Ask not what Obama can do for you, ask what you can do for Obama

"O-bama O-bama O-bama"

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Inside the mind of a rabid Obot (no link, biohazard):

And it’s why I smile when I read people shrieking and rending their garments for him to do this or say that as if he were their servant.

Obama IS our servant you moron. Haven’t you ever heard the term “public servant?”

We don’t work for him, he works for us.

This fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Obama and the rest of the country explains a lot about Obots. It explains a few things about Obama too.

Anglachel:

Both of these actions are part and parcel of the movement style campaign politics Obama favors and which is so beloved of the righteous Stevensonians. It is narcissistic and a-historical (We are the one’s we have been waiting for), refuses to acknowledge politics as they are, and antithetical to mundane, interest-based transactional governance. It doesn’t want responsibility, only obedience and adulation, and so refuses to take it when things go belly up.

Barack Obama ran for office because he wanted to BE President of the United States. He wanted the perks and privileges of power, he was on the ultimate ego trip.

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president because she wanted to USE the power of the office to do things for our country, to make our nation a better place. She could care less about the trappings of power.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have made public service their life’s work. And not just our nation, they have served the world. There is no higher calling than that.

Barack Obama came into office presumptuously comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s most famous speech:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I’m gonna make a prediction – 100 years from now schools and banks will be open on Barack Obama’s birthday.

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In other news…

There is a lot of news to cover today:

• Al Franken is the likely winner of the Minnesota Senate Race.  It’s not official yet but he is down by a mere 5 votes and is expected to pick up enough votes in the discarded absentee ballots that will put him over the top.  (You can judge the absentee ballots yourself at the Star-Tribune site.  There are literally hundreds of legitimate ballots what were tossed for no good reason)  I’m really glad to hear this.  Franken the satirical writer will put away his poison pen and become one of the only truly liberal senators we have.  Hillary was a strong supporter and I know she picks wisely.  So, a cautious congratulations to Franken and for those who would like to help defray the costs of the recount and make sure that every vote is counted, please see this link.  Update: Whoo-Hoo!  Franken is up by 31 123 129 205 this morning.   You can follow the action online here.  Go Al, Go!
• Terry Gross interviewed Elizabeth Warren of Harvard University a couple days ago.  Warren was recently appointed by Congress to investigate how the Paulsen Bailout funds were spent. What she says about the Treasury Department is scathing.  What she says about Sheila Bair, the FDIC head, is nothing short of laudatory.  Bair is the unexpected gem in the Bush Administration.  She is a woman with foresight and good administrative skills.  And she is also under attack by the Obamaphiles.  Don’t ask me why.  I think we all know.
• Bill Clinton reveals his donors to the Clinton Global Initiative.  {{Yawn.}}  There’s really nothing new here.  Leaders from countries around the world succumbed to the Big Dawg’s charms and donated money to a worthwhile foundation.  Some of those people were from countries we don’t like much.  Eh! They’re money’s still green and as long as they don’t mind parting with it with no strings attached, where’s the fire?
• Not everyone in the NY media likes the prospect of Caroline Kennedy as the next Senator from NY.  Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson reports on her “listening tour” of upstate NY.  As we all predicted, Lady Caroline, the intensely private person, has not been exposing herself to the germy hands of icky constituents.  Nooooo.  She has been greasing the skids with the leaders of the political machine in the upstate areas.  Sweet!  Edgeoforever, our source for all things Caroline, has more this morning.
• Oh and you women Obamaphiles?  You should remember what Rick Warren said about abortion.  You don’t remember?  Let me remind you:
  

  “Of course I want to reduce the number of abortions,” Warren told Beliefnet Editor-in-Chief Steven Waldman when asked if he was going to work with the Obama administration to achieve an abortion reduction agenda or if he thinks that the effort is a charade.

  “But to me it is kind of a charade in that people say ‘We believe abortions should be safe and rare,’” he added.

