(UPDATE, Jan. 5, '10: Expanded.)
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial has been a more reliable rubber-stamp for the doings of the Obama Administration even than a lot of Congressional Democrats, and it's past time someone said peep about it. I've declined to write publicly on the Herald editorial in all these years because I'm barely acquainted with a fellow on the editorial board and because Herald editorials have in past been mostly fair and responsible, even when I haven't much agreed with them.
But The Herald is today a monopoly. Its unsigned editorials are the editorials of the largest newspaper in Canada's four Atlantic provinces, the sole province-wide paper in Nova Scotia, and now the only paper in the largest city north of Boston and east of Quebec City. And not long after The Herald saw off its only competition in Halifax, it fell head-over-heels in love with a man called Barack.
I suppose it was November when it was confirmed for me that the Herald editorial's Obama-boosting was something pathological. The occasion was the mad Obama decision to grant the rights and protections of an American citizen to the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack in American history. Of course the Herald editorial ruled emphatically that Obama had taken "the correct course", as if this was some long-overdue, desperately-needed, obvious measure, instead of a gratuitous prostration before the enemy, absolutely without precedent anywhere on earth, that came out of the clear blue sky one day and had never occurred to anyone before sometime in 2009. The editorial also dismissed the naysayers, who happen to be the great majority, with a fair bit of ignorance of the issue thrown in for good measure, as is typically the case when the Herald editorial wades into American affairs. But that much was all in a day's work for The Chronicle-Herald -- the least reliable outlet in the English-speaking world for news having anything at all to do with Barack Obama; it was the rest of the editorial that crossed into a demonstration of blindest love for Barack Obama.
At the same time as the Obama Administration decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in civilian court like any American accused of a common crime, they also ruled that five much lesser terrorist figures be tried by the military commissions crafted by the Bush Administration and Democratic Congress, and approved by the very Supreme Court. Now, among those five sent to the military tribunals happened to be one Omar Khadr, who has some legalistic link to Canada and became an instant cause celebre among the entirety of the Canadian elite and left, if there's a distinction. In Canada Khadr is near-universally assumed to be a pitiful, blameless waif clutching a Mickey Mouse (literally), particularly among the kind of Canadians who are also head-over-heels for Barack Obama. So I just assumed the Herald editorial would at least register some polite complaint that the terror leader was being given the rights and protections of an American citizen, while the supposed Canadian innocent was busted down to military court. But no. The Herald editorial actually contorted itself to stalwartly defend both contradictory decisions -- to treat the enemy leader as a U.S. citizen, and to deny that same treatment to the pip-squeak kid believed by Canadians to have done nothing at all.
Now, there is no sensible way of reconciling those two extremes. It's as capricious a decision as has ever been made by any democratic government, and is the kind of arbitrariness one finds in rulers who claim a divine right. The Obama Administration's only given rationale was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was responsible for an attack on civilians, so he was being tried in civilian court, while the others were alleged to be responsible for military attacks and so were being tried in the military system, but of course a civilian massacre is if anything many times worse than an attack on armed forces in a war zone, and anyway, Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 attacks were also against the Pentagon, the very headquarters of the United States Armed Forces. So that day, in that editorial of The Chronicle-Herald, it finally became beyond dispute that the sole organizing principle in Herald editorials concerning Barack Obama was their irrational allegiance to Obama, in absolutely all he does, all he says, and all that is done and said under the name of his administration.
And so when Obama announced his "surgelet" for Afghanistan, as when he has announced anything at all of any import, the only question was how obsequious the Herald editorial on the subject would be. Of course the editorial would take the view that Obama was responsible and wise, plotting just the right course in just the right measure. Well, where other observers found Obama to be hesitatingly hedging his bets in search of a third way between the hard realities, the Herald editorial pronounced him "courageous". Where other commentators found Obama's speech dispiriting when it needed to be rousing, the Herald editorial decided he was duly "sombre".
