One of those snark lines issued by our President during Monday’s foreign policy debate that substituted itself for the more boring and coincidentally more competent serious thought, was this little gem.
“Governor Romney, the 1980’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”
It was one of those instances in my life that I found myself speechless, for days afterwards on this particular topic, not because of the sentiment being so insightful that I could think of no retort, but because the comment is so egregiously specious, so egregiously vacuous, and so egregiously dangerous to our national security that I stood flabbergasted with the concept that anyone, more particularly a sitting President, could possibly be so ill equipped for the Oval Office that he would verbalize that thought. The problem with a statement this moronic of course is as much as determining a place to start as it is anything else. There is so much wrong with this kind of idiocy, and I really do not want to miss anything, that this singular statement may very well be able to completely sum up what is wrong with the Obama Presidency, and with the Democrat Party as a whole, all by itself. I realize that every Democrat base supporter had that collective thrill going up their legs with this utterance, but my faith in Americans tells me that it will cost the Democrats big for at least the next two election cycles. In any case, it proves the statement that Barack Obama is the least qualified person in any room that he enters to be true.
In January of 1992, Northwestern University, perennial doormat of Big Ten football, hired Gary Barnett to be the new head coach. Barnett took over a team that during the previous decade had won fewer than 20% of their games. Barnett led the Wildcats to two Big Ten titles over the next six seasons, and then left to coach the University of Colorado football team, also leading them to a conference championship. As important as his success was how he got there. He researched the entirety of his staff at Northwestern and discovered that not a single one of his coaches had ever been a part of a winning team. He fired them all, and hired a new staff in its entirety. His top criteria for new hires was that they came from an atmosphere of success, a program that at some level was able to claim a clear record of winning. He wanted people who knew how to be successful on his team. when he recruited players, he only recruited those from high schools that won at least 8 of ten games in their senior years. He wanted players who knew how to win, and what winning felt like.
Ronald Reagan had a foreign policy that can only be considered successful. While the Democrats were tripping all over themselves trying to portray Reagan as a doddering old senile fool who was an affable dolt, the plain fact is that he took the reigns of leadership from a disastrous Jimmy Carter Administration that made foreign policy losses of the most astounding proportions seem so common place that a group of Iranian college kids stormed our embassy there intending to hold it for an hour or two, and ended up keeping hostages for 444 days. From that starting point, Reagan won the Cold War, paved the way for former Soviet Satellites to be granted membership to NATO, and created a missile defense shield for a Europe that has forgotten that they at one time had to defend themselves against foreign aggression. When Barack Obama denigrates the foreign policy of the 80’s as so old school that it should be considered laughable, let’s at the same time remember that this was the last successful foreign policy that our nation had.
Perhaps the silliest part of Obama’s theory is that the Reagan foreign policy would have only been successful if employed in a world in which the Cold War was raging, and that winning the peace were somehow not possible if we insisted upon keeping that which had proven itself so successful that it actually ended the previous hostilities. I realize that being on the back nine of my life there may not be a majority of my fellow citizens who can remember back to that ancient decade which followed the hapless Jimmy Carter Presidency and proceeded the skirt chasing years of the Clinton Presidency. So, here is a little history lesson for those of you who are a wee bit young, or a wee bit forgetful. Ronald Reagan’s admittedly simple foreign policy agenda was based on the belief that American Strength would lead to a lasting peace. He believed that if we built our military capability to the point that nobody in their right minds would consider picking a fight with us, and that if we projected that strength anywhere around the globe where our interests, or the interests of our friends happened to be, this would be the single greatest benefit that we could give to a world that relished a peaceful coexistence with their fellow human beings. As it turns out, he was right. Life really was that simple, and more importantly, it still is. What Ronald Reagan understood, and this is still true by the way, are the necessary conditions that actually lead to peace. One, is a mutually beneficial open exchange of goods and services. Another possible avenue is an overwhelming military victory by one side over the other. The last condition that can lead to peace is one side being so overwhelmingly better equipped militarily that attacking them is placed right out of the question. There is not a single instance, in all of human history by the way, of diplomats negotiating a lasting peace where one of those three conditions was not present to begin with.
Immediately upon his inauguration in January of 1993, William Clinton embarked upon what he termed as the peace dividend, which included huge budget cuts to our military, and our intelligence services. The subsequent frightful consequences of those cuts were later decried as George W. Bush’s fault when it became necessary to defend ourselves against the vicious attacks that would never have been possible if we had only kept the peace through strength posture. Those same people who were out in the streets campaigning for the, “peace dividend,” were the first to start wailing about how our intelligence and military had let us down so terribly on September 11, 2001. The dots so easy to connect for anyone not living in the liberal vacuum have yet to be connected by these self anointed intellectual elites. Nuance it would seem is synonymous with an intellectual and moral relativism that can only be possible when delivered in the context of serious thought being mixed with a constant assault upon the brain by a steady diet of hallucinogenic drugs, for example, pot. Our colleges have become cesspools of this type of idiocy masquerading as intellectual pursuits, and the worst part is that right and wrong are no longer considered to be absolutes, but merely differing realities in which it is considered taboo to measure outcomes against each other lest someone’s feelings get hurt.
So, when Barack Obama chides Mitt Romney over his old school beliefs, it is not an indictment about where we place the Russians on our list of friends or foes, but an indictment on the entire concept of measuring success or failure. One of the scariest things ever uttered by a President elect, was said in December of 2008. Barack Obama said the following.
“I don’t think that victory is possible in Afghanistan in the classical sense of what people would expect a victory to look like. There will probably be no ceremony of someone signing an agreement where we are declared victorious and the Taliban surrenders.”
The entirety of the Liberal mindset is that since there is no real right or wrong, only a moral relativism upon which any values should be based, where by all outcomes must eventually be made equal by an elite class of self anointed, the entire concept of victory against our enemies flies in the face of those victories being undeserved. If you are confused, don’t worry, just realize that the current group in charge do not feel that any one truly deserves to be victorious or defeated. Since Barack Obama feels that all wealth in this world is set at a specific amount, we can only be successful here in America by stealing wealth from a place where no matter how evil those inhabitants are, our two societies are indeed equal. So, when our embassies are overrun through out the Middle East and across North Africa, and Mitt Romney says that he intends to project American Strength as a means to keep the peace that we last enjoyed under a Reagan Presidency, Barack Obama’s chiding is not so much a symbol of claiming that this policy would not produce the results intended, but that we are wrong for desiring those results in the first place.
It is that belief that I find so extremely dangerous in a Commander in Chief. It is the belief that we Americans are not deserving of a peaceful existence or in the protection of our national interests. Barack Obama is intelligent enough to know that he can not verbalize his convictions in these terms. If he did, he would never have been elected so much as dog catcher. Snarky insults are all he has left in this particular debate, and that snark, once considered will not sit well with the voting public at large.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
