Obama and War; O-GOD,..."say hellooooooooo to the new Boss,.....same as....."

Obama’s War: The Reaction
The neocons and the war liberals are on board---(you know who you are)
by Justin Raimondo, December 04, 2009

I'm actually pretty surprised to see that many liberals and progressives are not climbing on board Obama’s war wagon – notably Rachel Maddow, who made a stinging criticism of the escalation by comparing the rhetoric of the Bush administration and that of the New Obama, concluding that the latter had adopted and even extended the essence of the "Bush Doctrine," the morally indefensible idea that we have to strike at targets that might possibly pose a threat to U.S. national security some time in the indefinite future. Her subsequent interview with counterinsurgency guru John Nagl, however, was strictly softball – but, hey, whaddaya expect. This is MSNBC, after all.

Speaking of which: in reporting the president’s escalation speech, Keith Olbermann was clearly embarrassed, like a father whose child has just crapped his pants in the middle of Walmart. His dispirited voice, the staged "debate" between lefty-blogger Cenk Somebody-or-Other and some Democratic Party "strategist"-cum-hack ("We can agree to support Obama while disagreeing about specific policies," announced Olbermann, somewhat too earnestly) – it was all very telling, not to mention hilarious.
A good number of Obama’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders are to be found on the neoconservative Right: we have David "Axis of Evil" Frum, who said we shouldn’t expect Churchillian rhetoric because it is not 1940 (what an admission for a neocon to make, surely a first!). National Review’s editors agreed: "Churchillian it was not." Yet they endorsed the president’s policy prescriptions, for the most part, while disdaining his tone (not bloodthirsty enough for their tastes). Bill Kristol, one of the intellectual architects [.pdf] of the Iraq war, opined in the pages of the Washington Post that, despite the speech’s flaws – notably the mention of a "too cute by half" deadline for the beginning of U.S. withdrawal – he is over the moon that Obama has "embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power." The Weekly Standard editor cited an exchange between a reporter and a senior U.S. official who was asked about Iran’s insistence that the Obama surge in Afghanistan is the same as the previous Bush surge in Iraq. The official replied that Obama’s war is being fought to protect the U.S. and its allies: "It’s easy to understand Iran’s perspective perhaps that there is some continuity here in the U.S. policy. That’s because the interest is consistent." Avers Kristol: "’The interest is consistent.’ That’s the heart of the matter. It’s encouraging that Obama seems to understand this fact."

The essential continuity of American foreign policy in the age of Obama is something the neocons have been joyfully anticipating since the Dear Leader took office: recall that joint conference between the pro-Obama Center for a New American Security, the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, and Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative, which celebrated what the participants presciently perceived as Obama’s hawkishness.

This continuity is not acknowledged, however, by Obama’s liberal supporters.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/12/03/obamas-war-the-reaction/