Guest poster Nora McAlvanah at Marc Ambinder’s The Atlantic blog picked up on a line from Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) July 24, 2008, speech at Berlin’s Victory Column, one which may come back to haunt him:
GOPers may have a field day with at least one oft-used-line from Obama’s speech today, which he amended slightly for his Berlin audience:
“America, this is our moment. This is our time” – Obama, speaking in MN the night he officially won the Dem nomination (6/3).
“People of Berlin — people of the world — this is our moment. This is our time” – Obama, in his first formal speech of his foreign tour (7/24).
Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.--Thomas Jefferson.
HE also managed to get in a Xerox JFK line…about Free Men Everywhere are Berliners…
but I was only half listening, so I can’t quote exactly and am too busy to look for a transcript. However, when I was listening wholly, the speech was rambling and completely unremarkable.
It’s all photo-op with Barack. (cross-posted at No Quarter)
The following was sent to the blog owner at “Blackfive.” The blog owner had 16 years of military service. If one reads his “about” page he’s a totally convincing person, and he just happens to really care about this country and the military. Read a few of the stories — they are about the heroes one never reads about. I don’t think he had any axe to grind.
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/07/from-gi-in-afgh.html Here’s the story relevant to this week’s events.
I did notice he has his well placed YES WE CAN! and
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAAAAAAAAA MAAAAAAA group present on
cue though.
Did anybody shout on cue, “WE LOVE YOU BARACK!” so he
could answer “I LOVE YOU BACK!” ???
He’s a disgrace. Obama and his croonies have turned our political system into a reality tv show -
What a depressing joke.
i think obama should be arrested as soon as his plane touches down on american soil under the “logan act”…..google it. he is threatening national security with his big mouth to foreign leaders, borders on treason to me…..in my opinion,is that still legal in the united states of obamaland ?
Tonight I sit and wonder, what has happened to America?? Have we all gone mad?? How can this man, this Senator, get away with taking America to task on foreign soil?? How does he represent one of our states as Senator and not know that to plaster posters on the Holiest sites in Jerusalem would be a slap in the face of Jews??
This man may be President of our great nation, how can this be?? How can a man who is affiliated with a known terrorist rise to be a Nominee for President?? What has gone wrong with this nation?? Why is there not an outcry so deafening that the world would stand up and take notice. They would notice that America will not be fooled by the likes of Sen. Obama!!
WE have heard your speeches Sen. Obama, we have heard them at nauseam, we have heard them before from others. You are without substance, you are not loyal to your country.
I find it interesting that I have not heard one word from your Grandmother, you know, the lady that raised you, educated you, and the one you told this nation, she was a “racist”. You felt comfortable in preserving the reputation of a “Spiritual Mentor” who was filled with hatred for his fellow man, and that “Mentor” told the world you were nothing more then another politician.
Another telling moment occurred today when the USSS supplemental budget request for presidential candidate protection was leaked to the media and reported. I’ve been working on campaigns since ‘76 and following budgets for almost that long and to my knowledge this is unprecedented. First, that the cost, most of which we could reliably assume falls on one candidate (since the leak also cited “international travel” as a driver in blowing the budget) was leaked, and second, that it was reported out.
Other old hands correct me if I’m mistaken, but back in the day the budget for the PPD was classified and no decent journalist would have reported those figures, particularly if they could be used for intelligence purposes.
I can’t stand Obama. How he hems and haws and pauses and stutters and makes up crap as he goes along. He’s a liar, a Stalinist, an arrogant conceited elitist Marxist who wants to tear down the sovereignty of these great United States. If anyone thinks that Bush sucked as president, just wait until this Marxist socialist becomes president. For the first time in decades, I am afraid for the United States of America. You think John Kerry was an effete snob? Hell, Kerry was just a dress rehearsal for Obama’s arrogance on parade. Good grief, I can’t believe how many Americans are falling for this fraud, just like lemmings off a cliff.
One more thought for those of us who do not remember the words:
We will bury you
Callimachus writes here about Oriana Fallaci’s new book, which deals in part with the question of whether a certain segment of the Arab/Moslem world is trying to overwhelm the West, both demographically and otherwise. He offers some quotes to that effect from Fallaci’s writings, taken from a book review by Brendan Bernhard’s in LA Weekly.
The first quote is from a 1972 interview (in her heyday, Fallaci was renowned for her pull-no-punches style of questioning) with Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who declared that the goal was to:
…wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”
At the time, Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later–much later–did she understand that:
…he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens … In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.”
Cold wars, terrorism wars, demographic wars. As far as the latter goes, Bernhard (and Callimachus) offers an explicit declaration, this time from Algerian President Boumedienne way back in 1974:
One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.
You can’t say the West wasn’t warned. But warnings often only seem important in retrospect. It was the sort of thing few were paying attention to at the time, “typical hyperbole.” Bombast. And perhaps it was, at that.
At least back then the threats were peaceful and reproductive in nature. More recently they took on a more chilling (or rather, a decidedly “hot”) tone–witness this Haaretz article (via Little Green Footballs) that quotes Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran telling former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar at a meeting in 2001 that “Iran must declare war on Israel and the United States until they are completely destroyed,” and that “setting Israel on fire” was the first order of the day.
