Former advisor to Senator Barack Obama, Samantha Power, who recently resigned due to (correctly) running her yap about Senator Clinton, probably would have been given the boot thanks to the BBC interview below. Power unhesitantly admits that Senator Obama (peace be upon him) has no plan for removal of troops in Iraq mainly because he has no access to info on the subject. When would he get such info? If and when he becomes President!
STEPHEN SACKUR: Let me stop you just for a moment. You said that he’ll revisit it when he goes to the White House. So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out within sixteen months, isn’t a commitment isn’t it?
POWER: You can’t make a commitment in whatever month we’re in now, in March of 2008 about what circumstances are gonna be like in Jan. 2009. We can’t even tell what Bush is up to in terms of troop pauses and so forth. He will of course not rely upon some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US senator.
He will rely upon a plan, an operational plan that he pulls together, in consultation with people who are on the ground, to whom he doesn’t have daily access now as a result of not being the president.
So to think, I mean it would be the height of ideology, you know, to sort of say, well I said it therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality entreats me –
SACKUR: Ok, so the 16 months is negotiable?
POWER: It’s the best case scenario
It’s the best case scenario
POWER: It is –
SACKUR: And of course in Iraq we’ve never seen best case scenario
POWER: We have never seen best case scenario
SACKUR: So we needn’t necessarily take it seriously at all.
POWER: What we can take seriously is that he will try to get US forces out as quickly and as responsibly as possible. And that’s the best case, estimate of what it would take.
The American Mind notes:
“Those words won’t please the anti-war voters backing Obama.
Power’s words are a far cry from the promise on Obama’s website [again emphasis mine]:”
Bringing Our Troops Home
Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.
Thank you, Ms. Power. Your service has been much appreciated.
This moron actually went to Harvard and Yale and won a Pulitzer.
As time goes on, the myth of Obama keeps shrinking.
One of the things that marks Gen Xers is the way they apprehend attempts to educate them as an assault on their personal dignity. Not everybody, but it is a generational trend. My experience with my students is that they are nearly incapable of debate, because every time you disagree with them, you suddenly find yourselves in a battle with their emotional survival. It makes many of them invincibly ignorant, I’m afraid.
An example of this comes up every time I teach Gen Xer’s this class I’ve got on the nature of beauty. Invariably, after I have gone through the three elements of the beautiful from St. Thomas - wholeness, harmony and radiance - one of the undergrads will prop a limp elbow into the air - what is it with this generation that even asking a question in class has to be a statement on how ambivalent they are about even being there? - and then he or she will issue forth, “I don’t agree.”
And then I respond, pretending all the while that this is the first time I’ve heard the astonishingness, “You don’t agree that there are elements to the beautiful? Okay, cool. Give me an argument.”
“Well, I think, you know, that any body can just decide what, you know, they like.”
“That’s not an argument.”
“I don’t need to give you an argument. It’s what I think. I have a right to my opinion.”
AHHHHHHHHHHH. There it is. The “rights” thing. And the abuse of the word “think.” There isn’t thinking going on here. There is resentment and petulance and the need to assert one’s existence. But it ain’t thinking. A huge inhibitor to great art coming out from the young generations today is that the assertion of knowable truth (including all of the skills that go into excellence of craft) comes off to Gen Xers and Millenials as an assault on their autonomy and personhood.
I understand Barbara Nicolosi’s frustration.
I’ve seen and heard of this sort of thing myself. But I think the problem is alot bigger than just blaming it on “Generation X.” (This “Generation” crap originated with the media. Why does the media obsess with categorizing everyone? Oh, right. They do it with gays, women, blacks and everyone else.) The bigger problem is that students aren’t taught to think; they’re not taught to defend what they believe. So when confronted with someone who dares challenge them to actually support their beliefs, it’s soon obvious that they’re incapable of doing so. To overcome that insecurity and inability, we get psuedo-answers like “I have the right to my opinion.” Um, nooo, you don’t. Jackass. Not if you can’t support it with facts and logic. You might, for example, have the right to believe that the color blue is better than red, but in that case, there’s no objective standard to determine which color is better. But something like the minimum wage: whether it is good for people or not is not a matter of “opinion.” (It actually hurts the very people it’s meant to help, but the union$ sure as hell like it.)
A public school system that can’t teach students beyond “I have the right to my opinion” is a failure.
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Barack Obama / The Messiah | Tagged: Barack Obama / The Messiah, BBC, Iraq, Samatha Power, US Military | 
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Posted by tsfiles
