So I got an e-mail from a friend who hates the war, hates Bush and has decided that experience is unimportant since men of experience got us into the mess we are in. Therefore to him Obama is the only tolerable candidate. This was my response.

1. The last time we sacrificed experience for vision we got Jimmy Carter, our savior from the ‘experienced’ politicians who brought us Viet Nam and Watergate. Rule no. 1 – just because a situation is dire does not mean it could not be made worse. Much, but no means all, of our Middle East problem can be traced to Carter’s failed policies there.

2. If you think the terrorist threat is a Republican ploy to scare voters, revisit Ground Zero and then spend a week in Israel and visit the numerous ‘memorials’ to the victims of suicide/ homicide bombers- I would start in Sderot- where missiles arrive daily from GAZA which the Israelis “withdrew” from years ago. If you think the Commie scare was just a made up boogie man, revisit the Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia, Korea, etc, etc. Rule No 2- Just because you may be clinically paranoid doesn’t mean someone is not out to get you.

3. As difficult as this quagmire is, withdrawal can make it much worse. Do you really think the absence of follow up terrorist attacks on our soil for over 6 years is just a coincidence?

4. Of all the places inexperience can be a sin, foreign policy of the only surviving democratic super power would definitely be the most deadly and costly.

5. Finally I refer to a part of Bush’ speech at the Knesset which so offended Obama and which Pelosi said was “beneath the dignity of a US president.” Speech

“But think about what we have witnessed in our own time. When Europe was destroying itself through total war and genocide, it was difficult to envision a continent that six decades later would be free and at peace. When Japanese pilots were flying suicide missions into American battleships, it seemed impossible that six decades later Japan would be a democracy, a lynchpin of security in Asia, and one of America’s closest friends. And when waves of refugees arrived here (Israel) in the desert with nothing, surrounded by hostile armies, it was almost unimaginable that Israel would grow into one of the freest and most successful nations on the earth.”

“Yet each one of these transformations took place. And a future of transformation is possible in the Middle East, so long as a new generation of leaders has the courage to defeat the enemies of freedom, to make the hard choices necessary for peace, and stand firm on the solid rock of universal values.”


With these words this commonly demonized president, ridiculed as an idiot by the Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington, Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann council of the foaming at the mouth politically pitiful, made a far more concrete and clear vision of hope and change than anything I have yet heard from Obama or Hillary.

But perhaps I am just engaging in a “desperate suspension of disbelief.”

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