Jack Kelly: Obama Needs a History Lesson

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpolitics/20080509/cm_rcp/obama_needs_to_study_history_b_1





Just words....

.... without proper research.

Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter...even if I get them wrong.

Obama's lack of understanding of history is pretty scary. He is inexperienced in every aspect.

HIllary lost, get used to it. Your war mongering , race baiting candidate has been soundly defeated

His words are just pie in the sky rhetoric and not based in any fact.

Perhaps the author doesn't know what the hell Obama was thinking.


It's over.

with the agenda of getting McCain elected?

version of history, or criticizes Obama's statements? I'm not a historian, but when Kelly says "FDR never spoke DIRECTLY with his enemies" did he send a high-level official to deal with them instead? Because that's what "direct talks" also means. Something that Condi Rice doesn't do with Syria or Iran.

There is strike one.

Because that's "meeting" with them. We "meet" with North Korea, even if Bush doesn't sit down with Kim Jong-Il. I don't know what sort of talks the US was engaged in during the run up to the war. Do you? Or do you just take this RW asshole's word on history?

He was referring to a face to face meeting.

As in, we don't "talk" directly to Iran or Syria. We DO, however, "talk" to North Korea. Sorry, you and your right-wing guy are both wrong. I know you love to try to prove Obama wrong, but he's right.

Let's not feign ignorance; he's done this before.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/09/24/politics/horserace/entry3291763.shtml

That's what SOS's do, whether or not the President personally meets with leaders--does it occur to you that Obama was referring simply to engaging in diplomacy with our enemies IN THIS PARTICULAR SPEECH, whether or not it involves an actual face-to-face with specific leaders (as he mentioned at other times)? That's what those other Presidents did, after all--they did meet with their enemies through the highest diplomatic channels, which President Bush does NOT do, except for North Korea. Any other interpretation is putting words in Obama's mouth that he didn't say.

just stop with the stupidity, please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:dunce:

despite the fact that we allied with them because Hitler was a bigger enemy, then you are too stupid to argue with.

you have this thing about FDR wrong, you just do, it was a stupid example that undermined your entire argument. by putting forth that argument (you could have chosen another one) you showed everyone here that not only don't your understand your history --YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT.

just go away. i am not smart enough to know everything, but i don't brag about my ignorance either. :think:

Stalin was technically an ally at the time. I understand that we allied him because Hitler was the bigger enemy, but he still was an ally at that point, and that is the reason why FDR met him.

Your ignorance is on full display here, you don't need to brag about it...

:think:

later for being wrong.

Boy thats rich.

First of all, the very fact that we could form an alliance with Stalin against Hitler makes the point that we can find common ground and achieve joint objectives by negotiating with people who would otherwise be our enemies.

If you think Stalin wasn't viewed as an adversary at the Yalta and Tehran, I can't really help you. I challenge you to find a reputable historian that agrees with that point of view. Yes, they were allies during WWII. But that was ending and everyone knew it and Stalin was considered an enemy. Do you actually not know this or are you playing dumb?

More importantly, it's really idiotic to base your opinion on Obama on a technicality regarding exactly when Stalin went from ally to enemy.

At the Crimean Conference Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin plan the final assault on Germany

IOW, the enemy of my enemy is my friend (ally). Just as we aligned, so to speak, with Iraq against Iran. The U.S. government has no ethics, it simply has expedient methods of achieving its agenda.

before the war:

"Hull had a freer hand in the Far East. The most important job of his career was handling the touchy prewar negotiations with the Japanese. Hull doggedly insisted that the Japanese clear out of China, as well as out of Southeast Asia, before he would discuss anything else. The Japanese refused to budge. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Hull admitted the Japanese negotiators into his office and, according to legend, gave them an old-fashioned cussing-out that all Americans cheered. Historians today generally agree that war with Japan was probably inevitable, but it has been argued that Hull never really gave diplomacy a try."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,940473-2,00.html

Kelly was wrong. We didn't just bomb our enemies, or tell them from afar what we demanded from them. We talked with them, directly. And when diplomacy failed, THEN we went to war.

FDR did when he sat at those Yalta meetings. The day the European war ended Patton wanted to turn his army directly toward Moscow, and got canned for saying so.

