Obama misses the revolution *UPDATED*
In the email giving the heads up about this post, Steve Schippert had one word, which he practically yelled: “H.U.G.E.”
As you may recall, early on in this Iranian thing, I wondered if the protest would coalesce around anything. Without a focus, it would just drift away. With a focus — well, anything is possible. It seems the focus is in place (getting rid of the Supreme Leader), a martyr has been created in timely fashion, and the Revolution is ready.
Would you all please remind me where Barack Obama was during all of this? There’s something almost poetic about a Leftie missing out on a revolution entirely. If things do go down, he owes the Iranian people a huge apology for backing the wrong horse.
UPDATE: Andy McCarthy explains why Obama may be quite comfortable sitting out this particular revolution:
The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
Because of obvious divergences (inequality for women and non-Muslims, hatred of homosexuals) radical Islam and radical Leftism are commonly mistaken to be incompatible. In fact, they have much more in common than not, especially when it comes to suppression of freedom, intrusiveness in all aspects of life, notions of “social justice,” and their economic programs. (On this, as in so many other things, Anthony Daniels should be required reading — see his incisive New English Review essay, “There Is No God but Politics”, comparing Marx and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.) The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — “equal rights” and “social justice” are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.
The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America’s history, but a “pragmatist” in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power.
Makes sense to me.
