"The picture emerging from the White House is a disturbing one, of timidity, clumsiness and short-term calculation. Some say he is the weakest president since Jimmy Carter." Ach, so?
His motivating principle seems rooted in an analysis, common in his formative university years, that America has too often been on the side of the bad guys. The response has been to disrespect those who have been our friends and to bow to our enemies. What else? C'mon, Rot, you want obvious responses? That's too boring.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
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More laments: Reversing the damage of all this may prove the work of decades. "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend," said William Blake. America is burning through its supply of post-World War II goodwill at an unsustainable rate.
Under the bus: I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives.
Conclusion: Right. Gitmo is going to close real soon -- and at no risk to national security -- just after Obama brings peace to the Middle East, adds 40 million uninsured to the system for not a penny more than you're paying today, talks the North Koreans and Iranians into abandoning the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and wins the war in Afghanistan after tying General McChrystal's hands behind his back.
VDH worries.
Barone:
The influential blogger Mickey Kaus argues that "anti-Obama anger" is caused not by his race, but "because he's a relative newcomer, as presidents go -- an unknown quantity, an enigma, with a short track record and patches of that record left fuzzy."
But on foreign policy as his record emerges -- as he reverses himself on missile defense and perhaps on Afghanistan -- his motivating principle seems rooted in an analysis, common in his formative university years, that America has too often been on the side of the bad guys. The response has been to disrespect those who have been our friends and to bow to our enemies.
A powerful answer to a smart Kaus. I should point out that Kaus was trying to explain the vehemence to Obama's "policies" not their Lagrangean, but Barone does write down a good Lagrangean.
The flowering of the Nuclear Freeze movement, Tecs.
You should have known and now you try to commandeer my label...making it your own, so I can't use it against you.
You know that I can be a tenacious sort, though...
Tecs, your pills! Hit that first link about William Blake.
Hey, Mr Rot, you woke up after a Stiegl slumber? I didn't get you Lagrangean allegory (are you talking about the French calendar?), but I did get what Kraut is saying:
But the alarming part is what he said in the same paragraph where he said that it makes no sense anymore "the alignments of nations that are rooted in the cleavages of the Cold War."
Well, NATO is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. The European Union is rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War. Our alliances with Japan and Korea and the Philippines, our guarantees to Taiwan and Eastern Europe are all rooted in the cleavage of the Cold War.
So he is saying that is all now irrelevant. What does he think our allies are going to think who hear this?
Ululululululu?
Kraut is wonderful.
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