[lbo-talk] "The US did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan"!

[C. G. Estabrook]

True enough.  Obama has enough trust in his own rhetorical abilities that he 
thinks he can occasionally tell the truth and get away with it.  That's the 
source of the talk-radio meme that he has occult powers of hypnosis...

When Obama first proposed himself as president, popular opinion made little
distinction between the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (it was against it).
Neither did elite policy, for different reasons (it was for it).  Obama's 
audition for the job ("Audacity of Hope") asserted that he could sell the latter 
to the former.

Here in Illinois and eventually elsewhere, Obama rallied the anti-war vote to
his candidacy and neutralized it (as the Democrats had been trying to do in 2004
and 2006).  His co-option was so successful that even the term is now not 
understood.  --CGE

Sheldon wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 10:00 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
> wrote:
>> A flat-out lie this morning from Obama as he announced the expansion of the
>> war that he was elected to end.  He seems to think he can get away with
>> saying anything.
>> 
> 
> Just so the record is straight.  Obama's initial popularity was his tepid
> anti-war stance regarding Iraq.  If there was a war he was elected to end, it
> was Iraq.  As far as I recall, he has continually promised an escalation of
> the war in Afghanistan.
> 
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