Barack Obama considers the liberation of Iraq equivalent to the rape of Georgia.
“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”
In that last bit, he can only be referring to his signature issue, the Surrender Battle of Iraq.
This is more Obama “without a teleprompter” tripe. Not only is the Russian invasion of Georgia not comparable to the UN sanctioned deposing of a Stalinist mass-murderer (an operation, moreover, where the US was accompanied by dozens of unified allies*) who had plotted to assassinate a US President; it is not comparable to Kosovo, whatever Vladimir Putin may say. Christopher Hitchens explodes that bit of Russian posturing here.
This is relevant because, if Obama’s right about setting an example for the Russians, he would pretty much have to buy into Putin’s Kosovo payback argument since that is the example Putin choose as a partial rationalization for invading Georgia.
But, Barack’s not content to be furbishing his foreign policy credentials by excusing Russian aggression because of the actions of a multi-national coalition under completely different conditions, nor is he finished when he implies that Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia is equivalent to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He’s apparently ignorant of the fact that our ally Georgia had to pull troops out of Iraq in response to the Russian invasion.
No, ignorance and insult are not enough, Obama also has to demonstrate that he’s clueless about China. He is convinced Chinese infrastructure is “vastly superior” to our own.
“Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics , Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business, you’re starting to think, ‘Beijing looks like a pretty good option.'”
Earth to Obama, China’s infrastructure is not only not superior, but it’s built on the blood of millions in a country where 120 million children suffer from malnutrition, where Christians are enslaved in factory conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, where air-pollution that’s far worse than anything in Coketown is a feature of daily life and where organs are harvested from executed prisoners without their permission.
The death penalty, by the way, is something China carries out more often than the rest of the world combined. One crime that attracts many death sentences is tax evasion. Maybe Obama is confusing the moral equivalency of China and Russia. Or maybe moral infrastructure isn’t important to him as long as the airports are painted and the trains run on time when there’s no snow.
Here’s a visual analogy for China’s superior infrastructure as set up for the Olympics. Can you say facade?
H/T The QandO Blog, where you will find a couple of other pictures worth viewing.
It does put me in mind of the substance behind Obama’s facade.
Do you remember in February that more than half-a-million people were stranded for a week in the Guangzhou Train Station? That thousands of Chinese houses collapsed from snow? Obama apparently doesn’t.
H/T Supernaut where you’ll find more pics of this event.
That picture of stranded Chinese being herded by police nicely combines the totalitarian aspects of China with a peek at actual infrastructure robustness.
At a hospital in the Buyi and Miao autonomous prefecture of Qiannan in the remote south of Guizhou, snow and sleet have cut electricity and tap water since Jan. 15. A hospital had to save power by canceling surgery to light up the emergency ward.
…The price of charcoal had climbed from eight yuan to 14 yuan a kilo…
In the central Hunan Province, one of the worst hit areas, seven people have died and snow is affecting the lives of 25.22 million people in 14 cities and 112 counties across the province.
…Heavy snow has also blanketed Diqing, a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in the southwestern Yunnan Province, starting from Jan.19. As of Sunday morning, Shangri-La had reported 35 centimeters of snow.
That’s about 13 inches. It was a 50-year occurrence natural disaster that included areas unaccustomed to heavy snow. A reasonable question then, vastly inferior infrastructure-wise: How would we cope?
Well, we have an answer: the Blizzard of ’93, the “Storm of the Century” affecting 26 states and most of eastern Canada.
Cities that usually receive little snowfall, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, received anywhere from 2 to 4 feet (1.2 m) of snow, causing some municipalities to adopt at least an emergency winter-weather plan for the future where one may not have existed before. Birmingham, Alabama, which normally receives 1-inch (25 mm) in a year, received 17 inches (430 mm) shattering the records for most snow in a single storm, a single month, and even a single season.
8 inches fell on Atlanta. 18 to 24 inches fell at the Georgia-Alabama border.
Yet, tens of thousands of North American houses didn’t fall down, hospitals weren’t rationing backup power for a month and nobody thought to mention the rising price of charcoal. That was 15 years ago, and I suspect US infrastructure has improved since. China’s seems still somewhat brittle behind the whitewash. More at NRO.
From an infrastructure standpoint let’s also consider Chinese censorship of information, particularly the Internet, and the fact they’re building a coal-fired generator every week: An infrastructure initiative anyone who believes in man-made global warming should condemn in China at least as vigorously as they do here.
The coal, by the way, is supplied by 5 million miners who are 117 times more likely to die in a mining accident than are American miners. The working conditions are
…not much better than those at the dawn of the industrial age in the 19th century.
The miners’ days are filled with degradations. They share soiled sheets and hard beds in dormitory rooms. They work without union representation for bosses they never meet. Yet theirs is also a culture of dependency. Though they rarely make more than $150 a month, they do better than peasants who work the surface of the land. If mining kills or injures a family member, the healthy need extra income to pay medical bills and support dependents.
The Daily Mail notes “Four out of every five mining-related deaths in the world are in China; ten Chinese miners die every day.”
They’re paid about $150 a month. Health care for those seriously injured is practically non-existent. Both of which circumstances Obama’s Maoist and Weather Underground terrorist friend, Bill Ayers (According to Obama a “respectable fixture of the mainstream in Chicago.”), should be required to defend on principle.
Barack Obama might want to consider where business is less likely to be disrupted by weather or state interference, and where it depends a bit less on human and environmental exploitation, before he starts urging any outsourcing to China.
*This list varies over time, but at least all of the following have supported the Iraq mission in theater:
Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Fiji, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Japan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.