Obama the globalist
Never mind his identity and father issues: this matters, explains Daniel Larison. Say hello to ‘dignity promotion’. At least it doesn’t pretend to be conservative:

Usually, at least outside the Bush administration and its supporters, policies that involve violating allied states’ sovereignty and risking their internal destabilisation are considered unwise — not so with Team Obama.

Well, it’s pretty “graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity” to full-throatedly support the bombardment of a country, Lebanon, when the campaign kills 1,000 civilians and displaces a million more, putting hundreds of thousands into refugee camps for months and years afterwards, but that is what Obama did during the summer of 2006. His appreciation for human dignity is truly overwhelming.

Those who continually come back to his position on Iraq seem satisfied that Obama reached the right conclusion without concerning themselves very much with how he reaches conclusions and makes decisions. Taking the longer view, his assumptions about America’s role in the world are more significant than his view on any particular policy. Basic assumptions are more valuable for understanding what a politician is likely to do in a crisis than how he has responded to any one particular policy or event.

This is a lefty hawk not a peace candidate.

The “mindset” behind the Iraq war is the mindset that says the following: state sovereignty is irrelevant when Washington says it is, international law exists to be used as a justification for our policies and a bludgeon against other countries, and civilian populations of states that supposedly or actually harbour or support terrorists are essentially expendable. In his comments on Pakistan and his vote on the war in Lebanon, Obama has not only failed to repudiate this mindset, but has demonstrated his fidelity to it on occasion.

Conservative endorsement either active or passive is evidence...

of how awful the GOP has become. It is so deeply distrusted, so loathed, by a significant number of conservatives that even a Democrat whom they know to be on the far left and in disagreement with them on almost everything has a better chance of winning their vote than the Republican standard-bearer.

I cheerfully admit he’s the best of the three real contenders but that’s very relative.

Worth a honk but not a vote.