It Could Go Either Way, I Suppose

I remain conflicted about President Obama's speech to the "Islamic world." Based on the speech alone, what it signals could be good or bad.

Is it basically the Bush agenda but with an audience here and abroad disposed to believe it is now good, hanging on to mere rhetorical changes to argue it is really different from Bush?

Or is it more of the long retreat from defending ourselves from violent Islamists, by refusing to confront the evil spawned from within Islam that threatens us all--even other Moslems?

I guess I don't mistrust the president enough to say he's signalling full retreat mode. But I don't trust him nearly enough to believe that we will wage the Long War.

I worry, however, just based on the president's generous exaggerations of Islamic accomplishments in the speech--which even if true begs the question of what went wrong with the Islamic world in the half millennium since the Islamic world could even claim to be on the vanguard of anything but car bomb fabrication.

I remain convinced that foreign policy is a distraction for our president, who really wishes to transform our domestic policy and economy far to the left.

Does waging war or retreating provide less of a distraction from domestic priorities over the next four years?