  “Don’t tell me it should be rare. That’s like saying on the Holocaust, ‘Well, maybe we could save 20 percent of the Jewish people in Poland and Germany and get them out and we should be satisfied with that,’” Warren said. “I’m not satisfied with that. I want the Holocaust ended.”

• Following up on that last point, edgeoforever at Not Your Sweetie has this little bit of Holiday Joy.  Bush has signed an executive order that allows a health worker with consceintious objections to refuse to participate in abortion related activities.  “Oh, don’t worry about that”, the stupid female Obamaphiles will say. “He has 120 days to rescind it once he takes office!”  Oh, REALLY?  And we’re sure he’s going to do that, why, exactly?  Remember, Obama’s whole shtick is to not rock the boat and challenge the media.  If he steps out of line even one tiny iota in those first 3 months, the Villagers are going to eviscerate him.  And they will use culture wars to do it.  It’s inevitable.

Changeity, hope, change, change!

Tuesday: New narrative-Hillary owes everything to Condi {{snort!}}

Ding! Your Rice is Finished!

David Brooks is a card, a real joker.  In his column today, Continuity We Can Believe In, he’s got to be kidding about how Clinton is going to take Condi’s initiatives and run with them:

It began with colonels and captains fighting terror on the ground. They found that they could clear a town of the bad guys, but they had little capacity to establish rule of law or quality of life for the people they were trying to help. They quickly realized that the big challenge in this new era is not killing the enemy, it’s repairing the zones of chaos where enemies grow and breed. They realized, too, that Washington wasn’t providing them with the tools they needed to accomplish their missions.

Their observations and arguments filtered through military channels and back home, producing serious rethinking at the highest levels. On Jan. 18, 2006, Condoleezza Rice delivered a policy address at Georgetown University in which she argued that the fundamental threats now come from weak and failed states, not enemy powers.

In this new world, she continued, it is impossible to draw neat lines between security, democratization and development efforts. She called for a transformational diplomacy, in which State Department employees would do less negotiating and communiqué-writing. Instead, they’d be out in towns and villages doing broad campaign planning with military colleagues, strengthening local governments and implementing development projects.

Fancy that!  Condi actually learned something on the job.  Will miracles never cease.  I mean, wasn’t this the same woman who couldn’t have imagined pilots who would deliberately slam their planes into people filled objects in order to cause death, destruction and defeat?  Did she think kamikaze only referred to a blue drink in a shotglass?

Yes, Brooks thinks the amazing Condoleeza Rice has spent hundreds of sleepless nights “toiling weak and weary” over some policy initiative that would spread money and assistance from the ground up,  It would start with the grassroots and try to change the world one poverty stricken person at a time.  It sounds like the plan we had promised Afghanistan right after we invaded them but this is *different* because it has the stamp of approval from Brooksie and that’s because Condi, who has problems with her working imagination, has tested it out. Sort of.

The Bush administration began to implement these ideas, but in small and symbolic ways. President Bush called for a civilian corps to do nation-building. National Security Presidential Directive 44 laid out a framework so different agencies could coordinate foreign reconstruction and stabilization. The Millennium Challenge Account program created a method for measuring effective governance.

Actual progress was slow, but the ideas developed during the second Bush term have taken hold.

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.

A priori,  a posteriori, symbolically. What’s the diff?  What do you want from this woman?  Hasn’t it been enough that she’s given the best 8 years of her life to Bush and Co?!

Finally, Brooks admonishes Obama and Clinton to get something done:

As Stephen Flanagan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, Obama’s challenge will be to actually implement the change. That would include increasing the size of the State Department, building a civilian corps that can do development in dangerous parts of the world, creating interagency nation-building institutions, helping local reformers build governing capacity in fragile places like Pakistan and the Palestinian territories and exporting American universities while importing more foreign students.

Given the events of the past years, the U.S. is not about to begin another explicit crusade to spread democracy. But decent, effective and responsive government would be a start.

Obama and his team didn’t invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.

Well, Condi and Gates didn’t invent the approach either.  And we shall see if there is any money left for action.  We may be left relying on the Clinton Global Initiative.  After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.