O The Third World

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com President Obama responded yesterday to former Vice President Cheney's claim that he doesn't consider the fight against terrorism to be a war by quoting from his inaugural address. "On that day," Obama reminded us, "I made it very clear that our naton is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred, and that we will do whatever it takes to defeat them, and make no mistake that's exactly what we've been doing." So there you have it: if Obama's rhetoric has, at one time or another, employed the word "war" in connection with words having some relationship to terrorism, then he must be waging war on terrorism. Immanuel Kant posited a noumenal world and a phenomenal world -- the latter consisting of what appears to the senses; the latter consisting of "things in themselves." For Obama, there is a third a world -- call it the oratorical world -- consisting of the world as Obama has described it in speeches.