Is Obama Chanelling George Bush?

The Times of London today reports some sentences attributed to Barack Obama, which, if accurate, suggest that he is chanelling George W. Bush. (Note especially the red letter words.)

"Britain, France and the United States set the stage for a dramatic
confrontation with Iran when they revealed the existence of a secret nuclear
site inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom as evidence of Tehran’s efforts
to deceive the international community.

The coup de théâtre came at the opening of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh after three days of intense diplomacy at the UN General Assembly. President Obama, President Sarkozy and Gordon Brown took turns to demand that Iran disclose its nuclear ambitions and threaten new sanctions.

Later, Mr. Obama raised the spectre of military conflict, saying that failure by Iran to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons would lead down “a path that is going to lead to confrontation”.

“Iran is on notice that when we meet with them on October 1 they are going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice,” he said.

Mr. Obama added that he would prefer a diplomatic resolution but added: “We do not rule out any options when it comes to US security interests. It’s up to the Iranians to respond.”"

I said last year on this blog that those pacifists, who supported Obama over McCain because they were so over-the-top hysterically opposed to Bush and the invasion of Iraq, were being naive to think that voting Democrat was going to make any serious difference as far as the wars are concerned. I said that Bush was not running so the voters could not punish him. I said that Democratic presidents go to war more often than Republican ones (Woodrow Wilson - WW I, FDR - WW II, JFK and LBJ - Vietnam). I also said that Obama's peace-loving, naive, apologizing for America tone would only tempt America's enemies to try to roll him, like Kruschev thought he could roll Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On the other hand, if McCain had been elected we might well have a 5th anti-Roe vote on the Supreme Court by now and be on the verge of putting another one on if Ginsberg steps down for health reasons. Such a change in the make-up of the court would have a generational effect on the abortion debate and, at the very least, would have sent it back to the states. Many states would impose partial restrictions and some might even impose total restrictions. Millions of lives would be saved every single year from here on out! Remember, we are talking millions of human lives, each one as intrinscally valuable as an innocent civilian life lost in a war.

Sure the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would still be going on if McCain had won. Sure the Iranain crisis would still be here. Sure Guantanomo would still be open. And how exactly is that different under "the One?" Sure he promised to close Guantanamo Bay, bring home the toops and heal the planet etc. etc. But promises are cheap and action is difficult. It is no wonder he is starting to sound like George W. Bush, seeing as how his policies have been so similar for the past ten months.

Obama claimed to be moderate on abortion; he said he wanted to find "common ground." But no one can name even one single, limited, moderate restriction he has placed on abortion, whereas there is a whole list of ways in which his policies have expanded access to abortion. He and his Democratic colleagues refuse to insert language into the health care legislation that would ensure that public money did not pay for abortion, thus confirming the suspicions of those who saw the health care program as "stealth FOCA."

I said that the choice was between two war-mongers, both of whom would keep abortion legal, but one of whom would at least take steps to impose some restrictions on the slaughter and would likely keep abortion from morphing into assisted suicide and euthanasia. Neither option was the Kingdom of God because Jesus wasn't running last year. But one was morally superior to the other from a reasoned, Christian perspective.

I'm not happy to have been right about Obama. He has been a tremendous disappointment to those who, in good faith, took him at his word as a moderate on abortion. Anyone who voted for him thinking he was more than a front man for the most extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party has surely by now been disillusioned.

And lest anyone try to use his sudden hawkishness on Iran as evidence of his "moderate" stance, let me just say once again that only the most naive among us actually believe that when it comes to war the liberals are any less ready to use violence than the conservatives. It doesn't make him conservative; it just makes him a liberal like all the other liberals.

There is only one kind of person who is happy Obama won and that is the kind of person who really wanted him to win precisely so that he could impose liberal policies, ramp up the welfare state and expand the power and reach of the Federal government as the method for solving social problems. That kind of person, however, was being dishonest in pretending that the war in Iraq was the big issue in the election. It was just a stick with which to beat McCain and promote Obama. Sure, people may have honestly been against the Iraq war but in reality the Iraq war was not the point. Getting a big-government liberal in the White House to finish what FDR and LBJ started was the point.

What I'm upset about is the good-hearted pacifists who are not big-government liberals who took the bait and fell for the flim-flam. The sanctity of human life would have been better served by electing the often bellicose war hero, as counter-intuitive as that might have seemed at the time. It's a lesson we would all do well to remember next time round.