As if that weren't enough, a little later in another installment on the same subject, the Herald editorial went one better, actually going so far as to explicitly compare Obama to the greatest president of them all, the man who was prepared to rend the nation and precipitate the bloodiest war in its history, and spill the blood of 600,000 Americans to do what was right. These are the actual words of the December 13 Chronicle-Herald editorial: "Like Abraham Lincoln, President Obama is clearly among the latter. He serves the cause of world peace by using force against those who are bound to violence." Ugh. You see why I say the Herald editorial is in love. And it's always so unbecoming when comfortable middle-aged men fall head-over-heels. Of course, for anyone who has a clue about Lincoln as he was -- and not as he's conveniently recalled by a latter-day elite Canadian newspaper editorialist with his head in the clouds singing, "Obama: say it softly, it's almost like praying" -- the very fact that the Herald editorial glorifies Barack Obama unto the heavens is the first clue that Obama is no Lincoln. The Halifax elite of Lincoln's day were as anti-Lincoln as any Confederate raider; their inheritors today are the ones invoking Lincoln to justify the elite conventional wisdom of their time. If Obama were remotely like Lincoln, the Herald editorial would presently be denouncing him as a warmonger and shredder of civil liberties and "all international law".
If the case for the Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem hasn't been made sufficiently, the December 30 editorial on the attempted Christmas Day terror bombing may clear up any lingering doubt. The sole reference to Obama was in praise of him: "U.S. president Barack Obama has wisely asked for a thorough review...." Now, by December 30 there had accumulated a pile of indictments against Obama and his administration on this score, and yet the Herald editorial was actually applauding Obama for his "wisdom" in requesting a review.
That "wisely" really was gratuitous; even if the editorial found it necessary to document that Obama had requested a review, just how much "wisdom" does it take for a politician to do the most usual, unimaginitive, cheap, and reactive thing possible, ordering a "review" after his government has made a complete pig's breakfast of things? "Wisdom" would have been revoking the would-be bomber's visa and monitoring him after he became known to the U.S. government as a jihadi; not upholding the visa, letting the man onto a U.S.-bound flight with a bomb in his pants, then when the fuse misfired and the civilian passengers detained him, turning him over to domestic law enforcement and granting him a lawyer on the taxpayer's tab without pumping him for information on other planned attacks, while your administration assures the people that "the system worked."
It gets worse when one appreciates that even openly pro-Obama American newspaper editorials were absolutely scathing of Obama on this same point. From the same day and on the same subject as that Herald editorial, the editorial of the New York Daily News: "What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis management. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. ... Obama's description of Abdumutallab as an 'isolated extremist' was remarkable and disturbing. The radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. ... In a similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a 'review'...." Again, that was the editorial of a pro-Obama American paper, on the same day and subject as the Herald editorial blindly and pathetically claiming "wisdom" in Obama's handling of the attempted bombing.
Yes, blinder love hath no man than The Chronicle-Herald's editorial for Barack Obama. It's about to the point that if Obama announced his intention to destroy America's nuclear arsenal by detonating it over Halifax, the Herald editorial could be expected to applaud in its accustomed judicious tone that "this is the correct course". But what upset my stomach was a casual cynicism in defense of Obama in the editorial on Obama's Afghan surgelet. I determined there was no virtue in holding my fire any longer on an editorial board capable of that kind of rationalizing.
That Herald editorial of December 3 concocted an argument out of thinnest air, excusing Obama for his withdrawal date, which the same editorial acknowledged in the same paragraph was "wholly unrealistic". The editorial calls it "triangulation", which would be bad enough, but that's a misuse of the old Dick Morris term of art from the 1990s, which is a point that demands a greater understanding of American politics and history than is found in the average Canadian newspaper editorial board. In fact the editorial is clearly implying this is something worse than "triangulation": a lie.
The editorial calls Obama's withdrawal date "wholly unrealistic", then proceeds to argue that this unrealism is necessary to "give the war-weary American public something to look forward to." You can almost see the Herald editorialist patting the heads of those "war-weary American public". Give 'em "something to look forward to" -- something "wholly unrealistic". That'll hold 'em. What do you call it when something "wholly unrealistic" is promised, to give people "something to look forward to"? Not Dick Morris' "triangulation".
