Well, give or take….
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-25772192

(Actually, I do know that some people were simply overcome with pride that our country had come so far as to have a part-Negro candidate, and in the words of an online pal who’d grown up in a Negro neighborhood and thought the world of his father’s friends there and the whole community, “I wanted so much to vote for the first black President.”

http://www.hoboes.com/FireBlade/Editorials/HoodMilitia/

(And even David Horowitz wobbled slightly a week or two before the election IiRC, but I think he regained his balance before he voted.)

Personally, I voted for Gov. Palin.

(Ben just above on July 26, 2009 at 11:55 pm made an excellent point, by the way.)

“I don’t like the phrase “one thing led to another.” Imagine reading a history book, “As a young man, Adolf Hitler was rejected from art school. Well, one thing led to another, and the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on the Empire of Japan.”

Hope this helps.

By curious and unnatural circumstances, they are suddenly in command of the entity they hate and despise. The coup d’etat of our economy, of energy and now of heathcare are all aspects of the same goal, which is to hammer this country down and into its proper place. A composite of Sweden and Cuba, as far as I can make out. It goes without saying that our military, let alone military victory, is not to their taste.

But I take hope in their madness. It may be, as the Communists proved, that decades indoctrination and propaganda cannot greatly alter the stubborn bedrock of national character. I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m sensing damn little hope and damn less enthusiasm for change as I (so faux-casually) talk to people around me.

The word “hate” is thrown about too loosely nowadays, but I can honestly confess that for the people who want to destroy this country, I feel hate.

And how can his supporters keep on waxing lyrical about his “brilliance?”

I read a line in about 1985 about Ralph Lauren’s lack of design imagination: “He is the most brilliant designer ever to find an old Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and some tracing paper.” I feel the same way about Obama’s speeches: they are shallow and derivative, without an iota of originality in them, mere pale copies MLK’s speeches.

Obama has a nice speaking voice. He would be fantastic doing voice-overs for NFL Films, or maybe movie trailers.

“Obama plans to emphasize results-driven cooperation with both countries. He will endorse a Senate bill, authored by Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar, that would condition a significant increase in aid to Pakistan on measurable improvements in Pakistan’s internal efforts to combat terrorism.”

Results driven cooperation to what exactly? We don’t know. (Note that Ambinder seemed to be impressed that Obama was going to bring Iran! into the calculations back then: “codifies for the first time Iran’s role in regional diplomacy”. We see how well that’s worked out in the meantime.)

At the same time, men who’s opinion I trust, men like Mike Yon and Herschel Smith believe that it will be decades before the Afghans make significant progress toward merely controlling their own nation, let alone joining the rest of the emerging democracies of Asia like India, Thailand, and Indonesia in providing stability and economic well being and education for their people, to say nothing of the more advanced economic powers like South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. Afghanistan is a hard case, perhaps as hard a case as a nation as any other on earth.

Though he hasn’t had much of a mention yet in this discussion, I think that Pres. Bush understood this “hard case” fact about Afghanistan and that in some measure, his practical sense of the matter was to keep our expectations low while keeping the jihadi presence there in check. I can’t recall a single instance of Bush suggesting we strive for victory as such in Afghanistan (as distinct from victory over al Qaeda).

In the meantime, US and allied casualties are growing due to the greater numbers of men on the ground and the greater numbers of engagements fought as those men press to rid select areas of Talib influence and bring security to the people, as they put it. On the upside, in contrast to my apprehensions about Obama, Gen Petraeus remains at his post overseeing the region. That may be the lone reassuring circumstance in the mix.