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An Obama Win Will Be More Than Historic

By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Thursday, October 30, 2008 4:30 PM PT

Some elections are routine, some are important and some are historic. If
Sen. John McCain wins this election, it will probably go down in history as
routine. But if Sen. Barack Obama wins, it is more likely to be historic --
and catastrophic.

Once the election is over, the glittering generalities of rhetoric and
style will mean nothing. Everything will depend on performance in facing
huge challenges, domestic and foreign.

Performance is where Barack Obama has nothing to show for his political
career, either in Illinois or in Washington.

Policies that he proposes under the banner of "change" are almost
all policies that have been tried repeatedly in other countries -- and
failed repeatedly in other countries.

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? That's been tried in
countries around the world, especially during the second half of the 20th
century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist and
communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of the
century.

The economies of China and India began their takeoff into high rates of
growth when they got rid of precisely the kinds of policies that Obama is
advocating for the U.S. under the magic mantra of "change."

Putting restrictions on international trade in order to save jobs at home?
That was tried here with the Hawley-Smoot tariff during the Great
Depression.

Unemployment was 9% when that tariff was passed to save jobs, but
unemployment went up instead of down, and reached 25% before the decade was
over.

Higher taxes to "spread the wealth around," as Obama puts it? The
idea of redistributing wealth has turned into the reality of redistributing
poverty, in countries where wealth has fled and the production of new
wealth has been stifled by a lack of incentives.

Economic disasters, however, may pale by comparison with the catastrophe of
Iran with nuclear weapons. Glib rhetoric about Iran being "a small
country," as Obama called it, will be a bitter irony for Americans who
will have to live in the shadow of a nuclear threat that cannot be
deterred, as that of the Soviet Union could be, by the threat of a nuclear
counterattack.

Suicidal fanatics cannot be deterred. If they are willing to die and we are
not, then we are at their mercy -- and they have no mercy.

Moreover, once they get nuclear weapons, that is a situation which cannot
be reversed, either in this generation or in generations to come.

Is this the legacy we wish to leave our children and grandchildren, by
voting on the basis of style and symbolism, rather than substance?

If Barack Obama thinks that such a catastrophe can be avoided by sitting
down and talking with the leaders of Iran, then he is repeating a fallacy
that helped bring on World War II.

In a nuclear age, one country does not have to send troops to occupy
another country in order to conquer it. A country is conquered if another
country can dictate who rules it, as the Mongols once did with Russia, and
as Osama bin Laden tried to do when he threatened retaliation against
places in the United States that voted for George W. Bush. But he didn't
have nuclear weapons to back up that threat -- yet.

America has never been a conquered country, so it may be very hard for most
Americans even to conceive what that can mean. After France was conquered
in 1940, it was reduced to turning over some of its own innocent citizens
to the Nazis to kill, just because those citizens were Jewish.

Do you think our leaders wouldn't do that? Not even if the alternative was
to see New York and Los Angeles go up in mushroom clouds? If I were Jewish,
I wouldn't bet my life on that.

What the Middle East fanatics want is not just our resources or even our
lives, but our humiliation first, in whatever sadistic ways they can think
of. Their lust for humiliation has already been repeatedly demonstrated in
their videotaped beheadings that find such an eager market in the Middle
East.

None of this can be prevented by glib talk, but only by character, courage
and decisive actions -- none of which Barack Obama has ever demonstrated.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

-- 
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools." --Herbert Spencer

"The republican is the only form of government which is not
eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."
-- Thomas Jefferson

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