Here are a few excerpts from President Obama’s speech on Sunday night about the killing of Osama bin Laden.
“Tonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken. . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed. . . .”
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Most of these first-person pronouns could have been replaced by either the first-person plural (our, we) or proper nouns (the United States, America). But they reflect a now well-known Obama trait of personalizing the presidency.
The problem of first-personalizing national security is twofold. One, it is not consistent. Good news is reported by Obama in terms of “I”; bad news is delivered as “reset,” “the previous administration,” “in the past”: All good things abroad are due to Obama himself; all bad things are still the blowback from George W. Bush.
Two, there is the small matter of hypocrisy. The protocols for taking out Osama bin Laden were all established by President Bush and all opposed by Senator and then candidate Obama. Yet President Obama never seeks to explain that disconnect; indeed, he emphasizes it by the overuse of the first person. When the president reminds us this week of what “over the years I’ve repeatedly made clear,” does he include his opposition to what he now has institutionalized?
Guantanamo proves to have been important for gathering intelligence; Barack Obama derided it as “a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.”
Some key intelligence was found by interrogating prisoners abroad; Barack Obama wished to end that practice: “This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of law.” “That will be my position as president. That includes renditions.” Renditions have not ended under Obama, but expanded.
In some cases we are trying suspects through military tribunals; here again, Barack Obama used to deplore the practice he now has adopted: “a flawed military-commission system that has failed to convict anyone of a terrorist act since the 9/11 attacks and that has been embroiled in legal challenges.”
Senator Obama complained about airborne attacks on the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. President Obama increased Predator assassination attacks fivefold. He has killed four times as many terrorist suspects by Predators in 27 months than did President Bush in eight years.
In January 2007 — three weeks after President Bush announced the surge — Senator Obama introduced the “Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007.” If it had passed, that law would have removed all troops from Iraq by March 2008. Obama derided the surge in unequivocal terms both before and after its implementation: “I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.” “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.”
Candidate Obama criticized warrantless wiretaps, in accusing the Bush administration in the harshest terms: “This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.” A disinterested examination of present policy regarding both wiretaps and intercepts would show no change from the Bush administration, or indeed considerable expansion of the use of these tools.
If one wonders why former President Bush did not attend ceremonies with President Obama this week in New York, it might be because of past rhetoric like this about policies Obama once derided and then codified: “I taught constitutional law for ten years at the University of Chicago, so . . . um . . . your next president will actually believe in the Constitution, which you can’t say about your current president.” George Bush did not believe in the U.S. Constitution?
In sum, Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.
Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.
Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.
Where are all the war protesters, the gitmo closed now crowd? Is there any MSM journalist in print or TV honest enough to bring to light what you just wrote?
This is a slam dunk VDH. Nothing to add here. The most disheartening aspect of this is the unusually high number of supposedly intelligent people that believe the Fraud-in-chief, and I'm not referring to his base. Yeah it has to be a mental condition
1. There's a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Candidate Obama took flak for asserting that if we had actionable intelligence we'd take OBL out even if he was hiding in someone else's sovereign territory.
3. A lot of what we have done at Gitmo made it difficult if not impossible to try these guys. Remember that they went to Gitmo not because it's a great place for a jail, but because it's ostensibly in extra-legal territory.
4. Finally, all the uses of the first-person pronouns don't hold a candle to two words: "Mission Accomplished."
VDH: Rich words: "Good News is reported by Obama in terms as "I"; and bad news is delivered as "reset"". "The One" is an empty suit tutored under our great educational system where self-esteem is more valued than a real education. Taught Constitutional Law for 10 years indeed...What a joke!
@MikeB: Where is your proof that
"what we did at Gitmo made it difficult if not impossible to try these guys"? Do you know all the details there or are you just parroting the MSM and liberal talking points?
The bizarre world of BO – where words and actions have no real meaning. They serve only to advance the cause célèbre and are then quickly forgotten once said cause is advanced. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. These are the earmarks of an unprincipled, ideologue. And the ease with which the man can lie is astonishing. In those rare instances when he has been questioned, his juvenile displays of righteous indignation – the tiresome rhetoric (“let me be clear”, “make no mistake”, etc.), the leaning posture, the finger wagging – have become cartoonish. No one in the MSM has the desire or the fortitude to call the man out. He is their cause célèbre! The complete disintegration of a legitimate MSM is much to blame for where we are today. They have completely abdicated their role as dissenter and purveyor of truth. And many Americans haven’t a clue.
Hanson has presented this laundry list of Obama's hypocrisy ad nauseam. There is hardly a column of his that doesn't re-hash it but this time is different. Why?
Ironically, with Obama's killing of OBL, Bush emerges a moderate and principled executive while Obama is exposed in near-Gothic horror as an out-of-control hypocrite. Average people will notice this--if only at the psychological level.
Hanson's column foreshadows ominously that Obama's stature must shrink over time--the documentary evidence is simply too overwhelming for scholars to ignore. What''s interesting is that without Obama, it was not so easy to see the impressiveness of George W. Bush.