It is patronizing, skin-crawlingly cynical, and unworthy of an argument in defense of the war. If this anonymous Herald editorialist and his readers are so very clever as to plainly see that Obama's withdrawal date is "wholly unrealistic", then why shouldn't the American people be capable of seeing the very same thing? The implication is that the American people lack the editorialist's level of understanding, and can be told a little white lie to hold them for a while. And this is supposed to be in support of the war effort. Well, like the anonymous Herald editorial-writer, I am a supporter of the war, but apparently unlike that masked man, I also respect and revere the American people, and it does seem to me that if you mean to ask the American people to sustain a war effort, you owe it to them to tell them what you know to be true, as far as you can know it.
Following is the offending passage:
Now take that last point, or rather that last imagining. That is both an unearned credit to Obama and an undeserved offense to the generals prosecuting Obama's war. The editorial of the largest newspaper on Canada's east coast is actually arguing that Obama offered a "wholly unrealistic" withdrawal date to "give his generals a sense of urgency". For a start, if it's plain even to Herald editorial-writer that Obama's deadline is "wholly unrealistic", then isn't it just possible that the generals would know that better than anyone? And I know all too well that The Chronicle-Herald guards its gates against news and opinion that may be upsetting to elite Canadian Obama-adulators, but surely even the Herald editorial board got the news that Obama took three months to order three-quarters of the reinforcements requested by his hand-picked general, in order to do the job Obama gave him in March. During which time, 116 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It is Obama who's been lacking the "sense of urgency", not the generals on the ground who are daily prosecuting his war without the men they tell him they need for the job.
And if the anonymous editorial-writer wanted to come up with three rationales to justify this Obama withdrawal date which even the editorialist couldn't support, then how about the most obvious one, namely that Obama's own majority party is against his surgelet. If you're fishing for justifications for setting a withdrawal date just a year after your reinforcements get into place, why not that the majority party is against sending them at all, and may be more inclined to let it pass if there's reason to think it'll be reversed before long? That most obvious point was not made in the Herald editorial, while two cynical, patronizing, and frankly imaginary rationales did make it into the final draft.
Now, as one who's been reading Herald editorials for many years, I recall that the Herald editorial takes a very dim view of Rush Limbaugh, and as those people who take a dim view of Rush Limbaugh are invariably people who never listen to him, I'd bet good money that the Herald editorialist didn't hear Limbaugh's definitive argument against Obama's announced withdrawal date, so I will paraphrase it here.
The Limbaugh argument imagines that it had been an al Qaeda or Taliban leader speaking on Afghanistan, instead of Obama. The speech goes on at some length about the al Qaeda/Taliban plans for sending thousands of reinforcements into Afghanistan, the necessity of the mission, etc., etc. Then this al Qaeda/Taliban leader announces that after 18 months, they'll start their withdrawal. Now how do you suppose we would take that? Would we dwell on the first bit, or the bit about the withdrawal starting in 18 months? Of course, we'd take that as an admission of defeat, and buck ourselves up that if we can just hang on in there for another 18 months, we'll have seen the enemy off.
Well, then, now we have some idea of how the enemy will have taken Obama's Afghanistan address, with its talk of withdrawals in 18 months. It took Rush Limbaugh to make that point, but Herald editorialists would not be so abased as to hear so "boorish" an observer.
What's more, I think the Herald editorial has the wrong end of the stick altogether on Obama's withdrawal date. The editorial assumes he's just saying it; that Obama has set this date purely for public consumption, knowing full well it's unrealistic, and will push on after that time if that's what's called for. That kind of deliberate dishonesty would be a scandal of the first order, but it assumes Obama will prosecute this war come hell or high water. I suppose we won't know for sure until we get there, but what possible reason has Obama given for assuming such a thing? If Obama is as committed to this fight as the Herald editorial imagines him to be, then why is he sending 30,000 reinforcements when he was asked for 40,000, and why did it take him three months to sign off on even that many?
Obama has been a true-believing leftist all his life, as far to the left as any man who's even gotten onto a major-party presidential ticket in the United States. His associations are all far-left. His voting record in his brief time as U.S. senator earned him the "most liberal" ranking of the 100 senators -- one of whom is a self-described "socialist". His entire candidacy in the Democratic primaries was built on his being the least unelectable of the anti-war radicals. He talks even now of nuclear disarmament, referring not to Iran, but the United States. And in this very Afghanistan address in which he used "I" some 45 times, he uttered the word "victory" not once.
