Live Blog POTUS on TeeVee
By Bronwyn's Harbor on August 31, 2010 at 8:00 PM in Current Affairs
President Obama — “an amateur cipher” — begins speaking at 8 p.m. ET. Don’t miss Larry Johnson’s post, “Barack Obama’s Mission Accomplished Moment.” Share your take below, and check out more stories:
“Obama thanks troops, looks to Afghanistan,” Politico.
“It sure makes things easier when you reject your own campaign rhetoric about how the surge — the Petraeus plan — shouldn’t happen and wouldn’t work,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said.”
“Previewing Obama Iraq speech, Gibbs won’t credit surge,” Byron York at the Washington Examiner. York’s essay is RICH with examples of Obama’s wildly varying comments, including this gem:
“in July 2007, Obama told an audience in New Hampshire, ‘Here’s what we know: the surge has not worked’.”
“WH: Hey, maybe Obama should be talking about the economy,” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.
Having Obama descend from Mount Martha’s Vineyard to declare that all is well! will only reinforce the notion that Obama has completely lost touch with mainstream America and perhaps with reality as well.
[...]
[The following is from an earlier section of Morrissey's essay]
The priorities of this administration are rather interesting. Instead of focusing on the crisis at hand, Obama wants to focus on the crisis from five years ago, no doubt to reinforce his PR strategy of if-you-think-I’m-bad-remember-who-I-replaced.
In the very next step, Obama will take credit from his predecessor, who handed the withdrawal date and plan to Obama (who at least had the wisdom not to blow it). And while the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is important, it’s hardly the highest priority for most Americans, especially those struggling to keep jobs and homes.
Maybe that’s for the best, though, if Obama tries to shill Recovery Summer, too. The problem isn’t the salesman, it’s the product. Arguing that the economy is headed in the right direction, when joblessness remains at a generational high and the GDP has dropped from a middling 3.7% to an embarrassing 1.6%, has already discredited Biden. Having Obama descend from Mount Martha’s Vineyard to declare that all is well! will only reinforce the notion that Obama has completely lost touch with mainstream America and perhaps with reality as well. Obama can afford to have Biden play court jester, but he can’t do it himself without completely losing his political support.
The weeks-long delay in responding to the numbers is quite easy to explain. Obama doesn’t want to address the fact that his extremely expensive stimulus plan has failed, and he doesn’t have a Plan B to unveil to American voters. Instead, it’s just easier to let people slowly realize that the White House is rudderless while the President eats his shrimp and finds new ways to talk about George Bush.
That’s just a couple choice snippets from Morrissey’s essay, which draws heavily on the always sharp Jake Tapper at ABC. Read it all: “WH: Hey, maybe Obama should be talking about the economy.”
“Obama’s Orwellian Iraq,” James Denselow at The Huffington Post.
If war is peace then perhaps failure is success.
Two years ago candidate Barack Obama criticised his rival John McCain for offering ‘fake’ change by stating that “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”. This evening President Obama will apply lipstick to the catastrophe that was the Iraq war. He will seek to suck the political poison out of America’s involvement in Iraq by presenting a far more nuanced case for victory in the country than George W Bush’s ill-advised words spoken on an aircraft carrier over seven years ago.
Obama has succeeded in depoliticizing the Iraq conflict. By virtually sticking to the identical exit plans of his predecessor, utilizing Vice-President Bidden [sic] as the face of American policy in Baghdad, and simultaneously withdrawing uniformed soldiers while up scaling the numbers of civilian contractors, Obama has been a champion for winning the official narrative for the US invasion of the country.
Yet as violence in Iraq continues to spike, with two consecutive months of over 500 civilian deaths, it would appear that Operation: New Dawn could be a case of rhetoric winning over reality. …
[...]
The beefing up of the civilian contractor presence guarding the largest US Embassy on the planet (some 80 football pitches large) and its new consulates in Kirkuk (where US-Iraqi forces joint patrol the ominously named ‘trigger line’) and Mosul by some 7,000 personnel equipped with MRAPs and Blackhawks is smart politics. This privatisation of the conflict takes the sting out of the argument around ‘bringing our troops home’ perhaps giving Obama a foreign policy win as Afghanistan continues to bleed American lives.
The supreme irony with the entire masquerade is that a US mission that originally invaded to locate WMD (there were none) changed tact to endorse the birth of democracy in Iraq. Yet as US Stryker vehicles roll across into Kuwait bearing the scars of seven-years of lessons learnt fighting IEDs, there is no democratically elected government in Baghdad to wave them goodbye. …
[...]
tir all these ingredients together and you have the volatile broth that is the ‘new Iraq’. Whilst some political relativists with no imagination will cling to the now redundant argument over ‘things are better than they were under Saddam’, most Iraqis are too busy trying to survive the present to argue over the past.
All things considered the lipstick applied on Iraq by the supposed US exit may quickly begin to smudge.
And of course, Larry’s post, “Barack Obama’s Mission Accomplished Moment” is not to be missed. Here is a teaser:
We come now to Barack Obama. Although the White House insists this is not a “Mission Accomplished” moment, there is no other possible interpretation. Once Barack completes his speech tonight he will take full ownership of Iraq. This is likely to be seen with the benefit of hindsight as one of the dumbest moves of the Obama Presidency. Why?
Well, Larry will tell you!
As for Obama’s big speech, now’s your chance to weigh in. What say you?
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