Obama Cannot Distinguish Between Good And Evil By Herb Denenberg

Source: http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=20121359&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576392&rfi=6

09/15/2008

Here's one of the most important reasons why Sen. Barack Obama is not fit to be commander in chief and president - he simply is unable to recognize the difference between good and evil. For proof of that I offer five pieces of evidence:

* Mr. Obama's reaction to 9/11 in a piece he wrote for Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on Sept. 19, 2001

* His reaction to Rev. Rick Warren's question about good and evil.

* His response to Russia's invasion of Georgia.

* His advocacy of infanticide and murder via his position on abortion-related issues.

* His continuous association with anti-American, anti-White, terrorists, racists and bigots of various stripes.



Reaction To 9/11:?Obama The Wimp Speaks

In a piece he wrote a week after 9/11, Mr. Obama recommended strengthening airport security and the like, but then called on American to "engage ... in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness."

Anyone with half a drop of red blood and a spine would call on America to obliterate those who would murder innocent civilians in a supreme act of bloodthirsty barbarism. But, no, Mr. Obama would start to psychoanalyze those who slaughtered 3,000 Americans. He would explain it as something that "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." He thus demonstrates he is not only a fool and a wimp, but also an ignoramus. He doesn't have the facts. The 9/11 barbarians were well educated and even wealthy, the very opposite of the picture of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair painted by Mr. Obama. As Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary, Mr. Obama's views were strange as our "attackers were wealthy and educated, connected and ecstatic." It is Mr. Obama who shows evidence of moral poverty and inexcusable ignorance, not the 9/11 killers.

As Investor's Business Daily observed, it was as if "the answer to the attacks should have been food stamps for al-Qaida." He would "understand" these genocidal maniacs rather than kill them. Then Mr. Obama warned of overreaction. He wrote, "We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern dissent." He didn't have time to express concern for American blood flowing at the World Trade Center, but went on to worry about overreaction against al-Qaida and bigotry against out neighbors. Americans didn't need his preaching about how to treat our neighbors - there was no reaction against neighbors of Middle Eastern descent. But what America needed was leadership with some guts and spine, not those who, with the smoke still rising from the World Trade Center, would be concerned about the poverty and ignorance of the wealthy and well-educated murderers of 9/11.

Compare this with the immediate reaction of Sen. John McCain to 9/11. Minutes after the attack on the Pentagon, he was interviewed by many media outlets, and immediately identified the source of the attack and called for all those behind this act of unspeakable horror to be crushed. Unlike Mr. Obama, he did not wait a week to then Hamlet-like try to explain what had happened. Even now with all Mr. Obama's advisors and consultants, he can't get much right on his first try. And even in this case, after having a week to consider 9/11, he got it all wrong.

Here as in so many other cases, Mr. McCain demonstrated he can get it right and get it right the first time and right on time. Mr. Obama has demonstrated gets it wrong, and even after time to consider and experts to consult, he still manages to get it wrong.



Obama's Answer To Evil:?Hamlet-Like Indecision

At the Saddleback Forum, both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were asked by Rev. Rick Warren: "Does evil exist, and if it does do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it?"

Mr. McCain answered without a second's delay. We defeat it. And then he gave the most obvious example - the Islamofascist terrorist whose highest moral value and first priority is the slaughter of women and children, and murder and genocide on the grandest scale they can achieve. Their evil is so pure and unspeakable it is hardly comprehensible by a civilized man. But Mr. McCain knows how to recognize such evil and what to do about it.

In contrast, Mr. Obama could not cite the most obvious example of pure evil. Instead, he sees evil on our streets and in parents abusing children. Give me a break. Then he gets into his endless moral ambiguity on any clear question of good and evil: "Now the one thing that I think important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confrontation, you know a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying [Warren interrupts to say, 'in the name of good"] in the name of good. And I think it very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because if we think it is good, doesn't always mean that we'll be doing good."

Mr. Obama's answer is further proof that he and his Democratic Party are in denial on the issue of Islamofascist terrorism. It was never mentioned in the debates. It is rarely mentioned in campaign speeches. Mr. Obama and his party should not be trusted to defeat an enemy they don't even seem to be able to identify and name.



Obama Sees Moral Equivalence Between Aggression And Self-Defense

When Russia invaded Georgia, Mr. Obama complained we'd be in a better position if we set a good example in such matters. That clearly implied his moral equivalence between Russian aggression in Georgia and our liberation of Iraq. This stupid statement of course weakened our international negotiating position. But it also shows Mr. Obama's moral bankruptcy in the inability to distinguish between illegal aggression and liberation of a nation based on seventeen United Nations resolutions over many years. Mr. Obama would have probably blamed Pearl Harbor on the bad examples we had previously set in regard to Japan. He would have cautioned our nation against overreaction. And he would have warned that we might be confusing good and evil. Finally, he would have traced the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor to poverty and ignorance rather than evil and infamy. With this kind of total moral confusion and ignorance, if this man sits in the White House we are doomed.

In contrast, again, Mr. McCain got it right and got it right on the spot.



Obama's Abortion Position

This column has presented in detail how Mr. Obama, while in the Illinois Senate, led the opposition to a bill (S.B. 1095, the so-called "Born Alive Bill") that would give infants born in the course of a botched abortion the right to life and to medical care. ("Obama More Than an Abortion Radical," (Aug. 15, 2008)). Mr. Obama feared that letting those infants live would somehow impair the sanctity of Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion. Thus Mr. Obama became the most radical proponent of abortion and became an advocate of infanticide and murder (and there's no way to dress up his position to deny its true meaning). The nurse who crusaded for the bill actually testified before Mr. Obama and his committee how she once held an infant for 45 minutes waiting for it to die. She said that Mr. Obama was unfazed by her testimony. This is surely another classic example of his inability to discriminate between good and evil.



Obama's Association With Evil

Who can remember a nominee of a major political party who had the kind of associates that Mr. Obama marches with - anti-Americans, anti-whites, bigots and racists, terrorists, and crooks? This man is beyond the pale. Both his decisions and his associates suggest he is unable to distinguish between good and evil, and even in cases of the most black and white divergence of right and wrong, he has no clear vision, and Hamlet-like can't make up his mind. Perhaps that is why he set a record of voting "present" while in the Illinois legislature, unable to make up his mind between "yes" and "no." As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani pointed out, as mayor or president you have no such vote as "present." You have to make a decision and you have to do more than engage in some intellectual discourse on doing evil in the guise of the good. Mr. Obama was right when he said that small-town mayors have to make decisions, but senators merely "yak." Until Mr. Obama learns to make decisions and learns to distinguish between good and evil, he better stay in the Senate and keep yaking ... and maybe voting present. Or better yet, he might do the nation a service by going absent altogether.



Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.