McCain Wins First Round (Marquess of Queensbury Rules)

September 27, 2008 

  When John McCain declared last night that we are not ever going to torture another prisonor, he had a moral authority that was unquestionable. Barack Obama had no such moments of moral authority last night at the debate. He seemed to struggle for words more, and seemed forced and artificial compared to McCain’s more natural and spontaneous manner of speaking. McCain was more genuine– when Obama used the term “folks on Main Street,” to convey an image of regular guy sensibility, it was forced, and like a ploy.

  Furthermore, McCain showed real passion in defending Israel against Iran’s president– on that same issue, Obama was intellectual, without emotion, and limited himself to referring to Ahmadinejad’s “nonsense.” But the stated goal of wiping Israel off the face of the map deserves a stronger phrase than that: genocide, atrocity, unconscionable aggression– something like that. Again, when McCain said that in Putin’s eyes he saw a “K, a G, and a B,” that demonstrated a directness, an emotional tie to what he was saying, and a resolve that Obama is apparently incapable of right now. Obama is the great orator, yet McCain had all the memorable phrases. When Obama said that “you’re using a hatchet when you need a scalpel,” that was indeed a witty response. But it evinces a man who believes always in overly-refined, too-clever-by-half solutions. Obama is so intellectual that he comes off as distant, cold, and detached. He even called McCain “Tom” at one point. Obama’s performance was flat, whereas McCain’s was inspired.

  McCain did a credible job in showing Obama to be an inexperienced man who’s not ready for the highest responsibility. It’s not necessarily Obama’s younger age: it is, rather, his not knowing what to do in a crisis, his posturing, and his erroneous, too-passive views on foreign policy. For example, he said more than once that Afghanistan is the central front in the “war on terror.” But that lacks even the most basic understanding of the world, that’s just a stab in the dark, just an irrelevant way of standing against the Iraq war. It’s easy to see that once Afghanistan was relatively cleaned-out of training camps, that it was clearly Iraq that became the central theater in the war on Islamofascism. This is because of Saddam’s invasions, his airlifting WMD to Syria (according to David Kay), his endless anti-Western, anti-American rhetoric, his conspiracy to assassinate a U.S. president, his murdering his own citizens, his hosting terror and jihad organizations in Iraq, his shooting at Israel, and his 12-year noncompliance with the cease-fire terms of the first Gulf War (Jeane Kirkpatrick proved the legality of the ‘03 invasion before the U.N. in Geneva on the grounds of Saddam’s noncompliance, recounted in her book Making War to Keep Peace). After all that, Obama says that the war in Iraq, which has obviously wounded al Qaida grievously, is an example of “taking our eye off the ball.” That’s real perspicacity, isn’t it?

  As McCain said, such lack of comprehension in a U.S. president is dangerous. To chase one man around, bin Laden, when we can crush his whole organization in the Iraq war, would be mistaken: but that’s what Obama advocated. Al Qaida is not resurgent, as Obama claimed. It is alive, to be sure, but just, wheezing away on life-support, and still making its ludicrous videos for our consumption, but al Qaida is not resurgent. How many people do you know that would have said that before hearing Obama saying it? Probably not a lot. Al Qaida is wounded because of our patriotism and because of our vigilance stateside, but most of all it’s wounded because of the sacrifice of daring Americans willing to fight totalitarianism. We also have been fortunate to have a president who didn’t back down in times of trouble, not even in the face of astonishingly indecent invective.  It’s clear that the guy from Arizona is also like that. Round One: John McCain.