Tag: harry s truman

I dunno: *would* Obama have recognized Israel?

Hot Air asks the question.  Come, I will conceal nothing from you: my knee-jerk reaction was to mutter Of course Barack Obama wouldn’t have recognized Israels: too many Jews in it for his liking, you understand.  But that’s actually, well, unfair. I mean, I don’t actually know that the President is an anti-Semite. Obama may simply think that he can’t run the Democratic party without putting up with all the Jew-haters, and he might even be right.

No, I think that what would have happened is this: in Truman’s place, Barack Obama would have been very much an advocate for Israel… on the cheap. Plenty of pretty speeches and high-minded statements. And this would have continued up to the moment when Secretary of State George Marshall (with the rest of the State Department behind him) told Barack Obama to back down, or face the consequences. At that point, you have to ask yourself: does Barack Obama have Harry S Truman’s grit? – Because say what you like about Truman (God knows there’s plenty to say), but give him this: once he decided on something that was it.   Continue reading I dunno: *would* Obama have recognized Israel?

Say what you like about Harry S Truman…

…but as this Weekly Standard review of Oliver Stone’s to-sink-like-its-namesake ‘documentary’ notes almost in passing, Truman had one hell of an advantage: he wasn’t Henry Wallace. We dodged one monstrously large bullet, there.

Although it does occur to me that the anti-Communist backlash of the early 1950s* might have done a good deal more long-term good if Wallace had been President for a while…

Moe Lane

*In case nobody’s mentioned this yet: yeah, actually, there WAS a secret International Commie Conspiracy directed at the United States. The Commies just got lucky in that Joe McCarthy was a drunken, unreliable imbecile.

‘The Buck Stops… with me.”

I just noticed that the President kind of likes to use that phrase a bit.  I wonder if he realizes that it makes him look like a bit of a narcissist?  Particularly since he’s clearly using that phrase in all those occasions to argue that while bad things that happen under his watch are always his responsibility, they’re never his fault.  Even the Christmas bombing attack was declared by the President to be ultimately the fault of a pre-Obama watch list system.  It’s frankly a far cry from ‘The buck stops here,’ which is at heart an admission that policy decisions flow from the top, and failures in policy are in fact in some way the fault of the people who are ultimately responsible for them.  Then again, Barack Obama is also a far cry from being another Harry S Truman.

I look forward to the hate mail that will implicitly validate my argument.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.