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Friday, July 04, 2008

Barack Obama's policy switches are giving the Left whiplash

Gerard Baker at the Times Online:


Change, it turns out, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America's political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are.

Since securing the Democratic nomination a few weeks ago, the only change coming from the Illinois senator has been in what he seems to stand for. Last month he dropped his opposition to a Bill before Congress that would give telecoms companies immunity from prosecution for carrying out illegal wiretaps on potential terrorist suspects.

He told a cheering crowd of Israel's supporters of his fervent commitment to the security of the Jewish state and added, for good measure, that an “undivided” Jerusalem should be the nation's capital. He said that he likes free trade after all, and that his primary campaign pledge to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement was a case of “overheated rhetoric”.

Last week he expressed support for a Supreme Court decision that struck down a ban on handguns and opposition to another that outlawed the death penalty for rape of a child.

This week he promised to expand President Bush's faith-based organisations initiative, a programme that channels funds to religious groups so that they can deliver social welfare services, which the Left regards as a heinous blurring of Church-State separation.

If next week he named Dick Cheney as his running-mate and revealed that he spends his spare time drilling for oil in wildlife habitats, the only surprise would be that it took him so long.

There's more ... read the whole thing.

What’s interesting about this analysis is that it’s being done at all. Of course the MSM are still not calling him a flip-flopper, they are referring to his “flexibility” (the NY Times), columnist E.J. Dionne tells us that Obama's Faith-Based Reform is a GOOD thing. another Post writer refers to his “…easing toward the center..” in (“Obama May Consider Slowing Iraq Withdrawal.”)

This is the sort of thing that the MSM is good at: changing the past and redefining the future. Unfortunately for the media and its acolytes, they are no longer the only ones with access to the past. Twenty years ago, the back issues of newspapers and magazines were only accessible to the paper’s staff and library researchers. Today Google and YouTube have made the millions of denizens of the Internet researchers par excellence. And the past cannot be erased as easily as it once was; in fact it can’t be erased at all and the result is a rapidly shrinking MSM as handmaidens of the Left.

According to the Post:
"My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I've said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe," Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota, a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since 1964. "And my guiding approach continues to be that we've got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I'm going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold."


Let's see: troops safe and Iraq stable. What's the difference between Obama and Bush on the war again?

But here’s a theme to look out for as the summer campaign intensifies: Candidate Says He Remains Committed to Ending War.

One has to ask the question: “who for the sake of God is not committed to ending the war?” Other than the inhabitants of the fevered dreams of the Left, is there anyone anywhere who is campaigning on the theme of an endless war? Who in his right mind does not want this war to end and our side victorious? The Looney Left for one. But supporters of this war want it to end and the troops to come home in triumph. We want the war to end because it will mean the defeat of Islamofascism. We want the war to end because it will mean we are safer from attack.

The war in Europe ended even though we still have troops there; ditto Japan, ditto Korea. But Obama is positioning himself as the candidate who wants the war to end and McCain as the one who wants it to go on forever.

And people are starting to ask the question “Who are the rubes?” There seem to be a lot of them in the MSM. But that part of the Obama cheering section is shrinking fast.

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