If America is going to win this Afghan War, it won't be made easier by half-measures -- sending 30,000 reinforcements when the generals ask for 40,000, restricting the rules of engagement, taking three months to order reinforcements, then announcing they'll be withdrawn starting one year after they've arrived, etc. My prayer is that American troops are allowed and enabled to do their job in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani government sees our common enemy as an urgent threat to itself and fully does its part in the war against them, and that the casualties are held down not only to spare the lives of good men, but to hold off the majority Democrats in their natural retreat, until the American people have the chance to turf them out of office and give power to the men with the stomachs to win wars.
It does seem to me that the editorial board of The Chronicle-Herald, like the rest of Canada's elite, fell head-over-heels for Barack Obama at some point in 2008, and hasn't seen him clearly since. They imagine him to be everything and anything they wish for him to be, and freely ascribe to him rationales and intents and characteristics that can only be divined by smitten adulators. And they take it as their purpose to defend and advocate for whatever contorted, convoluted decree happens to be arrived at by any functionary coming under the banner of Obama's administration. When Germany's Der Spiegel produces the most comprehensive and damning indictment of Obama's Afghan War policy, while the Herald editorial persists in its love affair, even unto the point of inventing imaginary rationales to justify what it acknowledges is "wholly unrealistic" and making Obama out to be the Lincoln of our times, then Joseph Howe must be turning in his grave.
I can only hope for the day when The Chronicle-Herald's editorial becomes capable of any dissention from Barack Obama's every deed and utterance, or The Herald's monopoly over us is broken. Nothing was ever improved by becoming a monopoly, and since it became last man standing in the newspaper business, The Herald has gone too far along the way to a miserable wad of glorified toilet paper.
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald's editorial has been a more reliable rubber-stamp for the doings of the Obama Administration even than a lot of Congressional Democrats, and it's past time someone said peep about it. I've declined to write publicly on the Herald editorial in all these years because I'm barely acquainted with a fellow on the editorial board and because Herald editorials have in past been mostly fair and responsible, even when I haven't much agreed with them.
But The Herald is today a monopoly. Its unsigned editorials are the editorials of the largest newspaper in Canada's four Atlantic provinces, the sole province-wide paper in Nova Scotia, and now the only paper in the largest city north of Boston and east of Quebec City. And not long after The Herald saw off its only competition in Halifax, it fell head-over-heels in love with a man called Barack.
I suppose it was November when it was confirmed for me that the Herald editorial's Obama-boosting was something pathological. The occasion was the mad Obama decision to grant the rights and protections of an American citizen to the enemy leader responsible for the worst attack in American history. Of course the Herald editorial ruled emphatically that Obama had taken "the correct course", as if this was some long-overdue, desperately-needed, obvious measure, instead of a gratuitous prostration before the enemy, absolutely without precedent anywhere on earth, that came out of the clear blue sky one day and had never occurred to anyone before sometime in 2009. The editorial also dismissed the naysayers, who happen to be the great majority, with a fair bit of ignorance of the issue thrown in for good measure, as is typically the case when the Herald editorial wades into American affairs. But that much was all in a day's work for The Chronicle-Herald -- the least reliable outlet in the English-speaking world for news having anything at all to do with Barack Obama; it was the rest of the editorial that crossed into a demonstration of blindest love for Barack Obama.
At the same time as the Obama Administration decided to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators in civilian court like any American accused of a common crime, they also ruled that five much lesser terrorist figures be tried by the military commissions crafted by the Bush Administration and Democratic Congress, and approved by the very Supreme Court. Now, among those five sent to the military tribunals happened to be one Omar Khadr, who has some legalistic link to Canada and became an instant cause celebre among the entirety of the Canadian elite and left, if there's a distinction. In Canada Khadr is near-universally assumed to be a pitiful, blameless waif clutching a Mickey Mouse (literally), particularly among the kind of Canadians who are also head-over-heels for Barack Obama. So I just assumed the Herald editorial would at least register some polite complaint that the terror leader was being given the rights and protections of an American citizen, while the supposed Canadian innocent was busted down to military court. But no. The Herald editorial actually contorted itself to stalwartly defend both contradictory decisions -- to treat the enemy leader as a U.S. citizen, and to deny that same treatment to the pip-squeak kid believed by Canadians to have done nothing at all.
