"Is Obama Bush Lite?"

Mon Jul 14, 7:58 PM ETIn this July 14, 2005 file photo,former White House advisor Karl Rove is shown in Washington.(AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, file)

John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls.

Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

Then there is Iraq. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops, even voting to immediately cut off funds for the troops while they were in combat. Then, in July 2007, he started talking about leaving a residual U.S. force, in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, able to go back into Iraq if needed.

By October, he shifted again, pledging to station the residual U.S. troops inside Iraq with two "limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda."

Last week, writing in the New York Times, Mr. Obama changed again. He increased the missions his residual force would perform to three: "going after any remnants of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces." That's not all that different from what U.S. troops are doing now.

And just how many U.S. troops would Mr. Obama leave in Iraq? Colin Kahl, an Obama adviser on Iraq, has said the senator wants to have "perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces" in Iraq by December 2010. So much for withdrawing all combat troops.

It's dizzying. Yet, Mr. Obama acts as if he is a paradigm of consistency. He told a Georgia rally this month that "the people who say [I've been changing] apparently haven't been listening to me." In a PBS interview last week he said, "this notion that somehow we've had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate."

Compounding all this is Mr. Obama's stubborn refusal to admit the surge was right and that he was wrong to oppose it. On MSNBC in January 2007, he said more U.S. troops would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Later that month he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." In fact, the surge has done far more than its advocates hoped in a much shorter period.

Yet Mr. Obama told ABC's Terry Moran this week that even in retrospect, he would oppose the surge. He also told CBS's Katie Couric that he had "no idea what would have happened" without the new strategy. And he still declares, in the New York Times last week, "The same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true." Given all that has happened, it's hard to understand how Mr. Obama can say, as he did Tuesday in a story on NBC Nightly News, that "I don't have doubts about my ability to apply sound judgment to the major national security problems that we face."

Americans have seen both candidates flip-flop. Mr. McCain at least has a record of being a gutsy leader willing to take unpopular stands who admits his shifts and explains the new information that caused them.

Mr. Obama has detached himself from past positions at record speed. And in doing so he runs the risk of being seen as a cynical politician, not an inspiring leader. If this happens, voters in large numbers may ask -- despite his rhetorical acrobatics -- if he is the change they've been waiting for.

    Let me begin by saying I despise former Presidential advisor Karl Rove, the key mastermind behind the Bush Administration. It is my fervent hope that soon Congress will have the gumption to arrest him for not answering his subpoena to appear in a judiciary hearing. However I found this recent op-ed piece by Rove interesting in that in Karl Rove's mind, presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, is now essentially no different in his Iraq foreign policy from either President Bush or John McCain. As I see it, Barack Obama will continue the same neoconservative "War On Terror" agenda of the Bush Administration (even though shifting the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan). That is fine with the neocons, who just want a war somewhere! As I see it, the huge national debt that the Bush Administration has placed upon America will only be exacerbated by the deficit spending policies of both Obama and McCain. (McCain has made the incredulous promise of a balanced budget in four years while Obama doesn't even mention reducing the deficit) The banks and corporations that run America are pleased as long as the American government and it's citizens are in debt because debt is profitable to the central banking cartel of which the US Federal Reserve is a part. Both Obama and McCain will continue the Bush Administration's economic policies. In my opinion, if one must vote for one of the major two parties, then Barack Obama is the "lesser of two evils" but if one, like myself, has come to perceive there is no real difference between the  two major parties anymore, then by all means vote for or write in an alternative third party candidate. A strong third party vote will send a message to "the powers that be" that a revolution is underway to restore the Constitution and economic prosperity to America again, because as I see it, McCain is "Bush Lite" and Obama is "Bush Liter". Don't waste your vote.

tags: barack obama  john mccain  karl rove  neoconservatism  iraq  war on terror  politics  takebackamerica  us  president  obama  mccain  corporatism  

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