From Mark Williams’ Sacramento Union Column; Barack Obama is an Empty Suit
It is difficult to see Senator Barack Obama’s recent international tour as anything more than an attempt to prop up an empty suit with the appearance of substance. The entire trip was tightly scripted and controlled, which is how campaigns are usually run, but Obama went far over the line and I think it is going to come back to bite him.
Emails from combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq reveal that they were ordered to attend at least one Obama event. No big deal there, combat troops were ordered to be at this writer’s broadcast locations in Baghdad, with one difference-making twist, the soldiers ordered to be at my broadcasts were not told what to say. The soldiers ordered to be with Obama were.
According to the troops, they were told to lie about their home states when asked. One soldier emailed an example to military blogger Ron Winter. Winter writes, “Apparently, the Senator’s campaign people wanted to make sure that the photo ops showed the Senator talking with service personnel from the appropriate parts of the country. Appropriate in this case apparently meaning places where he needs a big boost in the polls.”
So if military people pictured with Barack were from, say, Michigan, they were told to say they were from someplace like Arizona instead.”
NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell revealed more when she told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on HARDBALL that the videos and photographs we all saw on the news were not taken by anybody in any media. She said that in fact the media were barred from those photo opportunities, the military took the pictures and taped the videos and distributed what they thought important and, apparently, complimentary toward a United States Senator and their probable next boss. You may extrapolate from that your own conclusions as to the validity of the images you saw but you will have to guess about the parts you did not see because the Pentagon isn’t talking.
Barack Obama is not the first politician to manipulate such images, just the most crass, even more so than Clinton crass.
Berlin was where Obama revealed something about his true character. Obama military advisor Robert Gibbs told Agence France-Presse that it was the Senator who personally made the decision to blow off a scheduled stop at Landstuhl military hospital, a decision he made after being informed that his campaign would not be allowed to use wounded US Heroes as props in a television commercial. Chief Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told Politico that Department of Defense regulations prohibit such exploitation.
“Senator Obama is welcome to visit Landstuhl or any military hospital in his official capacity as a United States Senator,” said Morrell to Politico. “We made it clear to him that campaign staff and press would not be permitted to accompany him. We relayed those ground rules. They made a choice based upon the information we relayed to them.” Morrell added.
The visit was prominent on the candidate’s schedule right up until those ground rules were made clear so the senator decided that addressing Germans was more important than those men and women wounded in the process of making Obama even possible!
Without use as props, the wounded troops were worthless to the United States Senator who would be commander-in-chief.
In any event, Obama had a speech for the locals, one that had been heavily promoted with German language fliers all over Berlin and a breathless anticipation by the German media. I am not sure who thought that it would be a good idea to invoke the imagery of throngs of cheering Germans at the feet of a charismatic political orator but that does not historically end well. France is usually the next stop when that happens, and guess where Obama’s next stop was… right, France (although they managed to not surrender this time around).
The resulting speech was one long apology from Obama, on our behalf, because he perceives that America has not been playing nice with the other countries so he promised the Germans and the world that he would make sure we do better.
That should make you frightened for the future of the nation if come January 2009 Obama is sworn in. It will be at that exact moment when for the first time in history our national interests will take a back burner to those of other nations. All the next president will have to do is negotiate the exact terms of surrender.