It is good to see that Podhoretz the elder is still writing.
Is Obama an incompetent, way out beyond his depth? Or is he very skillfully executing the plan he had all along? N-Pod argues the latter.
The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing
statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days
away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of
us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the
left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the
anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers,
not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original
"community organizer."[. . .]
But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama
believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and
destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation
he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence. And
just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to
take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic "isolationist" label abroad.
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