JamieWeinstein.com

Remember that oft-replayed Chris Matthews interview during the 2008 election where the talk show host stumped a surrogate for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama with a series of seemingly simple questions: What has Barack Obama accomplished? Can you name anything he accomplished as a senator?

The flummoxed Obama supporter wanted to speak in generalities. He wanted to speak of how Obama inspires and of what Obama might do in the future. Matthews wouldn’t let him off the hook. Pressed by the Hardball host, the Obama surrogate just couldn’t name a single Obama accomplishment.

“I am not going to be able to do that tonight,” he finally relented.

Well, in the 10 months Barack Obama has been president, has anything changed? Is there anything substantive Obama has accomplished or are people still talking about what the president might accomplish in the future?

Just look at the record. Obama is the Nothing President.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if Nothing President became the Something President?

While so far Obama has failed to impress, this doesn’t mean things can’t change. While the final details are still unclear, some reports suggest that Obama is leaning toward completely fulfilling (or near completely fulfilling) General Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan. The decision would be politically risky for Obama, but it could give Obama a real chance to achieve a meaningful foreign policy legacy.

Due to liberal overreach and the souring economy, it is not impossible to imagine the Republicans retaking the House in 2010. Ironically enough, this could help save the Obama presidency.

Balanced by a Republican-controlled House, Obama would be forced to moderate many of his legislative proposals. Instead of pushing policies that are non-starters for most Republicans, the president could focus on achieving important policy objectives that would find real bipartisan support.

So far Obama is the Nothing President. But he could be more. He could achieve something real, lasting, and positive. First, he can help create a positive foreign policy legacy by surging in Afghanistan. To be something really special, he should hope that Democrats lose control of the House in 2010.

[This post was adapted from my North Star column How the nothing president could become the something president]

As President Barack Obama continues to deliberate over whether or not to fulfill General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan, one of the president’s greatest concerns is reportedly the unreliability and questionable legitimacy of the current Afghan government.

While this is hardly a trivial concern, it should be remembered that this same concern weighed heavily on those contemplating what turned out to be the hugely successful Iraq surge former President George W. Bush decided to implement in January 2007.

It will likely surprise many that commentator Charles Krauthammer, of all people, best articulated this concern while weighing in against the Iraq surge in his influential Washington Post column.

Calling Nouri al-Maliki’s government “hopelessly sectarian,” Krauthammer wrote in January 2007, “If it were my choice, I would not ‘surge’ American troops in defense of such a government. I would not trust it to deliver on its promises.” And despite his confidence in General David Petraeus, Krauthammer lamented that he was “afraid the effort will fail…because the Maliki government will undermine it.”

Krauthammer’s hesitancy back in 2007 about the proposed Iraq surge was eminently reasonable. His concerns were shared by others, including many in the military establishment. Thankfully, it was a rare instance in which Krauthammer was wrong. The Iraq surge worked.

In many ways, Krauthammer’s concern in 2007 with regard to the Iraq surge is Obama’s concern in 2009 with regard to the potential Afghan surge.

Critics have warned that, without a reliable ally in the Afghan government, America’s mission in the backward country is doomed to failure and therefore it is best for the United States to drawback. As conservative columnist George Will wrote last week, “If (Obama) is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.”

The concern over the reliability of the Afghan government is not lost on General McChrystal. In his August report to the president, General McChrystal expressed acute awareness of the failures of the Afghan government. Nonetheless, he concluded that America could still work with it and that success was possible in Afghanistan—but only if the mission was properly resourced.

The Iraqi and Afghan situations are not exact parallels, but lessons learned in Iraq can certainly be applied to Afghanistan. One of those lessons is that, despite concerns over the Iraqi government’s ability to do its job to complement the U.S. military’s surge of troops and change in strategy, the ultimate result was successful in reversing a losing situation (at least so far).

If General McChrystal believes that he can achieve a similar result with the current Afghan governmental situation, President Obama ought to trust him. After all, it was President Obama who appointed General McChrystal in May, and it was President Obama who set the mission General McChrystal is now asking for more troops to fulfill.

America and the free world simply cannot allow Afghanistan to once again become a safe haven for al-Qaeda to use as an open base to plot against the West.

