Yep – he’s doing to the Iranians what he did to Hillary, and then McCain/Palin.

If we’re going to stablize the world without doubling our defense budget again (which some here would like to do, I think) Obama’s tactics have the best chance of success, I think.

How is this not more effective than the saber-rattling and posturing of the previous administration? This is diplomacy at it’s best. Make your enemy look evil and manipulative, and make yourself look like a saint.

I may not like all that he is for, Everett Dirksen told me he didn’t agree with everything LBJ did either.

But who is president and who is in Congress.
If there are better idea’s let them come forth! If there are better plans, let them be presented.

Where are the REPUBLICAN leaders in all this?
You can’t sit back and let radicals like Limbaugh and Beck run amuck with the conservative party!
Clowns can not run the circus….

Where are the better idea’s?

I stand corrected. I had forgotten that Obama had put those words about FDR in his speech.

I was wrong.

The following was written on September 20, 2001–just nine days after the 9-11 attack:

Put Out No Flags
By Katha Pollitt

This article appeared in the October 8, 2001 edition of The Nation.
September 20, 2001

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong–the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we’re both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that have sprung up in front of every firehouse, the chi-chi art galleries and boutiques of SoHo. It has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses. It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.

And this was written by Michael Walzer of “Dissent” Magazine, in early 2002:

Can There be a Decent Left?
by Michael Walzer

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

I really didn’t expect to be saying this to you, Sinz … but you’re an idiot.

It makes me very sad to have to say that.

Wait – you’re saying that John Anderson was a hard-core Lefty?

As if George W. Bush and his cronies always had the utmost respect for the interests of their “coalition of the willing” partners

But the beauty of our system of government is that mistakes can be corrected by the voters.

Bush is out of office, the Republican who planned to succeed him (McCain) lost decisively to Obama, who promised a very different course. And the voters elected him a Democratic Congress to work with. That suggests something about the American system that beats what typically happens in Latin America or the Third World, the bulk of the nations in the U.N.

Finally, as I keep pointing out, while the Left used Bush as a boogeyman while he was in office (and even now), the hard-core worldwide Left never had ANY kind things to say about America during the Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, or even Carter administrations (when they ran a third-party candidate, Anderson), either.

I lived through those adminstrations, and the vituperative attacks on my country from the worldwide Left never, ever ceased. From them you’ve gotten nothing but a steady stream of denunciations: America has done THIS thing wrong in the world. America has done THAT wrong. America is racist. America is imperialist. America is fascist. America launches “illegal” wars. (The Left thinks every war the U.S. has fought since World War II is “illegal.”) On and on and on. Listening to them, you would think that the United States is the most consistently evil, oppressive, and unjust nation in world history.

Guess what. It’s mostly the opposite.
And it falls to we conservatives to keep having to defend America from such attacks, when its own left-wing citizens won’t.

When Osama bin Laden yells “Death to America!,” I wonder how many lefties in San Francisco and Vermont nod in agreement.

You may have thought that was your question … but what you really wrote was:

Surely you can think of some GOOD things America did in the world between 1789 and 2000?

I keep waiting for Obama to reiterate that part of America’s track record.

I think that “We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words — within our borders, and around the world.” is a damn good summary of America’s track record.

Obama should have reminded those U.N. delegates that the United Nations was the creation of the UNITED STATES –it was originally President FDR’s idea.

From Obama’s address last week: This body was founded on the belief that the nations of the world could solve their problems together. Franklin Roosevelt, who died before he could see his vision for this institution become a reality, put it this way — and I quote: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation…. It cannot be a peace of large nations — or of small nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world….

The United Nations was built by men and women like Roosevelt from every corner of the world — from Africa and Asia, from Europe to the Americas.

It seems your quibble is that Obama didn’t stand up in front of the General Assembly and tell them “the US built this institution, so STFU”.

about which they can find very few SPECIFIC things to be proud of.

You’re the one calling for specifics. Obama stated clear universal principles that the US has stood for, with the exception of the last 8 years.

Why didn’t Obama name some SPECIFIC good things we did in the world, instead of his usual fluff which every skilled diplomat sitting there recognized was an attempt to avoid the question?

Because he sure had no trouble listing what he considered to be specific bad things: Acting unilaterally, being too selective in its promotion of democracy, etc. And was that really true THROUGHOUT our history, as he implied? He could have put a caveat in there that “In recent years, America has tended to act unilaterally….” Instead, he made it sound like America has acted unilaterally throughout its entire history. That’s totally false.

Obama should have reminded those U.N. delegates that the United Nations was the creation of the UNITED STATES–it was originally President FDR’s idea. That no nation on earth has done more to promote peace through collective security. We created the U.N., NATO, the Partnership for Peace, and many other treaties of collective security. We did NOT act unilaterally in Korea or the Gulf War–in both cases the U.N. authorized the use of military force, but only the U.S. had the military power to carry out that U.N. mandate. (How many times has the U.N. been able to authorize military force without the U.S. armed force being required?)

It’s pretty obvious from listing to lefties like Obama and his hard-core lefty supporters, that they regard the Bush 43 administration as different only in degree but not in kind from the general run of American history, about which they can find very few SPECIFIC things to be proud of.