Now, there is no sensible way of reconciling those two extremes. It's as capricious a decision as has ever been made by any democratic government, and is the kind of arbitrariness one finds in rulers who claim a divine right. The Obama Administration's only given rationale was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was responsible for an attack on civilians, so he was being tried in civilian court, while the others were alleged to be responsible for military attacks and so were being tried in the military system, but of course a civilian massacre is if anything many times worse than an attack on armed forces in a war zone, and anyway, Khalid Sheik Mohammed's 9/11 attacks were also against the Pentagon, the very headquarters of the United States Armed Forces. So that day, in that editorial of The Chronicle-Herald, it finally became beyond dispute that the sole organizing principle in Herald editorials concerning Barack Obama was their irrational allegiance to Obama, in absolutely all he does, all he says, and all that is done and said under the name of his administration.
And so when Obama announced his "surgelet" for Afghanistan, as when he has announced anything at all of any import, the only question was how obsequious the Herald editorial on the subject would be. Of course the editorial would take the view that Obama was responsible and wise, plotting just the right course in just the right measure. Well, where other observers found Obama to be hesitatingly hedging his bets in search of a third way between the hard realities, the Herald editorial pronounced him "courageous". Where other commentators found Obama's speech dispiriting when it needed to be rousing, the Herald editorial decided he was duly "sombre".
As if that weren't enough, a little later in another installment on the same subject, the Herald editorial went one better, actually going so far as to explicitly compare Obama to the greatest president of them all, the man who was prepared to rend the nation and precipitate the bloodiest war in its history, and spill the blood of 600,000 Americans to do what was right. These are the actual words of the December 13 Chronicle-Herald editorial: "Like Abraham Lincoln, President Obama is clearly among the latter. He serves the cause of world peace by using force against those who are bound to violence." Ugh. You see why I say the Herald editorial is in love. And it's always so unbecoming when comfortable middle-aged men fall head-over-heels. Of course, for anyone who has a clue about Lincoln as he was -- and not as he's conveniently recalled by a latter-day elite Canadian newspaper editorialist with his head in the clouds singing, "Obama: say it softly, it's almost like praying" -- the very fact that the Herald editorial glorifies Barack Obama unto the heavens is the first clue that Obama is no Lincoln. The Halifax elite of Lincoln's day were as anti-Lincoln as any Confederate raider; their inheritors today are the ones invoking Lincoln to justify the elite conventional wisdom of their time. If Obama were remotely like Lincoln, the Herald editorial would presently be denouncing him as a warmonger and shredder of civil liberties and "all international law".
If the case for the Herald editorial's Barack Obama problem hasn't been made sufficiently, the December 30 editorial on the attempted Christmas Day terror bombing may clear up any lingering doubt. The sole reference to Obama was in praise of him: "U.S. president Barack Obama has wisely asked for a thorough review...." Now, by December 30 there had accumulated a pile of indictments against Obama and his administration on this score, and yet the Herald editorial was actually applauding Obama for his "wisdom" in requesting a review.
That "wisely" really was gratuitous; even if the editorial found it necessary to document that Obama had requested a review, just how much "wisdom" does it take for a politician to do the most usual, unimaginitive, cheap, and reactive thing possible, ordering a "review" after his government has made a complete pig's breakfast of things? "Wisdom" would have been revoking the would-be bomber's visa and monitoring him after he became known to the U.S. government as a jihadi; not upholding the visa, letting the man onto a U.S.-bound flight with a bomb in his pants, then when the fuse misfired and the civilian passengers detained him, turning him over to domestic law enforcement and granting him a lawyer on the taxpayer's tab without pumping him for information on other planned attacks, while your administration assures the people that "the system worked."
It gets worse when one appreciates that even openly pro-Obama American newspaper editorials were absolutely scathing of Obama on this same point. From the same day and on the same subject as that Herald editorial, the editorial of the New York Daily News: "What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis management. It's time to get a grip, Mr. President. ... Obama's description of Abdumutallab as an 'isolated extremist' was remarkable and disturbing. The radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. ... In a similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a 'review'...." Again, that was the editorial of a pro-Obama American paper, on the same day and subject as the Herald editorial blindly and pathetically claiming "wisdom" in Obama's handling of the attempted bombing.