I wrote this two years ago, it still is accurate:
What does a war protester do these days? Their man, President Obama, the anti-Bush, who promised to immediately cease our war along with all its painful deeds, won the Presidency. Yet the war goes on the same as before, the only difference, we don’t hear it reported everyday. The media apparently, like vultures, have moved on in search of new carcasses to pick to the bone.
So how do these peace warriors fill their day? They can’t protest the war, wiretaps, renditions, Guantanamo, or military tribunals. Do they rehear the rhyming chants of past anti-war demonstrations while the media dutifully reported every utterance? Are their cleverly worded signs stashed away in the garage patiently awaiting the election of a new designated war monger, or are they decomposing in garbage dumps where they belong? How do they now contain their full reservoir of hate and anger aimed at President Bush’s war, when before it could so easily be released?
Our current President and his party ran for office largely on the plank of abandoning the war. However now that he is in office he has quietly reversed himself on almost everything he promised to end. Has the heavy burden of responsibility, sitting on his shoulders, shined the light of error on his beliefs, or did he simply speak whatever he needed to say in order to win?
War protesters might now wonder if, possibly like our new leader, they were wrong in protesting the war. Should they seek a similar change of heart or should they face the grim realization they were only gullible pawns used by a man on his road to power?
Doubtful BO would see his recent actions as repudiating his prior stance against anything and everything Bush-Cheney related.
Truth-be-told, don't think BO knows what he truly, truly believes in his heart-of-hearts.
This guy is a pure opportunist, glomming on to anything that he believes, at any given moment, will get HIM something, make HIM look good. Thus the constant use of the 'I' 'me' 'my'.
The MSM plays right into this, with their stories all week long about the political hay BO can make out of the Osama KILL, how his poll numbers look now. How deranged is that??!
As far as BO 'growing up', that's doubtful, as well. His comment about not 'spiking the ball' as an excuse for not releasing the kill photos, is so telling about this guy's frame-of-mind: very adolescent and immature. It's as though BO has never emotionally matured beyond about 17 years old.
Yikes, scary thought that he's in charge for another 18 months.
Is that a lot or a little, in 1,389 words in this context? It's hard to say, since these things don't get announced very often. In the 745 words George Bush used to announce the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, the totals were
I: 5
me: 1
my: 2
Numbers this small don't tell us much. But just a few more data points: here's Mr Obama with the first person plural:
MikeB, I'm curious what you think are the salient differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. Without specifying, I interpret that you think Obama was right to decry in reference to Iraq what he supported (possibly expanded) in Afghanistan, but that seems illogical so I must be misinterpreting.
Regarding your second point, the President should have reminded people of that stand and pointed out that he had taken flak for it but it had actually been correct.
Point 3 reminds me that law is not a science and every case is up in the air until it is argued. Also that the courts have strayed far from the common conception of justice, though that is irrelevant to the point, since any case would be tried in the system/courts we have, not someone's ideal setup. We don't seem to have much legislated or Constitutional reference for handling of foreign nationals suspected of acts of terrorism or simply suspected of having useful intel. I suppose we could go back to the handling of such as it might have happened in the Revolutionary War. Still, the whole question of how things should be handled wouldn't apply based on future law, but on what we have on the books now. I don't see why they should be eligible for civilian trials, never have understood that.
Point 4 is arguable. I never had a problem with that banner because I heard it referred to the mission of THAT ship, not the completion of the whole war effort. Admittedly there was staging in the exploitation of the banner's placement, but perhaps it had been put up for the whole ship, and the press conference (if it was to be on the ship) had no other suitable place to be held. Obama has certainly done his share of staging, as I am sure you are aware.
The main thing about the first-person tendencies of the President is that it is ungenerous. Many people put effort into the eventual fruition of the mission to kill Bin Laden. I am not suggesting Obama ought to have started naming names, which would take a lot of time and possibly get those people killed, but a "we/our" approach would have been better received. And it was petty not to attribute any credit to the people who worked on Bush43's watch, if not Bush himself. Obama is a disappointment regarding the character of the President, as well as in his actions.
Hard to read this Mukasey piece without concluding, yeah, I guess The New York Times was right when it said all KSM gave us to find OBL was a pseudonym.
Rimfrel, you must be kidding. The guy who killed Americans on 9/11 was in Afghanistan. He was being protected by the Taliban government. We went in to clean the Taliban out and get OBL.
The real question is, what's the difference between Iraq and Iran? Each was/is ruled by a madman who is our sworn enemy. Each wanted/wants to develop WMD.
At least he's smart enough to not say, "I actually opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts, before I continued, and often increased, their use."
PS...Yes, it is all about Obama and how great he is. I still cannot fathom why his personal likeability ratings are so high. I personally find his narcissism and hypocrisy detestable, let alone his views on how America needs to be 'reformed'.
What you write about is what I like to call OBAMAISM. It is dedication and devotion to all things Obama. To President Obama and his supporters it’s the man that matters not the message. Likely because there is no message, the message changes daily to serve the needs and interests of the man. This is why he appears to waffle on every important foreign policy decision
A president and the policies he/she establishes need to be based upon fundamental identifiable principles. Bush did this. We may not have liked many of his policies be it was certainly easy to align his policy decisions to his known principles; he certainly was not a waffler.
When a nation places a man above principles, it’s the first step down a long dark road.
