Gird Your Loins >>

Prophets are generally unremarkable people without the clairvoyance they are granted, as in the case of God always picking the hermits and the outcasts to deliver his hellfire and brimstone to the idolaters. Joe Biden seems to fit that bill.

At press conferences after the election, Obama appeared before a podium bearing the sign “President-Elect Obama,” as though the American public does not know already who he is, furthermore betraying his obsession with personal branding and self-assertion. The new community organizer has already established an $ 800 billion buck stimulus plan that will likely pass in some form or another. During the debates, commentators remarked on how quickly Obama seized on the economic issues. To Obama, it was something that he was comfortable talking about given the climate and what he could blame on Bush. Not a so-called forte denoting expertise, rather a point of ease.  Everyone was quick to note how swiftly he seized onto the growing discontent with the Bush policies of the last eight years, and there was a general sense that Obama was swift to react.

Now the campaigning is over. Since then, the hope and change lingo of pomp and bluster has been replaced by a calculated effort on behalf of Obama to begin lowering expectations for his presidency. Sad really. Now given the current war against Hamas in Gaza, Obama’s slow response and sudden “respect for the current president” is a telltale sign of things to come on foreign policy issues, given that the has prematurely inserted himself other places. Vladimir Putin has cut off petrol to Eastern Europe, and now the Obama Administration (ugghh) is rumored to launch into low-level negotiations with Hamas, an international terrorist network, forking on Bush’s bait-carrot approach to Hamas, its recognition built upon its disarmament, and aid to the government it controls. We will have to wait and see which rout Obama takes, I wager. But one should only negotiate on what one considers negotiable, and given the land concessions that Israel had made in 2005, I think it is unlikely that Israel can deliver any other concession that will satiate this monster. If Obama plans on perpetuating the Bush Policy on Hamas, then we have to assume that he was wrong about the inaneness of an “Axis of Evil” and isolationism thereof.

Biden and Obama, who promised to re-engage the world with their good mojo, are deafeningly silent on issues of evil and terrorism. McCain, at Staddleback (which was the most objective look at each candidate in the entire election), called out evil as something to be crushed and destroyed like a brood of vipers. Obama reflexively tried to bring it back to our shores in the form of “social injustice,” liberal-speak for their own view of unfairness in the world. Like a Dawkins Atheist, he did not want to directly acknowledge the “problem of evil.”

All that said, foreign terrorists daily watch CNN, Fox, and NBC. They know us in many ways better than we know them. And they have hailed the Obama victory, a campaign that has only spoken of victory in terms of its own success and not our military’s, as a capitulation brought on by a younger generation sick and tired of “hearing about war.” I often wonder if the youth of this nation is capable of comprehending, with inerrant truth and understanding, the historical gravity and threat of Radical Islamic Extremism, and I wonder if the same well-fed youth, that now returns to its post-election life of study and comfort, could ever be again mobilized for a cause less “feel good” and more pointed than a smiling election. Obama’s election did not call for sacrifice; it appealed to the youthful spasm of wishing to banish all bad news, war tension, and worry. Thus it remains doubtful if that same generation, which voted in the vain hopes of flipping the kill switch and taking a sigh of relief, can samely be called to domestic duty without largess, tuition-payment, or other incentive. How we can afford that volunteer army… is another article unto itself. >>