Yes, blinder love hath no man than The Chronicle-Herald's editorial for Barack Obama. It's about to the point that if Obama announced his intention to destroy America's nuclear arsenal by detonating it over Halifax, the Herald editorial could be expected to applaud in its accustomed judicious tone that "this is the correct course". But what upset my stomach was a casual cynicism in defense of Obama in the editorial on Obama's Afghan surgelet. I determined there was no virtue in holding my fire any longer on an editorial board capable of that kind of rationalizing.
That Herald editorial of December 3 concocted an argument out of thinnest air, excusing Obama for his withdrawal date, which the same editorial acknowledged in the same paragraph was "wholly unrealistic". The editorial calls it "triangulation", which would be bad enough, but that's a misuse of the old Dick Morris term of art from the 1990s, which is a point that demands a greater understanding of American politics and history than is found in the average Canadian newspaper editorial board. In fact the editorial is clearly implying this is something worse than "triangulation": a lie.
The editorial calls Obama's withdrawal date "wholly unrealistic", then proceeds to argue that this unrealism is necessary to "give the war-weary American public something to look forward to." You can almost see the Herald editorialist patting the heads of those "war-weary American public". Give 'em "something to look forward to" -- something "wholly unrealistic". That'll hold 'em. What do you call it when something "wholly unrealistic" is promised, to give people "something to look forward to"? Not Dick Morris' "triangulation".
It is patronizing, skin-crawlingly cynical, and unworthy of an argument in defense of the war. If this anonymous Herald editorialist and his readers are so very clever as to plainly see that Obama's withdrawal date is "wholly unrealistic", then why shouldn't the American people be capable of seeing the very same thing? The implication is that the American people lack the editorialist's level of understanding, and can be told a little white lie to hold them for a while. And this is supposed to be in support of the war effort. Well, like the anonymous Herald editorial-writer, I am a supporter of the war, but apparently unlike that masked man, I also respect and revere the American people, and it does seem to me that if you mean to ask the American people to sustain a war effort, you owe it to them to tell them what you know to be true, as far as you can know it.
Following is the offending passage:
Anonymous Chronicle-Herald editorial-writer: "Where Mr. Obama was less
convincing was in imposing a strict timetable on the deployment, subject, of
course, to the situation on the ground at that time. The president envisions
U.S. troops beginning to withdraw by July 2011, which is even before Canada’s
firm pullout date of December 2011. At this rate, we could hitch a ride home
early.
"While the deadline is wholly unrealistic, it is the kind of triangulation Mr. Obama feels he must engage in. First, he must give the war-weary American public something to look forward to. Second, he must impose a benchmark for self-sufficiency on the corrupt Afghan government. Third, he must give his generals a sense of urgency."
rd to. Second, he must impose a benchmark for self-sufficiency on the corrupt Afghan government. Third, he must give his generals a sense of urgency." Now take that last point, or rather that last imagining. That is both an unearned credit to Obama and an undeserved offense to the generals prosecuting Obama's war. The editorial of the largest newspaper on Canada's east coast is actually arguing that Obama offered a "wholly unrealistic" withdrawal date to "give his generals a sense of urgency". For a start, if it's plain even to Herald editorial-writer that Obama's deadline is "wholly unrealistic", then isn't it just possible that the generals would know that better than anyone? And I know all too well that The Chronicle-Herald guards its gates against news and opinion that may be upsetting to elite Canadian Obama-adulators, but surely even the Herald editorial board got the news that Obama took three months to order three-quarters of the reinforcements requested by his hand-picked general, in order to do the job Obama gave him in March. During which time, 116 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. It is Obama who's been lacking the "sense of urgency", not the generals on the ground who are daily prosecuting his war without the men they tell him they need for the job.
And if the anonymous editorial-writer wanted to come up with three rationales to justify this Obama withdrawal date which even the editorialist couldn't support, then how about the most obvious one, namely that Obama's own majority party is against his surgelet. If you're fishing for justifications for setting a withdrawal date just a year after your reinforcements get into place, why not that the majority party is against sending them at all, and may be more inclined to let it pass if there's reason to think it'll be reversed before long? That most obvious point was not made in the Herald editorial, while two cynical, patronizing, and frankly imaginary rationales did make it into the final draft.
