humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 10, 10:14 am, Mark Sieving wrote:
>> >http://snipurl.com/23vpb [www_politico_com]
>
> That's just an implied endorsement by a superdelegate.  There's
> nothing to indicate that Carter has or would play any role in forming
> policy for Obama.


April 11, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack
Obama said on Friday it was not his place to criticize former
President Jimmy Carter if he were to meet with Hamas, although Obama
said he would not meet with the militant Palestinian group.

Hamas says the meeting will take place but Carter has not provided any
details of whom he plans to meet during his nine-day trip to the
Middle East, which begins on Sunday. The Bush administration and close
U.S. ally Israel oppose the meeting.

"I'm not going to comment on former President Carter. He's a private
citizen. It's not my place to discuss who he shouldn't meet with,"
Obama told reporters while campaigning in Indianapolis.

==The Washington Post Date: December 30, 2007 Author: Reza Aslan {anti-
Bush liberal)

Excerpted:



Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to "re- brand"
America's image in the Middle East, I can't help but think about Jimmy
Carter's toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new
year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's much- despised
despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to
welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and
Ford administrations' blind support for the shah's brutal regime,
Iranians thrilled to Carter's promise to re-brand America's image
abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate,
middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the
popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New
Year's dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of
ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted
the shah for transforming the country into "an island of stability in
one of the more troubled areas of the world." With those words, Carter
unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It's just this sort of blunder -- naive, well-meaning, amateurish,
convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions --
that worries me again these days. That's because a curious and
dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes,
on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in
these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a "fresh
face" with an "intuitive sense of the world,"





Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair
of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip
to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005)
or held a single policy hearing. He's never faced off with foreign
leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in
the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has
gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years,
these things matter.

<>

But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through
action, not branding.

It is as though, rather than accepting blame for the mess and taking
responsibility for cleaning it up, [re: Andrew Sullivan, et al. -- all
this talk about "intuitive experience" and "re-branding images"] they
would prefer to slap a new coat of paint on the problem and declare it
fixed.

It was "intuition" that made the mess in the first place. It will take
more than intuition to clean it up. After all, we are not launching a
new product. We are electing a president.