Its a neat trick, if you can pull it off – and it’ll work like a charm on liberals from Mark Steyn over at NRO:
What’s a columnist to do? It’s getting a little old to blame Bush for the horrors of the Bush presidency. So why not blame Bush for the horrors of the Obama presidency? As a sympathetic Jacob Weisberg sees it, the understandable urge to be the unBush has sent the Obama pendulum swinging way off the charts:
Obama, who did not have much global expertise before coming to office, molded his approach around his predecessor’s errors. Bush’s naive idealism and unilateralism encouraged Obama’s realism and multilateralism. Bush’s boycott of North Korea, Cuba, and Iran fed Obama’s eagerness to engage pragmatically with those tyrannies…
In so doing, Obama now faces an inverted set of hazards: getting overcommitted in Afghanistan, putting too much faith in the United Nations, accommodating dictators instead of standing up to them. Most alarmingly, given all that his predecessor did to discredit them, Obama has failed to stand up for the broader ideas of democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. Surely if not for Bush, Obama’s instinct after the Iranian election would have been to identify with those risking their lives to free their country, not to get back to his attempt at dialogue with Ahmadinejad(emphasis added).
So Bush is to blame for Obama kissing up to the mullahs? Brilliant! Who knew such a sober foreign-policy “realist” surrounded by the brightest minds of his generation could be so easily unhinged?
For those slow on the uptake (liberals): what the man is saying is that if Bush had used Obama-like policies, then Obama would have been positioned to oppose the Iranian mullahs using Bush-like policies. But because of “hope and change” Obama was forced – you see? – into foreign policy Carterism.
These people are getting desperate – and stupid.
Blogs For Victory 