Now, as one who's been reading Herald editorials for many years, I recall that the Herald editorial takes a very dim view of Rush Limbaugh, and as those people who take a dim view of Rush Limbaugh are invariably people who never listen to him, I'd bet good money that the Herald editorialist didn't hear Limbaugh's definitive argument against Obama's announced withdrawal date, so I will paraphrase it here.
The Limbaugh argument imagines that it had been an al Qaeda or Taliban leader speaking on Afghanistan, instead of Obama. The speech goes on at some length about the al Qaeda/Taliban plans for sending thousands of reinforcements into Afghanistan, the necessity of the mission, etc., etc. Then this al Qaeda/Taliban leader announces that after 18 months, they'll start their withdrawal. Now how do you suppose we would take that? Would we dwell on the first bit, or the bit about the withdrawal starting in 18 months? Of course, we'd take that as an admission of defeat, and buck ourselves up that if we can just hang on in there for another 18 months, we'll have seen the enemy off.
Well, then, now we have some idea of how the enemy will have taken Obama's Afghanistan address, with its talk of withdrawals in 18 months. It took Rush Limbaugh to make that point, but Herald editorialists would not be so abased as to hear so "boorish" an observer.
What's more, I think the Herald editorial has the wrong end of the stick altogether on Obama's withdrawal date. The editorial assumes he's just saying it; that Obama has set this date purely for public consumption, knowing full well it's unrealistic, and will push on after that time if that's what's called for. That kind of deliberate dishonesty would be a scandal of the first order, but it assumes Obama will prosecute this war come hell or high water. I suppose we won't know for sure until we get there, but what possible reason has Obama given for assuming such a thing? If Obama is as committed to this fight as the Herald editorial imagines him to be, then why is he sending 30,000 reinforcements when he was asked for 40,000, and why did it take him three months to sign off on even that many?
Obama has been a true-believing leftist all his life, as far to the left as any man who's even gotten onto a major-party presidential ticket in the United States. His associations are all far-left. His voting record in his brief time as U.S. senator earned him the "most liberal" ranking of the 100 senators -- one of whom is a self-described "socialist". His entire candidacy in the Democratic primaries was built on his being the least unelectable of the anti-war radicals. He talks even now of nuclear disarmament, referring not to Iran, but the United States. And in this very Afghanistan address in which he used "I" some 45 times, he uttered the word "victory" not once.
If America is going to win this Afghan War, it won't be made easier by half-measures -- sending 30,000 reinforcements when the generals ask for 40,000, restricting the rules of engagement, taking three months to order reinforcements, then announcing they'll be withdrawn starting one year after they've arrived, etc. My prayer is that American troops are allowed and enabled to do their job in Afghanistan, that the Pakistani government sees our common enemy as an urgent threat to itself and fully does its part in the war against them, and that the casualties are held down not only to spare the lives of good men, but to hold off the majority Democrats in their natural retreat, until the American people have the chance to turf them out of office and give power to the men with the stomachs to win wars.
It does seem to me that the editorial board of The Chronicle-Herald, like the rest of Canada's elite, fell head-over-heels for Barack Obama at some point in 2008, and hasn't seen him clearly since. They imagine him to be everything and anything they wish for him to be, and freely ascribe to him rationales and intents and characteristics that can only be divined by smitten adulators. And they take it as their purpose to defend and advocate for whatever contorted, convoluted decree happens to be arrived at by any functionary coming under the banner of Obama's administration. When Germany's Der Spiegel produces the most comprehensive and damning indictment of Obama's Afghan War policy, while the Herald editorial persists in its love affair, even unto the point of inventing imaginary rationales to justify what it acknowledges is "wholly unrealistic" and making Obama out to be the Lincoln of our times, then Joseph Howe must be turning in his grave.
I can only hope for the day when The Chronicle-Herald's editorial becomes capable of any dissention from Barack Obama's every deed and utterance, or The Herald's monopoly over us is broken. Nothing was ever improved by becoming a monopoly, and since it became last man standing in the newspaper business, The Herald has gone too far along the way to a miserable wad of glorified toilet paper.
