Obama IS Appeasement

Obama's Unique Appeasement Style
By Caroline Glick
Real Clear Politics
May 20, 2008

...OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement. Indeed, Obama claims that conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the likes of Ahmadinejad is the right way to be "tough."
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Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs. So from the very beginning, he wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama's pledge represents a massive act of appeasement. And since it is Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program that would bring a President Barack Obama to the table, his policy would invite nuclear blackmail by other countries by signaling to them that the US rewards nuclear proliferators.
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IN MANY ways, Obama and his allies call to mind the influential American newspaperman H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Mencken was the most influential writer in the US. He was an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic agnostic, a supporter of Germany during World War I, and a fierce opponent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He also opposed American participation in World War II.

In his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Terry Teachout argues that the reason Mencken did not think it was worth fighting Hitler's Germany was because Mencken simply couldn't accept the existence of evil. He could see no moral distinction between Roosevelt, who he despised, and Adolf Hitler who he considered "a boob."

There are strong echoes of Mencken's moral blindness to Hitler's evil in the contemporary Left's refusal to understand the nature of the threat posed by Iran and its terror proxies. And Bush made this clear in his speech to the Knesset when he said, "There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong."

Obama's supporters seek to silence these echoes by pointing to Obama's life story as Obama told it in his two autobiographies, Dreams From my Father and The Audacity of Hope. His supporters‚ argue that since his life story is unique, his decision to appease the Iranians is uniquely wise. Yet the most interesting aspect of his life story is how little is actually known about it.

As the New York Times noted in an article Sunday about Obama's career as an autobiographer, "In the introduction [of Dreams from my Father], Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order."

That is, the man who is supposedly uniquely qualified to appease, adopted an attitude of indignation at Bush's condemnation of those who seek to cut deals with evil men, is also rather cavalier about facts. Justifying Obama's fast and loose treatment of the truth about his past, his editor Deborah Baker explained that Obama's attitude was more important than the facts or, in her words, "The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."

LIKE HIS life story, Obama's policies are not based on facts, but on his attitude. And his attitude, like Mencken's in the 1930s, is based on a naïve and arrogant belief that the worst thing that can happen is to have someone who talks about evil in the White House.

Peter Osnos, Obama's former publisher told the Times that Obama's meteoric rise to the pinnacle of politics is due in large part to his gift as a storyteller. In his words, "It's almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one's life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it's a stunning fact."

Indeed, it is stunning. And frightening. It says that in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance. It is a world in which indignation can be summoned as readily (and perhaps more easily) for partisan political attacks as for delusional dictators‚ open preparation for genocide. And it is a world in which it is more important to discuss "healing" emotional wounds than devising policies capable of coping with an ever-more-dangerous international coalition of murderers.

Fighting the appeasement label (if the shoe fits, wear it!) Obama was all over the place on Monday insisting that Iran is nothing to worry about. "Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries" he said in one campaign appearance.

Obama has also praised President Reagan for negotiating with the Soviets. But Reagan negotiated with the idea that we get "Peace through Strength." Obama has repeatedly said he would cut defense, even Reagan's missile defense program which has recently been proven to work.

Obama: Talk softly and throw the stick away!

Sorry Obama, but peace has never been reached by unilateral disarmament. The mullahs in Iran must be laughing their asses off!