The Faster He Runs, The Behinder He Gets

Once upon a time long ago an American president, Franklin Roosevelt by name, said while seeking reelection, "I hate war. My wife, Elenore hates war. Even our little dog Falah hates war." There is little doubt that FDR was telling the truth as to his personal feelings. At the same time, left unsaid, was his understanding that US self-interest, even US survival, would compel us to go to war with Nazi Germany sooner rather than later.

FDR was an excellent politician. He knew how to win elections. He was a very fine orator, better even than the TelePrompter king from Chicago. Not unlike the current president, Roosevelt was not a good administrator--even though he understood perfectly how to mobilize and focus the energy of government to appear at least as if problems were being solved.

FDR was also a conservative sort of man. He sought reform in order to achieve consistency with the past. He sought not "overhauls" but incremental change. He hoped that many of the measures demanded by the Great Depression would be short-lived, would be allowed to expire as economic changes allowed. In this hope he was to be disappointed.

FDR was also a fundamentally honest man. He was not given to warping either history or reality in order to score points with the voters.

Barack Obama could undoubtedly say with complete honesty, "I hate war. My wife, Michelle, hates war. Even our little dog, (whatever the critter's name is) hates war." If the Nice Young Man From Chicago did emulate his great predecessor's comment, it would be an honest restatement. After all, war does tend to perturb the nice cozy world view of a law professor given to long reflective passages on the golf course. And, war, particularly one which is both admitted and fought with clarity, might disrupt grand plans of transforming America.

Mr Obama is not the politician that FDR was. Nor is he the orator. He is not even up to the level of dynamically ineffective but inspirational executive as was the Squire of Hyde Park (NY, that is not the section in Chicago where Obama lived.)

Even worse, Mr Obama is not in the same league with FDR when it comes to an unwillingness to distort both history and the present with an eye on political advantage. This penchant for warping reality and history beyond all recognition came into sharp focus with Mr Obama's breath taking and mind boggling equation of the 9/11 attacks with the BP blowout in the Gulf.

Mr Obama in an interview appearing in Politico which focused overall on the midterm elections and the president's tactical and operational role in that upcoming affray, averred, presumably with deliberation or at least calculated aforethought, that the Gulf blowout and its ongoing tragic aftermath "echoes 9/11." The president then dilated upon the way in which the oil blowout will necessitate a reflection upon energy and the environment similar to the way in which the attacks caused Americans to reconsider their vulnerabilities and our nation's foreign policies.

The analogy is not only wrong, it is specious and mendacious. Worse, it is a self-serving and very serious distortion not only of what happened on that September morning nearly nine years ago but of what happened before and after the killing explosion on board the Deepwater Horizon nearly two months back.

Whether the one time law professor is comfortable with the notion or not, the events of 9/11 constituted a direct military attack upon the land and citizens of the United States. It was an act of war, an act of unprovoked aggression. It was an act executed by a non-state actor with the aid of a state. Both the aggressive act and the equally hostile abetting were conditioned, informed by, and predicated upon the same basis: political Islam. There was no essential difference between 9/11 and 12/7/41. Both were unprovoked, unannounced attacks by hostile foreign powers pursuing ideological agendas.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an industrial accident. It was not intended. Not planned. It was not based upon an ideology hostile to the US and its interests. It may have been deadly and its effects may be extensive in nature and lengthy in duration, but there was no way in which it could be equated legitimately with the Allahu Akbar Attacks.

By seeking to invoke the memory--even the "echoes" of the greatest national trauma at the hands of a foreign entity since Pearl Harbor--Mr Obama is after the cheapest of all commodities, political advantage. Mr Obama is both wrapping himself in the flag and waving the bloody shirt in order to garner a bit of advantage in both repairing his damaged presidency and pushing more of the Great Transformational Agenda.

That, Mr Obama, is a cheap trick which FDR would never have considered. Nor would JFK have done something similar. Nor even the Democrat many would like to forget, LBJ. You, sir, are alone in the tasteless and brainless notion of conjuring up the specters of the thousands killed by hostile act in support of a political agenda and a partisan future.

To quote a truly great lawyer, an advocate of the first rank taking on the biggest bully of the Senate on national television, "Have you no decency, sir, at long last, have you no decency?"