Barack Obama's Moral Cowardice

I shouldn't be amazed, but I can't help it.

The left's extreme reaction to John McCain has gotten to the point of calling him a coward.

For some time, I thought Andrew Sullivan had taken the cake for the most unhinged Obama backer on the left, but frankly, Josh Marshall - now attacking Senator John McCain for "moral cowardice" - has gone so far overboard in the unscrupulous sea of nihilism that authorities are calling off the search:

The image is coming into focus. Even McCain's confidants are now suggesting that it was his anger and frustration with Obama that led him to embrace Steve Schmidt's Willie Horton-on-Steroids campaign for the White House. And whether it's the appearance before the Des Moines Register Editorial board or his tense refusal to make eye contact during the first presidential debate, I don't think many people would deny at this point that McCain's hostility and contempt for Obama -- what even Wolf Blitzer calls his "disdain" -- is palpable.

After the first debate many people wondered aloud whether it was hostility and contempt or fear and intimidation that kept McCain from looking Obama in the face even once. But with two weeks and more evidence to consider, it is clear that it was both: Hostility that is magnified by the person's mortifying inability to face the person who inspires it. That's the kind of unchanneled, clogged up anger that makes you unsteady, that makes you make mistakes.

McCain's moral cowardice has been one of the subtexts of this campaign ever since he wound up the nomination and turned his attention to Barack Obama. But I did not realize it would reveal itself in such a physical dimension.

Notice, first, how genuinely dumb this is: Either McCain disdains Obama (whereby the emotional reflex would be an urge to punch the Chicago socialist) or he's afraid of him.

Marshall can't get his attacks straight: All along McCain's been allegedly contemptuous of Obama (and thus elitist) and now he's morally challenged?

The truth is, Barack Obama's the one suffering from moral cowardice.

Note the most recent example, via Jeff Jacoby: The Illinois Senator made an about-face on genocide and U.S. foreign policy in Tuesday night's debate:

Moderator Tom Brokaw asked the candidates what their "doctrine" would be "in situations where there's a humanitarian crisis, but it does not affect our national security," such as "the Congo, where 4.5 million people have died since 1998," or Rwanda or Somalia.

In such cases, answered Obama, "we have moral issues at stake." Of course the United States must act to stop genocide, he said. "When genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening . . . and we stand idly by, that diminishes us."

But that wasn't how Obama sounded last year, when he was competing for the Democratic nomination and was unbending in his demand for an American retreat from Iraq. Back then, he dismissed fears that a US withdrawal would unleash a massive Iraqi bloodbath. "Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep US forces there," the AP reported on July 20, 2007 (my italics).

What kind of candidate is it whose moral response to genocide - genocide - can reverse itself 180 degrees in a matter of months? Is that the kind of candidate who ought to be the leader of the free world?

John McCain is truly the last person whom radical leftists want to call a moral coward. Barack Obama - the candidate of appeasement and retreat - has already got the market cornered on that one.

But Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, and untold other extremists of the leftosphere, are steadily building up enough capital for a leveraged buyout of the top Democrat's moral depravity.