ IN AWHILE.




SOME OF YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA WAS GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WW II .  MOST OF YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE RATIONING OF MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES, AND A SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD, NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW AUTOMOBILES.  READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING TAKE! N OVER BY FOREIGNERS IN 2008.

This is an EXCELLENT essay. Well thought out and presented.
Please read it all and think seriously about our future here on earth.  It is critical.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Historical Significance

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat. The Nazis had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America taking food and war materials.

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, who had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe.  Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia.

Together, Japan and Germany! had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

America's only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy (except Russia in the East) was already under the Nazi heel.

The US was certainly not prepared for war.  The US had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WW I because of the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW II, Army units were training with broomsticks, because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors, because they didn't have real tanks.  A huge chunk of our Navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England (that was actually the property of Belgium ) given by Belgium to England to carry on the war, when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact).

Actually, Belgium surrendered after one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could .

Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of! its Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany, only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brit's were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later.  Hitler, first turned his attention to Russia, in the late summer of 1940, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse.

Ironically, Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany .

Russia lost something like 24,000,000 people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone . . . 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brit's, then America.  If that had happened, the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this has been brought out to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things.  Now, we find ourselves at another! one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants, and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world .

The Jihadist, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs -- they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world.  To them, all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated . They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews . This is their mantra. (goal)

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas.  Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not yet known which side will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadist, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies.

The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadist.  Do you want gas in your car?  Do you want heating oil next winter?  Do you want the dollar to be worth anything?  You had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims, who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away.  A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements.  We have to do it somewhere.  We can't do it everywhere at once.  We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing .  . in Iraq. Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein.  Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades.  Saddam was a terrorist! Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction, responsible for the deaths of probably more than a 1,000,000 Iraqis and 2,000,000 Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there, we won't have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

WW II, the war with the Japanese and German Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928.  It did not begin with Pearl Harbor.  It began with the Japanese invasion of China.  It was a war for fourteen years before the US joined it.  It officially ended in 1945 -- a 17-year war -- and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again . a 27-year war.

WW II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars.  WW II cost America more than 400,000 soldiers killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the United States about $160,000,000,000, which is roughly what the 9/11 terrorist attack cost New York.  It has also cost about 4,000 American lives, which is roughly equivalent to lives that the Jihad killed (within the United States) in the 9/11 terrorist attack .

The cost of not fighting and winning WW II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by Japanese Imperialism and German Nazism .

This is not a 60-Minutes TV show, or a 2-hour movie in which everything comes out okay .  The real world is not like that.  It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly.  It always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is.  It will not go away if we ignore it. 

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an ally, like England, in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East.  The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates to conquer the world.

The Iraq War is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war.  Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons.  Unless somebody prevents them from getting them! .

We have four options:

1 . We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2 . We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3 . We can surrender to the Jihad an! d accept its dominance in the Middle East now; in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

OR

4 . We can stand down now, and pick up the fight later, when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and possibly most of the rest of Europe.  It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes, cultural clashes.  All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them .

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold War lasted from about 1947, at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; forty-two years!

Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany !

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan ..  World War II resulted in the death of more than 50,000,000 people, maybe more than 100,000,000 people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq.  The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. 
In WW II, the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years.  Most of the individual battles of WW II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

The stakes are at least as high . ! A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

It's difficult to understand why the average American does not grasp this.  They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis.

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe.

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most?  I'll tell you why! They would be killed!

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.

Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and an attorney living in Northern California that has studied the Middle Eastern culture and religion.








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[frawin]

WOW, that is a powerful article and very much in keeping with what is happening in the World, mainly the Middle East today.

Frank

PS this was supposed be under Jo's posting " A Powerful Article", I am not sure what happened that it got here.