A friend sent on an interesting poll by McLaughlin & Associates on a number of key foreign policy issues. It can be viewed in its entirety here. Several items on terrorism, Iran, and Israel stand out.
First, while “terrorism” is identified as the greatest threat to the U.S. only 15% give that answer. The next highest (excluding “don’t know”) is 7% as “ourselves.” Sigh. (But perhaps 7% of those polled thinking we’re the biggest threat is indeed a threat.) On Iran, overwhelming percentages of respondents across both parties think “Iran supplying a nuclear umbrella for terrorists” is a very serious or somewhat serious threat while a high (but smaller) percentage thinks the U.S. would not be safe with a nuclear-armed Iran. 79% think Iran would give nuclear weapons to terrorists to attack an American city.
On Israel, Bibi Netanyahu’s approval ratings are not stellar but still more positive than not, regardless of the respondent’s political party. And 87% of Republicans and 79% of Democrats think the U.S. should be concerned with Israel’s security. Perhaps the most interesting response comes to this question: “Given that Iran has publicly threatened to annihilate Israel, would Israel be justified in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities?” 67% of Republicans, 47% of Democrats and 57% of Independents answer “yes.” That’s a rather startling and wide gap according to party identification, far wider than the gap regarding the generic “should we care about Israel’s security” query.
But Americans are a skeptical lot, it seems. Asked “Do you think that if the Palestinians were given their own state in the West Bank and Gaza they would live peacefully with Israel or continue their campaign of terror to destroy Israel?” only 18% choose “live peacefully” (with only 7% of Republicans choosing “live peacefully” over “destroy Israel” while the Democrats’ split was far closer, 25-47%).
The bottom line: Americans are “not naive,” as the president likes to say, about Iran and are very supportive of Israel. As to the former, given the level of concern about an attack on a U.S. city, a policy that seemed to tolerate Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would be very unpopular. Finally, the difference along party lines with regard to Israel is noteworthy and troubling (at least to those who believe a robust relationship between the two countries is in their mutual interests), especially at a time when Democrats dominate both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Seriously, could Obama possibly be more deceitful and weasily? Any American who has paid attention (and wasn’t blinded into self-deception by their own self-righteous hope to be one of “the ones we have been waiting for”) could see that this guy will lie, omit, and obfuscate on any and every point, as long as it appears to serve his personal political interests. His first concern does not appear to be stabilizing the economy, but rewarding liberal interest groups, like ACORN. The list of radical associations and instances of disingenuousness are already too long to list (outside of a lengthy tome), but they just keep piling up. His agenda is logically impracticable, devastating for the economy, radically and dangerously ambitious, and disingenuous in its moralistic tirades and targets for taxation. Once again, shame on the left for both buying his garbage and for forcing it upon the rest of us. And for those who thought he was a moderate, wake up! In four years, we will have another chance to review his record and prove to ourselves that Americans still have some common sense by voting him out.
This is incredible…. ACORN? What a nerve… And Congress/RNC won’t cry foul? (I gave up on the MSM)
I would also look closely at the “Organization for America” activities in “recruiting” people.
As you may know “Organization for America” is the DNC arm devoted to Obama’s 2012 re-election. It aims at keeping together, alive, fired up and ready his “grass root” operations (including voting turn out, registration and fundraising) for the next 4 years . It’s billed to the public as another
“community organizer” group. But it isn’t. I would be curious to inspect any “coordination” communications b/t ACORN and Organization for America.
What do you want from the thuggish Chicago pol?
ACORN may indeed count every American, some more than once! Aliens, too, if they would really like to be American or something.
No, Rod, Congress won’t cry foul. The Democrats have majorities in both houses. The “blue” states they come from are the ones likely to benefit from a jacked-around census.
J.G. Thayer has an excellent observation here, because there is nothing we can do about this one. The Census will be largely completed before we get to vote on the House, and a third of the Senate, in November 2010.
ACORN is one of the entities most responsible for the subprime-lending-based worldwide economic collapse. ACORN constantly patrolled banks to make sure they were lending copiously enough to poor people, as required under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — the true seed of the whole mess — bullied banks that didn’t meet their (ACORN’s) standards for poor-people lending and lobbied against them (successfully) at all levels of government. (It’s no wonder those same banks figured out how to offload the unacceptable risk that lending to the insolvent entailed by packaging the loans into mortgage-backed securities and selling them in the open market.) Indeed, this one organization is so … the only word for it is evil, and here they are one of the main tools of continued dominance of the U.S. electorate by Barack Obama. Is there nothing the rest of us can do?
Amen.
I fault Judd Gregg for this to some extent. He missed a golden opportunity to highlight this Obama power grab when he withdrew his nomination as Commerce Secretary: why didn’t he use his withdrawal statement to make it clear that his withdrawal would remove the WH’s pretext—er, stated reason–for assuming oversight of the census, thereby restoring status quo ante?