Obama Advisor: Winnie The Pooh Fundamental Text on National Security
Obama’s presumptive National Security Advisor gave us reason to pause today as he declared that “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr. Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he thinks that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
Somehow I doubt that our foreign policy can be so easily summarized as to compare it to a stuffed animal being dragged down the stairs, but Mr. Danzig attempts to make the comparison anyhow. What he is trying to say is that if Pooh’s head did not hurt so much from being dragged down the stairs, he would be able to think of a better way to go down the stairs, one which caused less pain. What he fails to realize is that Pooh is not being dragged down the stairs because it is the only way he knows how to get down, it is because he is at the mercy of the child who is holding onto his foot.
Being a stuffed animal unable to move his own limbs, Pooh has no choice but to allow Christopher Robin to drag him down the stairs. Had Christopher Robin never dragged him down the stairs, causing the bumping of the head in the process, Pooh would never have seen what is at the bottom of those stairs. Think back to the Apollo 1 tragedy which cost the lives of three men, the pain of losing those three men could have very easily caused our space program to be suspended indefinitely, instead we fought through the pain and two years later landed a man on the moon. Some of mankind’s greatest accomplishments have been due to our resilience to fight through the pain and continue to push forward as opposed to running away at the slightest hardship.
If however Mr. Danzig wishes to base national security on Winnie the Pooh, I would like to remind him of another quote “I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.” The simple minded thought process behind Danzig’s classification of Winnie the Pooh as the fundamental text on national security exemplifies that statement.
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The guy makes a joke–which is accurate, because if something doesn’t work, you try something else–and you rightwing blowhards pounce on it. My goodness… How about when George Bush choked on a pretzel and almost died (how I wish that pretzel had been just a centimeter bigger…)? How about when John McCain told his wife she plastered on makeup like a trollop and called her a cunt? How about Tom DeLay not having enough brain cells to recognize that Marxism entails a worker’s rebellion before attaching that label to Obama? How about Paul Bremer dismissing the Iraqi police force killing our soldiers in Iraq? How about Larry Craig soliciting sex in an airport bathroom stall? How about David Vitter getting it on with the DC Madam? How about the fact that you didn’t even know what Obama’s proposal for health care was before you condemned it and compared it, erroneously, to Canada’s single-payer system? How about George Bush saying his big sacrifice in the name of our troops was giving up golf, when he actually had continued to play it? How about John McCain saying it isn’t too important that we bring our troops home from a misguided, mismanaged, overpriced, and unnecessary war? What’s McCain said about Afghanistan and Pakistan and finding Bin Laden? That he’ll take him to the gates of hell? Besides that? Any concrete plan? Didn’t think so. But how could one expect a concrete plan from a man who said Iran was training Al Qaeda and doesn’t even know the difference between Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurd… How could one expect a man who said the Taliban are headquartered in Waziristan when they’re about five hundred miles away in Quetta?
But no… let’s pounce on a statement that is essentially true and logical–that if something isn’t producing results, you try a different approach–instead of focusing on the issues. The fact of the matter is this strategy of preemption and this foreign policy of bluster and bravado isn’t producing any results… Insanity, Einstein said, is tantamount to doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Ours is a foreign policy of insanity. Why not try some pragmatism?
Hey “p”: how about posting a comment that’s on topic, instead of leftist rhetoric, hearsay, and outright lies?