We were 'allies' with Russia because a 2nd front was probably the only thing that could have stopped Germany in the early 40's, but that doesn't mean we were friends with them.

If you want to use this definition, we aren't "Enemies" with Iran now either, are we? Or have we declared war when I wasn't paying attention?

"Is this a consensus among historians, or just the opinion of one asshole"

I really think you've got some scrambled circuits.

sniper fire wrong?

Shes lost!

In that respect, she is certainly more aware than most of the members here.

If youre a Democrat, get on board and help us out. Enough of this nonsense. Its destructive, and you know it.

Another reason is that he has absolutely no appeal to the Rust Belt.

Average Joe beer drinkers don't take kindly to politicians who can't tell their Iwo Jima from their Okinawa.

And god help Obama if ever mistakes John Foster Dulles with Allen Dulles.

I mean, we're talking about white people without a college education here. Nothing annoys them more than imprecise historical allusions.

:shrug:

Obama has a chance to make him look very good with the electoral woes of Obama.

Do you mean to say that if Obama is such a pathetic candidate that Hillary,Edwards,Richardson,Biden and Dodd are the worst candidates of all time if they can't beat pathetic Obama????

a handshake and sniper-fire...

But she's really really supersmart otherwise lol.

Okay, an even worse name.

But that's ok. :D

S/he DOES give NJ a worse name. :hi:

BTW, this article is stupid.

Do you honestly think the Rethugs aren't going to touch this in the GE if he is the nominee?

The Democrats will win running a chicken against McCain. I'm not worried about it.

They hang out with comic book guys you know.

I am a self confessed history geek and I know that the details of all history get fuzzy with repetition. the further back you go, hell one just has to look at Reagan and Nixon to see the shifting realities that come out.

History is not set in stone and only written by the victor.

Seems to me we should be working to get him elected.

Get used to it - even though it bothers you.

Time for you to wake up to reality

first response! LALALALALALA I can't hear you! LALALALALALALALA Go away!!! LALALALALALALA

:rofl::rofl:

his own argument within his own article in regard to Stalin. You, however, are a Repub operative.

Now he's working to knock down our nominee.


He's still in the denial phase.

George Santayana at the end of his little name-dropping exercise. Fair's fair, I guess...Jack Kelly would probably ask "who the hell is George Santayana?"

And we're on the cusp of winning in Iraq, etc. His columns are, at best, largely devoid of critical thinking.

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=COLUMNIST14

...shows me this guy is a piece of work. He not only hates Obama and loves Hillary, but he is pretty sweet on McCain as well. This is the new spokesman for Clinton supporters? Just because he's more obscure doesn't mean he's any less of a wingnut.

It's obvious he is a right winger from his previous articles. But not this one - there is no hint of discernable bias here.

But I didn't see anything objectionable about this article - it's pretty cut and dry - and I couldn't find an equivalent left wing source.

"Inexperienced in every aspect" - yet taking his victory laps as if he's won the nomination.

OMG!!

You'll probably also enjoy Jack Kelly's article on how the media is making too big a deal of global warming:
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/temperatures_trending_cooler.html>

And he's also got a bizarro-world take on the Iraq war, in which the Democrats are the ones moving the goalposts:
<http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/moving_the_goalposts_on_iraq.html>

Oh, and its a gross misrepresentation to portray Churchill and Roosevelt as not knowing that the russians was a coming enemy, when they had the Yalta meeting.

They were very much aware that it was a union of necessity more than anything else.

and then switched to Clinton because she is going to outperform Obama in the fall.


Except now all of your attacks on Obama now have to do with his being ill prepared to be President and not on electoral college reality, because Hillary continues to lose to him.


So why should I listen to you if your research on Obama was so faulty before and your analysis of election capability is always disproved by the last election?

I was originally for Dodd. He was a relative unknown for me. I thought I could paint my own liberal views onto him since he was so unknown. I'm still learning about Obama. And the more I know, the less I like.

other option. Of course, he calls Putin the President of Germany and thinks Al Qaeda is allied with Iran, but you go for it!!

