Obama's true passion

Karl Rove on B. Hussein Obama:

Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.

For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.

He insisted in an interview with NBC in 2007 that Congress mandate "consequences" for "a failure to meet various benchmarks and milestones" on aid to Iraq. Earlier this month he fought off legislatively mandated benchmarks in the $97 billion funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama agreed on April 23 to American Civil Liberties Union demands to release investigative photos of detainee abuse. Now's he reversed himself. Pentagon officials apparently convinced him that releasing the photos would increase the risk to U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a "quagmire" and ordered more troops to that country. He isn't calling it a "surge" but that's what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to end the Iraq war by withdrawing all troops by March 2009. As president, he set a slower pace of drawdown. He has also said he will leave as many as 50,000 Americans troops there.

These reversals are both praiseworthy and evidence that, when it comes to national security, being briefed on terror threats as president is a lot different than placating MoveOn.org and Code Pink activists as a candidate. The realities of governing trump the realities of campaigning.

You have to admit that Rush Limbaugh called this on. He said, before the election, that if Obama won that there would be no withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. Once the war belonged to Obama he would not lose it and have that defeat hanging around his neck come 2012.

Democrats were eager to have the US lose the war when Bush was president and could be blamed for the defeat but now that they own the war and can claim credit for success they will give the finger to their lunatic fringe and attempt to produce a victory.

They will not do this out of any genuine sense of patriotism (they have none) or out of any genuine hatred of our Islamofascist enemy (they feel a certain kinship with the Islamofascists, after all the Islamofascists hate the same things that the American left hates - America, Israel, Christians, Jews, Capitalism, freedom). The Democrats will base their actions solely on the political calculation that their opposition to the Vietnam War gave their party an anti-military image which has done them long term damage.

As for closing Gitmo Obama wants to do it but the adults in the CIA, FBI, Defense Dept. and Congress are putting their foot down (Limbaugh predicted this too, BTW). The simple fact is that we can't try them in open court because doing so would give away too much of our intelligence gathering methods and capabilities and no other country will take them (unless it is to toss them into a cell, torture them and then put them to death - which we, for reasons I don't understand, have some kind of problem with).

Rove then goes on to talk about the bad:

We are also seeing Mr. Obama reverse himself on the domestic front, but this time in a manner that will do more harm than good.

Mr. Obama campaigned on "responsible fiscal policies," arguing in a speech on the Senate floor in 2006 that the "rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy." In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he pledged to "go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work." Even now, he says he'll "cut the deficit . . . by half by the end of his first term in office" and is "rooting out waste and abuse" in the budget.

However, Mr. Obama's fiscally conservative words are betrayed by his liberal actions. He offers an orgy of spending and a bacchanal of debt. His budget plans a 25% increase in the federal government's share of the GDP, a doubling of the national debt in five years, and a near tripling of it in 10 years.

On health care, Mr. Obama's election ads decried "government-run health care" as "extreme," saying it would lead to "higher costs." Now he is promoting a plan that would result in a de facto government-run health-care system. Even the Washington Post questions it, saying, "It is difficult to imagine . . . benefits from a government-run system."

Making adjustments in office is one thing. Constantly governing in direct opposition to what you said as a candidate is something else. Mr. Obama's flip-flops on national security have been wise; on the domestic front, they have been harmful.

In both cases, though, we have learned something about Mr. Obama. What animated him during the campaign is what historian Forrest McDonald once called "the projection of appealing images." All politicians want to project an appealing image. What Mr. McDonald warned against is focusing on this so much that an appealing image "becomes a self-sustaining end unto itself." Such an approach can work in a campaign, as Mr. Obama discovered. But it can also complicate life once elected, as he is finding out.

Mr. Obama's appealing campaign images turned out to have been fleeting. He ran hard to the left on national security to win the nomination, only to discover the campaign commitments he made were shallow and at odds with America's security interests.

Mr. Obama ran hard to the center on economic issues to win the general election. He has since discovered his campaign commitments were obstacles to ramming through the most ideologically liberal economic agenda since the Great Society.

Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.

Obama, or to be more accurate Mr. Obama's string pullers - you know the people who put the words on his teleprompter, could not get elected by running as a radical neo-marxist. So they crafted for him what has to be one of the greatest political swindles in the history of the world. They managed to get him to the right of his Republican opponent on economic issues, especially taxes.

Of course this would not have been possible if Obama had been facing a halfway competent GOP challenger. But the hapless RINO John McCain is incapable of offering criticism of anyone other than a fellow Republican so Hussein was able to fool a majority of the voting public into believing that he was going to cut their taxes.

The truth is that Obama is the most left wing politician to ever sit in the Oval Office. In less than six months in office he is well on his way to nationalizing the banking and credit industry, the auto industry and the health care industry.

This is all according to plan and it shows us were Obama's true interests lie. Give on national security in order to preserve the leftward push on domestic matters. Because the transformation of the American economy from free market capitalism to Marxist central planning is the key to the establishment of a permanent governing class.

And that is the goal which the left eternally lusts after, to entrench themselves into absolute and unchallenged power. The shape of the world to come if Obama, and more importantly the people whom he is fronting for, realize their dreams can be seen in current events. The attempt to shut down talk radio, the abuse being heaped on Carrie Prejean and the attempt to criminalize policy differences with the previous administration. All of these things represent a desire to go beyond mere electoral victory and achieve not just the defeat of their opponents but their utter destruction.

This inability to tolerate the bare existence of opposition is ever and always the hallmark of the tyrant. The opponent must not just be overcome he must be eliminated. The signs at the beginning of the journey with someone like Obama always say "This Way to Utopia" but the signs at the end of the trip always have names like Berglag, Gorlag, Majdanek and Sobibor.

2010 and 2012 offer chances to get off the train. Will we be wise enough to avail ourselves of the opportunity?