Wednesday, June 4, 2008

I am Disappointed

First things first - congratulations Barack Obama. I look forward to voting for you in November, and I look forward even more to the work you will do come January to end the war, restore our civil liberties and bring honesty, transparency and new thinking to the federal government.

My joy over Obama's victory was tempered today, however, after I read about his remarks before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Obama had a chance today to tell the AIPAC crowd some truths that they don't want to hear - that the U.S. shouldn't support the building of West Bank settlements, for example - the same way he told Cuban-Americans last month that he would ease the embargo.

Instead, Obama used his speech to promise that the U.S. will join in any war that threatens Israel, needlessly antagonized the Palestinians by saying that Israel shouldn't divide Jerusalem and took a bellicose posture against Iran that would make George Bush proud. I'd like to hope that this is all just political posturing (not that that's alright), but I'm just not sure.

The only solace I take from Obama's speech today is that it wasn't nearly as bad as John McCain's AIPAC speech. Sigh.

3 comments:

Jake Featherston said...

The American political system is presently incapable of generating a major party nominee that won't kowtow to AIPAC. Hopefully this will no longer be the case by 2012, but for the moment, Barack Obama is the best we can do. At least he's not chomping at the bit to go to war with Iran, like our "friend," the Arizona Gila Monster.

Anonymous said...

I do not get this. Obama is a socialist, not a libertarian. Ron Paul is a libertarian who is for less government and less taxes in our lives. Obama wants to raise the capital gains and dividends taxes and has government programs as far as the eye can see and government solutions for everything. I never thought that libertarians were big government people. I am a libertarian/conservative but would never vote for Obama.

Jake Featherston said...

"I am a libertarian/conservative but would never vote for Obama."

Hey, just so long as you don't vote for John McInsane. I'l be voting for Bob Barr myself, that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that Barack Obama is the lesser of two evils. After all, McInsane is even more of a neo-con, big government RINO than Bush, and is probably the least libertarian of the Republican Presidential nominees since Benjamin Harrison, from 120 years back.

The biggest of all big-government programs is war, and McInsane wants to take us into yet another one in Iran, while Obama wants to get us out of the one in Iraq. That makes Obama more functionally friendly to libertarianism than that horrible old man from Phoenix.