Thursday, February 14, 2008
|
|
"A Funny Thing About Revolutions..."
|
|
Posted by:
Hugh Hewitt at
8:39 AM
|
My new Townhall.com column is posted and reflects on the upheavals within the Democratic Party.
For a sense of the long knives that are coming out of their sheaths, see this DailyKos diary. (HT: Hal.)
It isn't going to be pretty in Denver.
Or in the fall. Though not much remarked upon, Senator Obama's vote against some key provisions of the FISA renewal bill and his opposition to it overall as well as his skipping the final vote was a defining moment for him.
Yesterday, the forces of civilization removed one of the world's worst terrorists, one who been behind the killing of hundreds of Americans including the Marines in Beirut.
Mughniyah was killed because intelligence was gathered and he was found. No intelligence equals vastly more terrorism. Limiting intelligence equals vastly more terrorism.
Obama voted to make intelligence gathering much more difficult this week, and opposed even broadly bipartisan authorizations of intelligence gathering.
This doesn't make him a liberal or a civil rights advocate, but a radical proponent of "see no evil" indifference to the threats in the world.
If Obama was president and presented with good though not perfect intelligence that the next Imad Mughniyah was in our sites, would he authorize the killing?
If he is unwilling to authorize the sorts of intelligence techniques that large bipartisan majorities support, why should anyone assume he'd be willing to approve reliance on intelligence that can never be perfect or guaranteed not to go badly awry?
Senator Obama is part of the left's political elite that believes the U.S. is the problem, and that the U.S. government is not to be trusted to treat its citizens fairly or to use intelligence tools responsibly or act against terrorists prudently.
This is not a small group, and it counts the Speaker in its number, but neither is it close to representing a majority of Americans. (Incredibly, the hard left faction in the House that mirrors the Obama-minded in the Senate are threatening to let the country's intelligence gathering authorities lapse on Sunday because they lack the votes to force the country to only partially blind itself to the activities of our enemies.)
A vote for Obama in November will indeed bring about change: The U.S. will go from hunter to hunted, will go from the offense that has been part of the Bush Administration's policy since 9/11 back to the Clintonian fecklessness that dithered as the enemy nested and metastasized.
With the same results, though with larger disasters and great casualties as a consequence.
|
|
|