Obamas Summer Trip - Road to the Middle Class

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says to Obama: “Meet Michael Yon. Now, Read His Book.” He is referring to Yon’s recently published Moment of Truth in Iraq.

Presidential candidate John McCain has offered to take Obama to Iraq so that he can update his 872 day old views on that embattled country.

What kind of presidential candidate would last have been in Iraq 872 days ago and counting, the conservatives ask?

Come now, fellas. The answer is pretty straightforward: A candidate who needs to keep the Angry Left quiet until he gets the Democratic Presidential nomination. He wouldn’t want to know about the success of the surge, at least not yet. Not until August.

Up until Obama clinches the Democratic nomination he must be reliably against the war and for a troop withdrawal.

But after he gets the nomination...

Well, already, having rejected John McCain’s travel offer as a cheap political trick, he is saying that he might very well go to Iraq in the summer.

Here’s a prediction. When he gets back from Iraq and his little chat with Gen. Petraeus, Obama will say, “Why, Golly Gee!”

Well he won’t say that, but he will say the equivalent in liberalspeak.

“Why did President Bush lie to me about Iraq and the facts on the ground? I have been to Iraq and I can now say that the briefings I was getting from the Pentagon were all wrong. Based on my understanding of events on the ground and my conversations with people I have met there I believe there is a chance that we can stabilize the Iraq regime and bring our troops home. But in order for this to work the Iraqi government must do better in meeting its milestones, and I will insist that all milestones be met before a single additional soldier is sent to Iraq. Despite the incompetence of the Bush administration and its failed strategy I believe that we can achieve reconciliation in Iraq, and I have a plan to achieve success, one that corrects the mistakes of the Bush administration.”

And, of course the mainstream media will swoon. Best speech on national security by an American politician in the last 50 years, they will say.

They call this sort of thing “The Turn.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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