Obama Avoids the Crocodile
By reversing himself and refusing
to release graphic photos of abused prisoners of war,
Barack Obama has stunned liberals.
They feel betrayed and abandoned by
a president they put into office. On war and torture, at
least, they thought Barack was one of them. He is not.
Barack is not into ideology. He is into Barack.
As he showed in 2008, when he threw
his
white grandmother under the bus and spared his
beloved black pastor, the
Rev. Wright, then threw Wright under the bus when
his toxicity level rose too high, Barack has all the
sentimentality of
Michael Corleone when it comes to the
family business.
And what Obama is saying with his
refusal to release the photos is what he has been
signaling for weeks now: I am not going to fight the
liberals` war—on Dick Cheney`s turf. The rewards are
nonexistent, and the risks too great.
Thus, when Gens. Petraeus, Odierno
and McKiernan grumbled, Obama tossed a blanket over the
photos. Barack Obama is not taking on CENTCOM or West
Point for a bunch of congressional progressives.
Thus, after he had opened the door
to prosecution of the Bush lawyers who wrote the
"torture memos,"
and resistance formed up, Obama backed down.
He said he did not want a special
prosecutor. He did not want a 9-11 commission to delve
into the criminality of what was done. He wants to put
all that behind us and move forward.
Liberal moral outrage
notwithstanding, Barack Obama is not going to fight the
liberals` war on the liberals` turf. And history
confirms the wisdom of his instincts. For it was by
pursuing liberal theology that Democrats lost the nation
they once owned.
It was ideology that led
FDR and
New Deal liberals to trust in
"Uncle Joe" Stalin,
to claim Mao`s men were
"agrarian
reformers," and to defend Alger Hiss and deny the
government was shot through with
security risks and Soviet spies that dealt all those
cards to
Tailgunner Joe and turned the nation over to Ike and
Dick in 1952.
It was the liberals who belatedly
discovered that the war JFK and LBJ had
marched us into in Southeast Asia was a
"dirty and immoral" war and we were defending a
"corrupt and
dictatorial regime," which gave Richard Nixon his
New Majority and 49-state landslide in 1972.
It was the Church Committee and
Pike Commission ripping up the FBI and CIA, and
Jimmy Carter`s braying,
"We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism," and kissing Leonid Brezhnev—followed by the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan—that convinced Americans they
had to roll the dice with the cowboy.
And while Ronald Reagan was
liberating Grenada and helping the Contras overthrow the
communist Sandinistas, liberal Democrats were penning
"Dear Comandante"
mash notes to Daniel Ortega.
In short, liberals are incorrigible
and their disease incurable.
Obama senses this, and is not about
to let them conscript his presidency into an ideological
crusade, all of which invariably end, like the
Children`s Crusade of Peter the Hermit, with
everybody dead or in captivity.
Which brings us to The Crocodile.
Whatever one may think of Dick
Cheney, about him it must be said: He is not ashamed of
his record. He does not apologize for it. He is willing
to go out and defend it in the arena.
He believes, that, after 9-11, he,
as a custodian of the national security, had a duty to
go the limit to get information from terrorists to
prevent another or worse atrocity.
He admits to having approved the
authorization of
"enhanced interrogation techniques," including
waterboarding. He believes they yielded indispensable
information about our enemies that helped to prevent
another attack for seven and a half years. He does not
believe that they were illegal, or constituted torture.
He is a true believer, full of
conviction and certitude, whose unstated retort to those
demanding he be prosecuted for war crimes is the one he
gave the distinguished senator from Vermont, Mr. Leahy.
And Cheney is winning.
Why? Because other than the hard
left, which demands commissions, prosecutions,
indictments, convictions and imprisonments, on the other
side it is all loud noise and moral mush.
He is winning because he has the
courage of his convictions, while his enemies come up
short in both departments.
There is another reason Obama does
not want this fight.
There is a high probability, if not
a near certainty, that, one day, al-Qaida is going to
conduct some spectacular attack on this country or its
allies, and Americans will say,
"This didn`t
happen when people like Cheney were running the show."
Obama has been dealt a tough hand,
and he knows it.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
could all go horribly wrong. And, should that happen,
the boy from Hyde Park and Harvard Law wants to be
standing beside the CIA, not the ACLU.
That, too, is why Obama wants no
part of this fight with Cheney.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan
needs
no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed
here by
Paul Craig Roberts.
