Sometimes I think that the Democratic Party learned everything it needs to know from The Godfather. In particular, I'm thinking about how Obama, like Carter, it stuck in a dynamic where he criticizes only our friends while kowtowing to our enemies. We can see this in Hillary Clinton's bizarre Apology 2009 tour of Asia and Russia (if I were a Clinton conspiracy nut, I'd swear that she purposely had "reset" mistranslated to distract our attention from how stupid the whole "Reset Button" idea was to start with) and the Administration's crawling to Castro and the Taliban (!), while going through that whole "Gordon who?" pantomime.
I understand how, following a series of (to them) logical steps the Democrats can convince themselves that their criticism of our friends is constructive and won't cost. At the same time, they believe that we could have peace in our time if we could only induce our adversaries (who are all, at bottom, rational people just like us who understandably resent our crimes against them) to talk. But why can't they step outside of this dynamic to realize that punishing our friends and rewarding our enemies will tend to make fewer of the former and more of the latter?
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6 comments:
No, I don't think they can, because it's more than just that. It's also the safety of going after soft targets, rather than ones that shoot back.
Sadly, and I hate to defend the Obama Administration, but wasn't this precisely the Bush Doctrine on domestic politics? Should we therefore not be surprised that Bush accumulated far more domestic enemies than friends?
SH - You think Bush went after domestic targets simply because they don't shoot back?
If you believe that the Bush administration was Evil, then why is it unreasonable to punish those who were friends with Evil, and to reach out to those who were opposed to evil? It's the whole "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing. Practiced by lunatics, of course.
erp;
Explicitly? No. But I think probably inadvertently. For Bush it was much more of his deliberately trying to be nice to his opponents but not making the same effort for his friends.
Bush is such a gentleman, I can't imagine his not being nice to everyone. Do you have something or someone specific in mind?
Cast your memory back to the immigration debate and what Bush's cronies said about their GOP opponents. That's the clearest example.
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