The thing that amazes me is how little terrorism we’ve faced.
Considering the accumulating constituency for revenge that the last few decades has surely created, we must assume that there really are many people with motive…
And considering that a handful of copycats of the Washington Snipers could paralyze the entire country using completely legal weapons that can be bought without record or background check at any gun show…
Why aren’t we under constant attack?
The bumblefuck slapstick methods of our “national security professionals” when faced with someone like the Boston bombing brothers, after repeated warnings and watchlist entries, make it quite clear that our relative lack of terrorist events is NOT the result of a benign shield of 3-letter agencies Bauer-torturing their way to happiness, nor is it Admiral Poindexter’s Colossus/Panopticon project of surveillance.
Those ‘sober and realistic’ decision-making people don’t have a real good track record so far, IMO.
I’ll take my chances with the carefree intellectuals, thanks… might have a chance of not being further disenfranchised in favour of the corporatocracy then.
I think Carter is the one everyone thinks of in response to this question but hawkishness was not the problem. The Iranians were pretty obviously determined not to return hostages until Carter was out of office. Carter knew this and authorized a risky rescue mission. That doesn’t show any particular lack of hawkishness. Responsibility for the debacle that followed rests with the military leadership of the time, not with Carter. The main difference with Ronald Reagan was that Reagan recognized you get credit for winning, not for doing the right thing. He protected the American people from the Grenadian threat.
It cuts both ways: Nixon and Carter were certainly beat up over security issues and defeated by Kennedy and Regan respectively. On the other hand, Goldwater and McCain were defeated at least in part because they were portrayed as war mongers.
I too was struck by Obama’s insincerity and almost shame at trotting out the garbage he said at the beginning of the Snowden affair. He struggled for words and looked extremely sheepish.
Your answer will be accused of being of the “tin-foil hat” variety, but in a surveillance society its hard to really argue that they don’t have something on him. Or that he was threatened – like the great joke about how, on entering the oval office, a new president is shown a film of the Kennedy assassination from an angle we’ve never seen, and is asked “any questions?”
However, there is another justification that plays into Obama’s psychological profile – he clearly has issues standing up to other authority figures – how many times has he staked out a strong position only to fold immediately upon getting any blowback? Its so common we could say its a signature feature of his governing “style”. And to think that he wouldn’t receive gads of blowback if he ever suggested taking away the NSA’s favorite toys is sorely naive.
Honestly, I thought Carter lost it by giving in to the hawks and trying that stupid rescue mission that blew up in his face. It was absolutely not his style. If he’d just stuck to his peaceful ways, he’d have been much better off.
Pouring a 44 (brewed by Billy from peanuts) for our best ex-president.
That’s a pretty perplexing question, actually. No president in recent memory has faced the amount of white-hot, unthinking rage that Obama has (the lefties hated Dubya, but aren’t generally the gun-toting type, while gun sales have exploded in recent years). The difficulty of the logistics of maintaining security, especially out in the open, has got to exceed the sheer incompetence of the gunznbabble types (at least the ones too incompetent for the mercenary sector, where they would have little gripe with such a corporatist-friendly president).
They suggested that Obama might have taken office and been immediately
assailed by surveillance-happy spooks who assured him that the world
was full of existential terrors and that if he did anything to get in
their way of Total Information Awareness, he would be drummed out of
office in ignominy as the president who let America get attacked.
I get that this is a discussion-encouraging post, but I think Cory and his friends are making a big assumption that- on some level- absolves Obama of his crimes. Why is it assumed that Obama ever intended to be anti-surveillance? Why were his campaign speeches taken without question? Why is it that evil, faceless government spooks are the ones who changed his mind?
I’m not pro-Bush or anti-Obama or anything like that, but the attitudes of “of course a republican would violate our civil rights” and “blame someone else for the democrats doing the same” is kinda bullshit. Politicians are liars. Why can’t we apply this across the board?
If that’s in answer to, “Is it realistic to think that a president who isn’t a big enough hawk will cost his party the next election,” then I don’t understand your response. By keeping his military mitts off countries like Mexico and Germany during his first term (“He kept us out of war”), Wilson easily slid into a second term. Republicans did not take the next election because Wilson had been lacking war fever; Harding’s big two pitches were a post-Great-War “return to normalcy” (restoring “traditional” isolationism) and pushing back against Progressivism (better living through scientific method and Amendments 16 through 19).
FDR won his third term, in large part, because of his “tough dove” approach to Europe’s incipient meltdown. Faced with an isolationist Congress and electorate, Roosevelt got Americans to believe his assertion that no Americans were “going to be sent into any foreign war.”
Reagan’s a very interesting case. His talk was tough as nails, but his military actions were lightweight, practically set-pieces…definitely contrary to the Cold War doctrine of global containment.
If Cory would like to explore his question in its larger contexts, Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome – A History of American Hubris would make for excellent reading.
I am not a fan of Obama in the least. However, I wasn’t a fan of the alternatives to him either. This being said, he is just a politician. He’s going to follow the money like everyone else.
I don’t care if it makes me sound like a conspiracy theory nut, but I’m of the firm belief that all this NSA crap, the NDAA, and the Patriot Act are designed with one purpose in mind: destroy our rights and make us far easier to manage.
All I’ve got to say is if you don’t think Obama is just another politician watch this http://youtu.be/-B_G5SczZtY
I know in order to win in politics you tend to have to play hardball, but it would be refreshing to see someone willing to deviate from the norm and truly stand out on their own merits. However, I don’t ever see this happening.
Long story short: he’s doing what he “has” to do in order to maintain government power and our position within the world. The question is, at what cost?
Your knowledge of history and that of your friends is flawed. LBJ was a strident anti-communist, and thoroughly approved of the Vietnam intervention, as well as its escalation.
In the event, it turned out that our intervention in Vietnam was crucial to winning the Cold War - it put significant strain on the Soviet Union’s economy and helped widen the rift between China and the USSR which also had the effect of further taxing the USSR’s economy by tying down a significant proportion of their armed forces ranged along the China/USSR border.
I actually think FDR was not hawkish enough. Potentially Peral Harbor and large portions of WWII could have been avoided if Germany and Japan had been attacked after their initial hostile declarations or after their first act of gression against other nations. But, I don’t think that this ever hurt FDR politically, although I’m no expert on this period in US history.