So you didn't research or read or listen to any debates involving Obama? How moronic is that? Did you not pay attention to any speech or any part of the debates during the time you switched from Dodd to Obama? I mean, this article touches on something every supporter should have known, since it's been a major point of his campaign since he began. My God, man, there was a whole part of the debates a few months back on this very issue! Yeesh, and you totally missed all of that?

Well now I can see why you support Clinton, ya' close yourself off from reality and do little research of your own.

Sad.

What the fuck more do you need him to do? Live with you for a year?

Because Obama is going to be our nominee.

So he'll try and bring Obama down for he can feel validated for supporting Clinton.

It's a funny sideshow, though! I quite enjoy NJ's doom posts. It's as if he doesn't realize this nomination ended Tuesday night.

not just whining, "it's a lie, it's a lie", but real proof?

that would be so helpful.

was the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences where FDR and Truman respectively met with Stalin (and Churchill).

Now, you can argue that Stalin was still an ally.
And you can argue that either or both of the conferences were failures.
You can also argue that JFK's foreign policy was a disaster.
There are a lot of arguments that you can make.

You can argue about this stuff until you're blue in the face, and you can read thousands of pages of history books about this and other historical issues.

And if you want, you can find authors who support GWB's contention that we shouldn't negotiate with enemies.

But, honestly, do you really think that whether or not the Yalta conference achieved its objectives is a relevant question when assessing Obama's candidacy? Really?

We've got the war in Iraq, healthcare, NAFTA, the financial crisis, nuclear proliferation, global warming, renewable energy...

But the effectiveness of the Yalta conference? That's the big issue?

Please.

Do you see a problem here? I do.

Works for me!

and he's in a much worse position, for he can't even understand modern, current political situations....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWf7w--TwyU

I refuse to attack anyone but our ACTUAL opponent... McCain....

Let's unite people..... this is about winning back the White House..!!!

He never says something like this without knowing what he is attempting to bring across.

"I've written about the Obama campaign in the past tense. This is premature, as far as the nomination is concerned, because the Democrats have morphed from the party of the working man to a party of snobs who look down on working men and women. But in the general election, the question is not whether Sen. Obama will lose, but by how much."

"The Iraqi security forces have many shortcomings, but are much better than they were a year ago. Journalists would be less often "shocked" by positive developments in Iraq if their reporting weren't colored so much by antiwar sentiment."

But "Spengler," the erudite cynic who writes for the Asia Times, thinks the women in his life are a clue to the inner Barack. His mother, Ann Dunham, was a communist sympathizer, he noted. A childhood mentor who Barack praised in his autobiography was Frank Marshall Davis, a prominent member of the Communist Party USA.

"Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household," Spengler said. "Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career," Spengler said. "He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at an emotional distance.

That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath."

Spengler's is a minority view. But if he's right, we shouldn't wonder why Barack won't wear an American flag pin in his lapel.

I mean it's too much info, and doesn't fit into a soundbite ;)

sadly, Obama has the nomination all locked up now. what a shame.

Even Reagan, the most hawkish of Cold Warriors, met with Gorbachev. Nixon's meetings with Soviet leaders in the early '70s opened up US-Red China relations. President Carter orchestrated meetings between Israel, an American allie, and Egypt, presumably an American antagonist (enemy of our friend), and they made peace, and Carter and the other leaders walked away with Nobel Peace Prizes.

I took Obama's comments to mean that using the United nations, unilateral, and multilateral diplomacy, will work a lot better than what Bush has done, and what McCain would do. Theirs is the politics of machismo, of one-upsmanship, of the delusion that this is not one world, and it is, no matter how humans have artificially divided it into countries and cultures and spheres of influence.

Obama believes in diplomacy, and he can look at the above examples and see historical justifications of diplomacy's success. US-USSR nuclear treaties, the result of talking to the "enemy," kept the world intact. At the time, it seemed like the Cold War would never end, and the treaties would not hold, but they did. Here we are still. It is in the realm of international diplomacy, and generous, but strong, statesmanship, that we will remain.

I understand that the alpha male sentiment is that you smack down everyone around you to show who is in control. but sending out a message that U.S. foreign policy would be different than what we've seen under Bush/Cheney isn't a bad message to send to the rest of the world. our allies have been alienated by recent foreign policy moves on the part of the U.S. Look at how Spain and GB have handled terrorism incidents in their nations. Have they destroyed their economies in order to look like they have the biggest balls? have they routinely tortured innocent people out of fear? is that the big alpha balls this Jack person prefers?

