‘Bomb Bomb Bomb’ Iran McCain or ‘No More Bomb-a’ Obama?
Ben Shapiro
Many conservatives have decided to sit out the 2008 election. The choice between Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is no choice at all, they say. McCain’s a liberal Republican beloved by the mainstream media; he clashes with the base on a whole host of issues. This election is a lose-lose proposition – the only winning answer, as the computer puts it in the movie War Games, is not to play.
Except there’s one problem: we’re still at war. John McCain may resemble Obama on the environment, campaign finance-reform, and immigration. He may be surprisingly milquetoast on gay marriage and his rhetoric may be moderate on abortion. He may be averse to torturing terrorists. But in general, he’s a hawk’s hawk on foreign policy. His opponents, by contrast, are pacifists of the most egregious sort.
McCain recognizes the dramatic threat to world peace posed by Iran. In January 2006, he labeled the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons “the most serious crisis we have faced – outside of the entire war on terror – since the end of the Cold War.” The media raked McCain over the coals for joking that as president, he would – Beach Boys style – “Bomb bomb bomb. Bomb bomb Iran.”
Obama has said that he will do what it takes to stop Iran. Short of actually doing anything, that is. Obama’s Iran solution is to sit down and talk with vicious scumbag Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Obama titularly refuses to rule out the use of force against Iran, but he’s an appeaser of the regime – he voted “Not Present” to the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization and stated that it was the policy of the United States to “roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hizballah, and its indigenous proxies.” He then proceeded to attack Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for her support of the amendment, saying it paved the way to war with Iran. Voters want a leader who won’t repeat the mistakes of Iraq – and the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment takes us down that same path, explained Obama’s spokesman, Reid Cherlin.
McCain is also a hard-liner with regard to Iraq. He famously pushed the troop surge in Iraq, which has been tremendously successful. Obama, by contrast, has campaigned as the only Democrat who was anti-war from the beginning. He pledges to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months of entering office. “I don’t want to just end the war,” Obama recently averred. “I want to end the mind-set that got us into war.”
This is thinking of the most dangerous sort. Obama is advocating the wholesale jettisoning of the post-September 11 mindset – the mindset that we live in a dangerous world and must not wait for threats to fully materialize before striking. Obama would prefer that we simply ignore burgeoning threats until Americans die. Then, presumably, we will fight back in a minimalist way – minimalist, because we don’t want to “[fan] the flames of anti-American sentiment” the way we did in Iraq.
Note to conservatives: sitting on the sidelines this November may mean more dead Americans. Our enemies do not ignore America’s domestic politics – they realize that if Barack Obama is elected president, they can attack us with virtual impunity. Barack Obama’s “change” talk is largely rhetoric, but there’s one way it isn’t just talk – Obama will change America back into the paper tiger of the Bill Clinton years.
FamilySecurityMatters.org contributing editor Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. He is also the author of the recently published “Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future” as well as the national best seller “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.” He practices law in Los Angeles.
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Tagged: Bill Clinton, dead Americans, Defense Appropriations Bill, Lebanese Hizballah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
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Posted on 02/26/2008 by papundits
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