Either I haven't been paying attention, or the Republicans missed a fantastic opportunity to bash the shit out of Obama for the prize-winningly dickheaded answer he gave to Shepherd Rick Warren and his Saddleback Herd of Shep, about whether evil exists and how we should deal with it. I just had a conversation about this with Douchashov and Germanicus (neither of whom is usually know as a political retard, but both of whom have made exceptions in this instance), and both seemed satisfied with the long-winded, poor-postured, stammering ejaculation of sophistry that Obama saw fit to counter with. First, judge for yourself:
If I were one of the subhuman mongrels working for the McCain campaign, I would have commissioned an ad that went roughly like this: "In response to a question about how best to fight evil, Barack Obama said we should be more worried about America becoming evil in our fight against terrorism and to keep America safe from our enemies abroad."
Or something like that, with a cheap punchline, and it would be a lot more polished because I'd be getting paid to think about it all day, instead of sneaking in blog posts about it between the work I'm actually being paid to do. But the point is that Obama actually has the right policy on this, but the dumbfuck Democrats, as usual, don't know how to frame it. Here's what I would have counseled Barack Hussein Obama to say:
"Of course evil exists. Now, my Republican opponent always has an easy answer to the question of how we confront evil: we destroy it, he says, because there's no room for nuance when we're talking about evil--unless it involves following evil into Pakistan, which I have said I would do as president, and which my opponent has called me naive for. But let me ask you and your congregants this: Do we see evil in North Korea? In the oppression of people of faith in China? In Myanmar? In Darfur? In Pakistan? Well then, should we invade all of those countries tomorrow? After all, there's no excuse for failing to stop evil, right?
If you don't think that's a good idea, it's probably for reasons having to do with resources, the military being stretched too thin, lack of preparation, excessive danger to our troops, the possibility the we could do a lot more harm than good, any number of things. And if that sounds reasonable to you, then you and I agree on this issue of principle.
The difference between me and my opponent on this question is simply one of judgment, of what the right time and place are to fight evil in order to best protect the interests of the United States. Just days after 9/11, he thought we should be invading the one country in the world we absolutely knew that Osama Bin Laden was NOT in, whereas I chose to focus on the one that was harboring him. That's the difference between me and John McCain"
Now how hard would that have been? He's going to be in a fucking evangelical church, David Plouffe--do you think you might want to prepare him for a question about evil? My statement hits like six different points of winning political psychology, and does it with logos, pathos, AND ethos, motherfuckers! Instead, Obama comes off sounding like a chin-stroking intellectual who is dodging the actual point of the question, which was obviously al-Quaeda.
You make me sick. Sick. Now get out of my sight.
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2 comments:
Kudos to the awesome power of the mock. I think we can agree that Obama could have given a better answer, perhaps along the lines you suggest, and that his team should have been better prepared for this line of questioning.
Putting that aside, is there any situation in which Obama can give a thinking man's answer, and get away with it? Part of his schtick is to elevate the level of the debate--that is his strategy for winning and why he has so many people swimming drunk on idealism. He has gotten tremendously far using this strategy, and he is rightly reticent to mess with that.
What do you think, is it just the answer he gave, the audience he gave it to, or both? We need to open a different thread on the ground game, but if he is tailoring his message by demographic then this probably counts as a failure.
"if he is tailoring his message by demographic then this probably counts as a failure."
Yes and yes. And my post was meant to show that he can give a "thinking man's answer" without sounding like a schmuck (within limits--a true thinking man may have been prompted by the question to begin a lengthy disquistion on the very concepts of good and evil, so thank god we avoided that).
I agree that he has gotten a lot of mileage out of the post-partisan garbage, and can continue to do so if he's smart about it. My point last night, though, was that he needs to be very fucking careful when it comes to answering these foundational values questions, and his performance so far has not been encouraging.
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