Report on Debate: Only One Candidate Looked Presidential in Debate

Barack Obama Agrees With John McCain Again and Again and Again John McCain and Senator Barack Obama particapated in the first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi on Friday evening. Once again, John McCain showed without a doubt that he is ready to be Commander in Chief from day one. Senator McCain’s answers were clear, direct, and heartfelt. Barack Obama, by contrast, repeatedly evaded questions and directly contradicted previous statements that he has made. Read more

How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story. Read more

McCain Wants To Delay Debate To Focus On The Economy And Obama Says No: Who Is Right?

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Election 2008, What matters most?

 

 

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Biden: Wealthy Americans Must Pay More Taxes to Show Patriotism

The video above shows Obama-Biden tax and spend redistribute income goals. “We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people,” Biden said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Noting that wealthier Americans would indeed pay more, Biden said: It’s time to be patriotic… time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

Link to related CommonSense2day Post here

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Charlie Gibson’s Gaffe-”The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.”

“At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of ‘anticipatory self-defense.’ “

– New York Times, Sept. 12

Informed her? Rubbish.

The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy’s pledge in his inaugural address that the United States “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson’s 14 points.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.

Not the “with us or against us” no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed “doctrines” in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush doctrine.

Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

By Charles Krauthammer
Saturday, September 13, 2008; A17
You can communicate with the author at: letters@charleskrauthammer.com

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Common Sense review of Charlie Gibson interview with Sarah Palin

Palin Takes on Charlie Gibson
(from Rush Limbaugh show)
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go to one Sarah Palin sound bite. This is perhaps one of the highlights of Sarah Palin’s interview. It’s number 23. It is one of the highlights of the whole interview last night. She’s great in this. I just want to set up this. She would not allow Charlie Gibson to put different words in her mouth when she answers his question about Israel. Now, just listen to this. This is Gibson’s question. “What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?”

PALIN: I don’t think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves, and for their security.

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Ladies of “The View”

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