The reality-based candidate

It’s no longer a phrase heard much anymore, but the Progressives used to title themselves “the reality based community.” They understood the real world, unlike the cruel, self-centered, self-serving conservatives surrounding them. Of course, that being the case, Obama must be the reality based candidate. However, Cheat-Seeking Missiles, riffing off a Washington Post editorial, points out that, when it comes to Middle Eastern policy, Obama is anything but grounded in reality:

The editorial winds up for several paragraphs before delivering this closer:

Yet Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Other than choosing the word “eccentric” when so many other words would have worked better (thick-headed, flabbergasting, laughable, cro-zo), that pretty much nails it. You have in Obama a candidate who is clueless regarding the threats we face and the best means to face them, who wants so much to not be Bush that he refuses to acknowledge reality.

I for one would rather have a president who makes the mistake of calling out a fool all by himself instead of assigning the task to a surrogate, than one who tramples over Pakistan – a nuclear-armed nation that’s just barely holding of an Islamist uprising – to hunt for Osama bin Laden, who has done nothing more threatening than issuing tapes lately.

You can read the rest of Laer’s post here.