Unless Khamenei is a man especially given to metaphor, it seems we must take his intent seriously. The Haaretz article concludes with the words, “Khamenei still holds the post of Iranian spiritual leader, and [is] considered to be the powerful man in the country.”
There’s that “spiritual leader” phrase again, one which actually deserves the much-abused designation “Orwellian.” I’ve written about “spiritual leaders” before, here, in a post entitled “Yeah, and Goebbels was the ’spiritual leader’ of the Nazis, too.”
What I wrote then still applies, to Khamenei in this case:
…how are people such as Abu Bakar Bashir, a cleric who most agree is the one who inspires and guides the murderers of Jemaah Islamiyah “spiritual” (unless, of course, the spirit of evil and hatred counts)? Is it because he hides behind the role of cleric? Well, the mere title “cleric” does not a spiritual leader make. It’s a perversion of the word and the concept “spiritual”…
These “spiritual” guys must never have heard of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously counseled “speak softly and carry a big stick” (a bit of trivia here: it turns out that Teddy was actually quoting a West African proverb. But I digress).
The extremely spiritual Iranian ayatollah may not speak softly, but he seems determined to obtain the biggest stick of all, and he’s not all that shy about saying what he plans to do with it. Whether he will accomplish either goal remains to be seen.
This all puts me in mind of a very different leader (who was quite unspiritual, unless you count Communism as a religion): Nikita Khrushchev, whose terrifying words, spoken in 1956 to Western ambassadors at a Moscow reception, haunted my childhood, “We will bury you.”
What did Khrushchev mean? Some thought he meant an ideological victory in the cold war (although that victory was not thought to be primarily demographic). Some feared a hot war such as Khamenei appears to be promising. The preponderance of evidence seems to be that Khrushchev meant the former, although there’s no doubt he had a plethora of big sticks available for the latter:
The translation has been controversial by being presented as belligerent out of context. The phrase may well have been intended to suggest “we will outlast you” as a more complete version of the quote reads: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you” – a meaning more akin to “we will attend your funeral” than “we shall cause your funeral”.
Those big sticks were never used, and the long war between the USSR and the USA remained cold, although it provided kindling for large and heated brushfires in many parts of the world. And history has dictated that the seemingly final burial (in the ideological sense) went in the other direction.. But history has yet to be written on the final outcome of the threats–cold and/or hot–of those others.
[HISTORICAL SIDELIGHT: Khrushchev was frightening in my youth, but little did I know at the time what a big improvement he was over his predecessor, Stalin. Nor was I aware how relatively rational he would seem compared to the current crop of Islamic supremacists.
Khrushchev himself often appeared to be somewhat of a loose cannon and a buffoon, a reputation he may have purposely manipulated and played on; witness the famous shoe-banging incident of 1960, which didn’t frighten me but certainly puzzled me at the time:
The shoe sits in front of Khrushchev, behind the shoulder of the man looking with a mixture of hope and resignation at his watch. What was the shoe incident about?
Well, according to his granddaughter Nina Khrushchev, it was an act of humorous theater in which Khrushchev purposely played the fool in order to make a point. And, who knows? She might even be correct (although I’m not sure. At any rate, I can’t quite imagine the Ayatollah doing the same, although Saddam may give it a go at his trial).
Here’s her version, for what it’s worth :
The head of the Philippine delegation, Senator Lorenzo Sumulong, expressed his surprise at the Soviet Union’s concerns over western imperialism, while it, in turn, swallowed the whole of eastern Europe. Khrushchev’s rage was beyond anything he had ever shown before. He called the poor Filipino “a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism”, then he put his shoe on the desk and banged it….
According to Khrushchev, there was abundant evidence that western powers had mistreated and mistrusted the Soviet Union…Dismissing him as a worthy opponent, capitalists thought of Khrushchev as a vaudeville character. Very well then, he would become one. He needed the UN stage to make an important statement: it is better to take the socialist world seriously. He wanted to be heard. But next to the noble Macmillan, smart Eisenhower, refined De Gaulle and wise Nehru, the short Nikita Khrushchev couldn’t help looking a wag.
Instead of trying to act and speak according to traditional diplomacy, he broke the ritual and created his own manner. The manner, which suited his goal, was to be different from the hypocrites of the west, with their appropriate words but calculated deeds. He would do it the other way - say more than he meant. A tragi-comic act of shoe banging was intended to separate two superpowers not only in terms of their politics, but also in their diplomatic methods.]
This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 11:18
At least he didn’t say, “today Berlin, tomorrow the world”…
It was great to hear the presumptuous Affirmative Action Party nominee tell the crowd that the U.S. is still in need of “perfecting”. US of A, under the bus! Barring the TWO free concerts, how big would the crowd really have been?
The pandering to Islam, as always, was in evidence. The Dhmmipean Union knows all about “tolerance”, BHO. Many of their major cities already contain Muslim ghettos, some of which local police fear to enter. Islam is working to establish Sharia Law within those same ghettos. A system of law that allows honor killings, and in which one man equals one vote. However, it takes the testimony of TWO women to equal the testimony of one man. Do we really want a POTUS that wants us to be “tolerant and understanding” towards such people? Is that change you can believe in?
In addition to the facts that he is corrupt, a Marxist socialist, and a liar, do we really want/need a POTUS that wants Americans to lay down for the same Islamization that is well under way in Europe?