Obama Running for President of the US

I may be mistaken, but it seems that John McCain is running for premiere of Iraq. That’s all he’ll talk about. Oh, he’ll touch on the economy, drilling off the coastlines, all of his other throwaway lines, but he keeps coming back to the war in Iraq. He’s the expert. Obama is just an unenlightened, naïve neophyte that is in way over his head when it comes to any foreign policy.

But the funny thing is that Barack is right where he should be. He not only recognizes, but makes no bones about the fact that as the Democratic hopeful for president, he must consider every ramification and all possibilities when it comes to not only his position as commander-in-chief, but as the president of the American people, keeping them safe, prosperous, energy efficient and ready to tackle the opportunities and pitfalls that we can all look forward to in the next four to eight years.

McCain is like a broken record, only his message was tired well before he has hit his stride. His latest attack on Obama is absurd, but it is also hurtful and destructive. He actually has the unmitigated gall to accuse Barack of being willing to lose the war if it benefits his presidential bid. Number one, although McCain and his cronies have spoken of winning this war in Iraq for a number of years, they have yet to define what a win would look like.

Furthermore, he speaks of the surge like the war and occupation of Iraq began with the surge. The surge is a magical and mystical action somehow concocted by McCain and only McCain. The sad thing is that John McCain gets every detail wrong about the surge as he describes it to anyone who will listen. He takes credit for knowing about it before anyone else does, attributes the wrong participants in describing its course of action and results, and gets the dates of the surge completely wrong as he criticizes Barack for refusing to even acknowledge that the surge worked.

Well, I for one don’t care if the surge worked. Yes, there are elements of Baghdad and other areas of Iraq where violence is down, but it would be truly naïve to ignore the multiple elements that have caused it to occur, including payoffs of the worst of the provocateurs that has caused them to temporarily cease fire. McCain certainly won’t talk about that, but will we just pay them in perpetuity? I guess McCain would.

Finally, I think it’s time for us to ask McCain if he’ll acknowledge that he was wrong for starting this war if he keeps insisting that Obama acknowledge that the surge worked. I won’t sit by the phone and wait for his call. Frankly, Obama has already spoken publicly about what has and has not worked about the surge, but this will never be enough for McCain, and let’s face it. This is all that McCain has got in his arsenal, so he’ll keep loading and reloading until he runs out of ammunition…in November.

Barack Obama is not only a superb candidate; he is already demonstrating what kind of excellent president he’ll be. He is running for the president of the United States, and even though Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire region, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a slice of the pie that will be his domain once January rolls around, he is wisely and expertly recognizing that the economy of our country is in desperate need of a complete overhaul, and that must be job number one. McCain, on the other hand, has placed all of his eggs in the Iraq war basket, and frankly, those eggs are really starting to rot bigtime.