[This post was adapted from my North Star column Afghan government not stable enough to support U.S. surge? We heard the same thing about Iraq]

In its war with one of the great malefactors of our time, it looks like the Obama administration may have come to the understanding that the smart path to take is to simply admit defeat. Last night, Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren aired an interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

President Obama defiantly declared during his presidential campaign that he was willing to meet with America’s most intractable enemies without preconditions. During his presidency, the Obama administration declared that while the president may be willing to meet with the world’s worst tyrants, he and his team had no intention of meeting with Fox News television hosts.

“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization,” said deputy White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer. His comments come on the heels of the American public rapidly deciding to stop abiding by the fiction, which has also been aided by the mainstream press, that Barack Obama is some sort of political deity endowed with magical powers to transform the world.

Let’s be honest. Fox News leans to the right. This is especially evident in its prime time opinion lineup. But how is this any different from any other network other than the fact that Fox leans right instead of left? Just take a look at MSNBC for Pete’s sake. Not only is the cable news network distinctly left wing, but during the 2008 campaign, MSNBC allowed their passionately partisan opinion hosts to anchor their supposedly straight news coverage – at least until complaints forced MSNBC to reconsider. Chris Matthews moderated not one, but two Republican primary debates!

At the same time the Obama administration decided to launch a war on Fox News, it invited MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann over to the White House for tea and crumpets. Obama can invite whomever he wants to visit him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but we don’t have to accept the false reality that Obama is in effect promoting, which is that Fox News is unfairly biased while MSNBC is some beacon of fairness whose prime time personalities will be welcomed in the White House with open arms.

This is not a very difficult issue to understand. Obama likes MSNBC because it is full of charter members of the Obama Fan Club. He doesn’t like Fox News because the network is often critical of him and his policies.

If Obama can glad-hand Hugo Chavez and his administration can meet with the mullahs that rule Iran, then Obama and other members of his administration should be able to sit down with Chris Wallace.

As we saw last night, it appears that the Obama administration ultimately came to the right conclusion that it was time to wave the white flag.

[[This post was adapted from my North Star column Talking to the enemy: Obama caves, sends Hillary to do interview with Fox News]

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“I never saw anywhere in the news a Democrat carry a picture to any kind of a rally with a picture of Adolf Hitler putting him with a characterization of Bush,” said liberal commentator Ed Schultz on his The Ed Show on MSNBC last week. Ed was challenging his guest, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, who had just reminded big Ed about how Democrats did just that during President George W. Bush’s tenure in office.

It takes some sort of severe amnesia to not remember the constant references made by some liberals comparing Bush and his administration to Nazis. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, I attended a “Peace Festival” on campus where signs depicting George W. Bush as Hitler could be purchased as if it was completely normal. Anyone who remembers watching the anti-war rallies during the Bush years must have seen left-wing activists parade such signs around.

But it wasn’t just the rank-and-file left wing nuts that made the Nazi comparison. Prominent left-wing nuts compared Bush and his administration to Nazis as well.

Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison, for instance, suggested the Sept. 11 attacks were almost like Bush’s Reichstag Fire, a reference to the fire many believe Hitler staged in the German Reichstag and blamed on the communists in order to consolidate his power. Ellison told an audience that 9/11 was “almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

And let us not forget Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin’s absurd and outrageous comparison of Bush Administration interrogation tactics in the War on Terror to the tactics used by Nazi Germany.

But comparing Republicans to Nazis is not a new fad among liberals. It has been a long-standing practice. In his 1988 book The Culture of Terror, leftist icon Noam Chomsky compared Ronald Reagan’s America to Hitler’s Germany. The Associated Press reported that at anti-Reagan protests in three American cities in 1983, young protesters carried signs proclaiming “Reagan: Our Hitler.”

In 1995, Democratic Congressman Major Owens didn’t just compare the new conservative majority in Congress to Nazis, he stated that his conservative colleagues were worse. ''These are the people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler.'' Influential Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel also jumped in on the action. “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things,” Rangel said, suggesting the agenda of the new Republican majority in Congress was worse than Hitler’s agenda.

America’s number one ally in the Middle East, Israel, is routinely branded as acting Nazi-like in certain liberal quarters. Not only is the comparison idiotic and factually unsupportable, it is also morally repugnant. Misusing Nazi analogies is always wrong, but libeling Israel as Nazi-like is particularly vile for obvious reasons.

So, yes Ed, liberal radicals are second to none when it comes to labeling their political opponents as Nazis. Do you need any more evidence?

[This post was adapted from my North Star column Liberals Haven’t Compared Their Rivals to Hitler? I’m Sorry . . . What??]