I have a different interpretation…maybe. I’m thinking there may be a method to the “lying enough times” thing. I don’t think President Obama is a particularly subtle person, nor his intelligence particularly scintillating (I’ve been underwhelmed, anyway)… but maybe in telling both truth and lies in a confusing mix, he’s hit on a strategy that works. Is it possible to suffer from “judgment fatigue”?

I mean this: If we’re inured, over time, to never knowing for sure what’s truth and what’s lies, might we get tired or overwhelmed with the effort of evaluating each statement, and eventually just apply some rule of thumb – “President Obama is telling the truth because he’s wearing a red tie today,” or “President Obama is telling the truth because he’s talking to union members”? Or, worse, might we just become apathetic about exercising judgment? It’s the “boy who cried wolf” idea: too many false alarms, things that we think might be lies that turn out to be true, and the Big Lie never gets checked. Are we being softened up?

But I’m still not sold on the idea that President Obama has a particular Big Lie in mind, our good hostess’s growing suspicions notwithstanding. (I can’t say I’m not suspicious; just that I’m not sold.) At the moment I’m still leaning toward “President Obama is a ruthless and essentially amoral pragmatist who doesn’t yet know whether he’ll need this tool, but he’s darn well going to have it ready, just in case.” Like the Missionaria Protectiva in Dune, seeding the inhabited planets with religious myths for the someday, possible use of a random Bene Gesserit in distress.

(I hope I haven’t just squandered any credibility I might’ve had… Loved the book, was bewildered by the incredible badness of the movie.)

Nominally correct, HOWEVER — an action showing a willingness to commit violence WOULD have stopped Hitler cold.

His generals and advisers were so nervous at his aggressiveness that they were willing to depose him if the French had so much as placed a company of troops on the bridge into the Alsace-Lorraine, and said “No!”. This has been revealed by papers which have since come available.

The result of being willing to fight would have been not having to fight.

As anyone with experience knows, the bully prefers easy prey. Stand up to them and you will not get beat up every week, as the second time they will choose an easier target unwilling to fight at all.

It would have, quite possibly, been the end of Hitler and with a very different universe resulting today.

Obama’s “Be Nice” is, in fact, the most utterly wrong tactic to take, as Bill Whittle details in his Afterburner piece on PJTV –

Game Theory and a Losing Strategy: Obama’s Bad Judgment With The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Still, he said it. The world listened. It may be milk-and-water, but at least it is not all water.

He spoke of armed conflict — which is apparently not so terrible a thing sometimes; who knew? — as though he had just discovered it. He said that he was sending “thousands of young Americans” into battle, as though it’s the first time he’d ever contemplated having to do that… after wanting to be President all his life. (He’s also off by a factor of ten, even if you only count the Afghanistan “surge”, and not the hundreds of thousands already deployed, for whom he is also responsible.)

And then he presumed to give the world a freshman-level lecture on what war means. (Perhaps the Norwegian Nobel committee needs such a lecture, although I doubt it. But when addressed to the world, as his speeches often are, he sounded silly and juvenile. I was reminded of a child speaking to an adult, with all the authority of something learned in grade school that day.)

His inaccuracies are also those of a rank amateur, at best. He claims that WWII might have the best claim to being a ‘just war’, even though more civilians than soldiers died. That sort of moral equivalence — one dead civilian considered the same as another — turns my stomach. Were the German civilians inadvertently killed during Allied bombing raids equivalent, in President Obama’s mind, to the million Leningraders who were starved to death by the Nazis? Are we supposed to count Allied civilian casualties together with Holocaust victims, or the civilians caught in Allied cross-fire together with the Bataan Death March? Disgusting.

(He also says “soldiers” in this context and others… which would offend me were I a sailor, airman, or Marine. It’s a standard mistake for someone who has never served to make, like calling a sergeant “sir”… but the President’s speechwriters are supposed to know better.)

“I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” Nobody expected you to, kid — except maybe yourself and Michelle.

There are many more such points, large and small. What they add up to is this: the man knows nothing of war, nothing of the military, nothing of military responsibilities to allies… and is just now beginning to wake up to his need, as Commander-in-Chief, to understand these things. So he lectures us, on the assumption that these new revelations he’s been having will be new to us, too.

(If you like, try this exercise. Imagine yourself as a member of America’s armed forces — if you happen not to be one –in uniform, fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq or holding down the DMZ in Korea or patrolling the waterways or the skies. Imagine you’ve been on the front lines for years, facing people doing their best to kill you. Now read the speech again… and count how many times you, as a warrior, find yourself shaking your head and saying “no sh!t, Sherlock!” or the equivalent.)

Is President Obama beginning to wake up to the enormity of the responsibility he’s shouldered, the vast gulf between the real world and the one he imagined in undergraduate bull sessions, and the tremendous costs if he screws up? Perhaps he is. I hope he is… although I’m not at all optimistic.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

It was a very good speech…but then, Obama makes good speeches. Talk is ultimately cheap, and actions speak louder than words. Time will tell; I hope he is growing into the office, but life has made me a skeptic, and thus far Obama hasn’t done anything to change that…

http://www.breitbart.tv/bachmann-on-the-b-cast-a-conservative-call-to-action/

I thought early on in his administration, and may have said so here before, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him exercise at least some modicum of military power–many Left leaders do (they mainly like to be pacifists when the goal is to persuade other nations to adopt the pacifist program). The old Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and some others have exercised the Left agenda at home at the same time as they work hard to maintain a projection of strength militarily, and abroad. Obama may be aiming for a bit of that, and we may see him grow increasingly comfortable with it. After all, it’s his military now.

That being said, I don’t imagine for a moment he’ll relax his leftward drive on the domestic front, and I think the dangers there are pretty darned immediate. And that will be the case no matter what he says in any particular speech. If he needs Congressional support to exercise military muscle internationally, there’re always the Republicans to help. And of course American military might could come in handy in supporting the global Left’s goals–like, um, the Copenhagen program.