Good article from Karl Rove on the Wall Street Journal site. Rove actually offers up some praise for Obama!
Barack Obama inherited a set of national-security policies that he rejected during the campaign but now embraces as president. This is a stunning and welcome about-face.
For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush’s military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an “enormous failure” and a “legal black hole.” His campaign claimed last summer that “court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists.” Upon entering office, he found out they aren’t. …
Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama excoriated Mr. Bush’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, insisting it could not succeed. Earlier this year, facing increasing violence in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama rejected warnings of a “quagmire” and ordered more troops to that country. He isn’t calling it a “surge” but that’s what it is. He is applying in Afghanistan the counterinsurgency strategy Mr. Bush used in Iraq.
Of course, Rove is damning the big “O” with faint praise in the beginning of the article and then quite rightly moves on to hammer Obama’s special blend of socialist naiveté and extremism on domestic issues.
Glad to see that Obama is now beginning to realize that, in a foreign policy sense, the country is bigger place than his cronies in MoveOn.org and ACORN would have him believe. However, it is also quite upsetting to have it so plainly confirmed over the past few weeks that Obama was more concerned with presenting a phony election image than he was about actually running an effective government.
The more we see of Obama, the more we learn that, whatever he may have said during the election, he is wholly dedicated to his socialist domestic policy agenda of taking over private industry, imposing strict government control over the means of production, setting up his massive health care bureaucracy, decimating our ability to use energy (and thus the attacking the foundations of our economy), vastly increasing the size/power/scope of government operations, and hiking government spending beyond levels Bush, Clinton, and Bush Sr. could have ever dreamed possible.
Rove’s closing words are, therefore, absolutely appropriate (if not more than a little ironic, in that Bush II did the same thing by campaigning as a conservative and then ramping up spending and government intrusions on individual rights more than any of his predecessors could have imagined),
Mr. Obama either had very little grasp of what governing would involve or, if he did, he used words meant to mislead the public. Neither option is particularly encouraging. America now has a president quite different from the person who advertised himself for the job last year. Over time, those things can catch up to a politician.
On that note, Rove hits a home run and, honestly, who would know better?
