A thought for the day: the political class has determined that Barack Obama was right about the Iraq war and that John McCain was right about the Surge. Does one right trump another? Or, as the war re-polarizes along party lines, do they cancel each other out?
And it's clear that the Iraqi government wants U.S. troops out more quickly than John McCain does, whilst U.S. generals want to send troops home more slowly than Obama does. Who trumps who?
Who trumps who? Well, I'd say that THE ECONOMY trumps Iraq. Now more than ever.
It doesn't really matter who "wins" on Iraq at this point, all that matters is that the idea that McCain somehow dwarfs Obama on matters of foreign policy is being throw out the window. Even among pundits with giant man-crushes on McCain's manly manliness. As long as Obama's foreign policy judgment and vision are arguably superior/equivalent to McCain's, then Obama takes it on points... since foreign policy is the only area McCain even had a shot at.
If you want to take a look at his economic credentials, read Frank Rich's Op-Ed:
The term flip-flopping doesn’t do justice to Mr. McCain’s self-contradictory economic pronouncements because that implies there’s some rational, if hypocritical, logic at work. What he serves up instead is plain old incoherence, as if he were compulsively consulting one of those old Magic 8 Balls. In a single 24-hour period in April, Mr. McCain went from saying there’s been “great economic progress” during the Bush presidency to saying “Americans are not better off than they were eight years ago.” He reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks.
In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.
Heh.
No comments:
Post a Comment