I thought Obama was not stern enough with McCain last night, and we are left with the utterly bizarre outcome that McCain is seen as more serious on foreign policy. In particular, when McCain kept up his arrogant and condescending put-downs about how little Obama understands, a good response would have been something along these lines:
“I realize that John has been around a long time, a very long time, and that he has visited a lot of countries and has met a lot of foreign leaders (unlike his running mate). But that tells us nothing about John’s temperament and judgment when it comes to the ability to keep us safe. And in fact, on so many key issues, John has made the wrong call, often with disastrous consequences. He was George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s biggest cheerleader when raced into a stupid and wrong war in Iraq, a war that has made the world a far more dangerous place and puts our security in jeopardy for years to come. Where was his famous judgment and temperament when he swallowed– hook, line, and sinker– falsehoods about Iraq being connected to 9/11 and having WMDs? We know George Bush was a novice. But shouldn’t John McCain’s decades of experience have suggested to him, just maybe, things would not turn out so rosy?
So, this is the issue. John has proven that he does not have the temperament and judgment to lead or to face foreign and domestic crises with calmness, with common sense, and with nerves of steel. John is the still a member of the utterly discredited neo-con club that believes preventive war will solve our problems, when we know that it will only make things worse, and that military action must always be a last resort, when diplomacy has failed. On some issues, John is even more extreme than Dick Cheney. Think about that. His belief that all the world’s problems can be solved through the barrel of a gun are on display tonight when he talks about Iraq only in terms of the surge, forgetting that the surge was not an end in itself, but a means to an end- a durable political solution that remains in doubt in an increasing tense and ethnically-divided Iraq. But no, John doesn’t seem interested in that. He doesn’t know the difference between a tactic and a strategy because he can’t admit he was wrong.
He has also adopted George Bush’s legendary stubbornnesswhen it comes to not opening negotiations with America’s enemies, forgetting that treating them as outcasts only emboldens them, and makes problems worse down the line. Hasn’t be learned nothing from the past eight years? Are we bound for another four years of prancing around the world stage like a hot-headed adolescent?
But John never thinks of the future, can never calculate beyond the immediate horizon. We have a financial crisis, the most serious since the Great Depression. We don’t know where John stands on it, but we do know that his erratic and unstable behavior over the past few days raises very serious questions about his temperament and judgment. We need a strong and steady hand, both domestically and the world stage, not somebody who is rash and unpredictable. We’ve seen that before and we don’t need to see it again. We can’t afford four more years of bad judgment. We can’t afford a McCain presidency.”
What do you think?
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