(no subject)

[fpb]

I cannot believe that Obama is now proposing, as his Big Idea, to bribe the Taliban out of the war. Does he imagine that has not been tried in decades of war? And does he not imagine that they will take the money with a grin on their faces - said grin becoming rather fixed when they realize how far the dollar has been devalued - and use it to purchase more plastic explosive and heavy machine-guns? Come on, Mr.President, this is a real world.

Comments

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In his life, he has always met polite, upper-class Muslims of the same kind as himself

I really wasn't going to comment on this post, but please tell me that was a Freudian slip?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not in the least. The operative words are "polite, upper-class" - members of an international aristocracy who have as much in common with each other as with their own countries, if not more so. I met them in Oxford. Obama is the type to the life.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

It was the "Muslim" part I was questioning. As written, it read as if you've actually thrown in with the "Obama is a secret Muslim" crowd.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I certainly do think that his religious identity is marginal. But then, many American presidents including Lincoln and probably Washington were not Christian. (The most recent was Taft, who was a Unitarian and stated in so many words that he did not believe in the Incarnation.) If Obama were a Muslim, he would be quite outrageously out of skew with the average - rather like a family of Egyptian diplomats I knew in Rome, whose teen-age daughter used to laze around the semi-public local pool with my sister in a bikini in the summer, and would consider aloud becoming a Christian because she had liked Jesus Christ Superstar so much. It is his ignorance, and not his knowledge, of Islam, that bothers me.