In the eyes of Americans who see the picture of the Yalta meeting, Stalin is the enemy there. As far as Kennedy - the missile crisis showed Khrushchev that he was wrong, didn't it? Khrushchev backed down, not Kennedy.

The right wing labeled Kennedy as a commie lover because he spoke about the insanity of MAD. Was he wrong? No. While Kennedy was talking about this, the JCS were talking about faking an attack from Cuba in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. Looking back at history, which approach was better? Do you or this Jack person think we would have been better off to kill Americans and fake an attack (aka Operation Northwoods) in order to establish dominance in this hemisphere? Is Cuba really that much of a threat to the U.S.? Then or now? Or, was the rabid fear a problem itself?

what about Vietnam? Kennedy, in his second term, was looking at pulling out more "consultants" from Vietnam. Johnson, on the other hand, showed his "big balls" and faked the Gulf of Tonkin. And all the waste and misery that resulted. How did that domino theory work in practice? Vietnam was a bad war, waged for stupid reasons that ultimately weakened the U.S. and did nothing to halt the spread of communism.

Are you and this Jack person aware that the USSR was imploding long before Reagan came along? That their downfall was predicted in 1974 while Rummy and Wolfie were saying they were about to wipe us all off the map?

(here's a good quick wrap up of that moment- The Power of Nightmares, part 2- http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=power+of+nightmares&sitesearch=

And what about the current issue: terrorism (which is what this article is really about.) Was using the WTC attack as a pretense to overthrow Saddam a good thing? I don't think so. He was "our bastard" before he was our enemy - and he kept the fundies from taking power in a nation with large oil reserves. What has been the result of that "big balls" move? Is oil cheaper? Is the world safer? Is the threat of terrorism less?

I think Obama was sending a signal to our allies and others in this world that the U.S. was no longer interested in pursuing apocalyptic middle eastern scenarios.

However, I think the article does signal one important thing - and that is Obama's need to have a running mate that assures those who need to feel they have some big balls to hold onto to feel safe.

He needs a geography lesson as well. Huge blunder on Oregon!

What a Fraud!





!

This is such a ridiculous miscarriage of logic. Khruschev and Stalin? The meeting between FDR and Stalin was absolutely vital to defeating Germany. We would not have won WWII without Russia. There was nothing that FDR could have agreed to to stop the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. An attempt to oust the Soviets from Eastern Europe, depriving them of the buffer zone they felt they needed after losing over 10 million people to the Nazis, would have caused another war.

And, just so you know, Elie Abel's contention was that Khruschev thought the Bay of Pigs catastrophe showed Kennedy to be weak. His assessment of Kennedy's character had nothing to do with that particular meeting with Kennedy in Vienna. Good grief. Kennedy met with him, attempted an agreement, left without one and, after sizing up Khruschev's agenda, he went on to build up our military and develop more weapons leading to the brinksmanship-based peace of most of the Cold War.

How the hell any of these things (things which I believe are common knowledge to any college graduate) prove that Obama doesn't understand history is beyond me.

Of course he wouldn't negotiate the un-negotiable. This is totally patronizing to him and has always talked in strong terms against Osama bin laden.

I HAVE NOT MADE A PUBLIC PRONOUNCEMENT OF SUPPORT FOR EITHER OF OBAMA OR CLINTON. I VOTED FOR EDWARDS>
Thought I would make that perfectly clear
If a person posts a question or a comment expressing concern with or clarification on a remark or position stated by Senator Obama they are very quickly and in no uncertain terms labeled a racist, Hill-bot or worst of all a right winger. It appears that the attitude of Senator Obama's supporters here is that all he has to do is wrap up the nomination and then he should just be declared president, after all he will win regardless of who the repubs run, I mean shoot he could probably even beat Regan. Sooner or later the discussion is going to have to turn to what it will take to actually win in November. To assume that it is a done deal at this point is to invite MAJOR disappointment later.

Just my thoughts.

Jack Kelly = Sean Hannity = Rush Limbaugh

All are equally worthless

off to the ignore with you.