Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Check this out and then see if you think the best way to send a message to the muddle-headed spendthifts on Capitol Hill is to just stay home in November. Remember, our choices ain’t between perfect and awful, rather between having-the-potential-to-operate-according-to-sound-economic-and-national-security-principles and, well, the disaster depicted in this piece.
You may have noticed there have been a lot more national-security posts than, say, jazz-guitar posts or culture posts lately. It’s just that it’s right there in my face. Yours, too.
Here you go: the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the magnitude of the Iranian threat.
1.) Even with the Italian offer of 2,000 troops, the UN can’t get a sufficient “peacekeeping force” in place in southern Lebanon.
2.) Iran’s long-awaited response to the incentives package is “We’ll talk some more, but we’re going ahead with uranium enrichment.”
3.) North Korea says it may strike preemptively since it sees the current joint US-South Korean military exercises as an act of war.
Western civilization better produce some human beings with brains, heart, guts and steady nerves of a magnitude we’ve not yet seen. There are some good people on the case, but so far nobody’s come forth with a true solution to any or all of this.
I think I remember reading some time back in one of his blog posts that Dean Barnett has had cystic fibrosis for his whole life, but he joltingly reminded me of it in a guest post on Hugh Hewitt’s blog today. Without fishing for pity at all, he brings it up to say it has equipped him to stare into the abyss, which is what the whole Western world is doing now. One of those upside-the-head pieces we’re seeing more frequently as the events of World War III swirl with ever-greater momentum.
We can at least be thankful that the White House via Tony Snow jumped right on that Detroit based federal judge’s striking down of warrantless wiretaps. Jeez, after a week of stuff like the foiled London plot and the Dearborn guys with the car full of cell phones, maps and airline schedules, what kind of idiots still see a perfectly legitimate and catastrophe-averting program as an “abuse of power?” The ACLU and activist federal judges, that’s what kind.
This post isn’t rich with links or quotes. So much of what it is, in its essence, about, is being reported, reflected upon and analyzed all over the web. Any of the national-security links over on the right side of this page will get you to some cogent insights that get my amen.
I’d just say that it feels awfully late in the game. I’ve spent the weekend wondering why Condi Rice drank the Kool-Aid and went for that resolution. John Bolton looked none too comfortable making his way across the room behind her. When you consider that Secretary Rice signed off on partnering with France in the crafting of it, that the Security Council passed it overwhelmingly, that Israel acquiesced to it (although Israeli press across the responsible spectrum understands it to be a bad thing), and that much crowing over Israel’s defeat is now coming out of the Arab/Muslim world, you have to scratch your head. I think what happened was that Dr. Rice – and I guess W himself – started taking seriously this notion of an “international community.” Bad move. There’s really no such thing, but there are power-mad and evil people who would use the concept to anesthetize the real world of nation-states and decent human beings. Alas, now it’s a done deal, and the weakening of the West accelerates because of it. Everybody from the Dearborn, Michigan guys with the keen interest in cell-phone chips to the British guys who were days away from knocking ten planes out of the sky over the course of a day to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cryptic references to August 22 feels emboldened.
Meanwhile, one of the two major political parties in the most powerful, prosperous, free, culturally robust and God-inclined nation on Earth has demonstrated, with the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary, that it has absolutely no understanding of the nature of these times, the deadly stakes in this current situation.
As I say, my take is that it’s awfully late in the game. The West’s will to survive may not be commensurate with what’s ahead in the very near future.
I hate like the devil to concede that E.J. Dionne has a point about anything, but he does in this piece when he says that Republicans look like crass opportunists tacking a yay-for-death-tax-cuts provision onto a minimum-wage hike bill so as to either be able to squelch the wage hike or get their tax cut through. That’s his only valid point, though. (His most unrealistic point is saying that the episode signals the end of the American right.) There’s nothing wrong (and everything right) about scaling back (how about repealing?) the death tax, regardless of the wealthiness of anyone affected, and there’s nothing right about the minimum wage.
The upshot of all this is that the ostensibly conservative GOP wouldn’t find itself the recipient of grim prognoses from the likes of Mr. Dionne if it could rise above the sometimes-in-Washington-you-have-to-make-Faustian-bargains mentality. I, for one, would feel better about the act of voting than I’ve felt the last gazillion times I’ve been in my precinct booth, if I could press the button for someone with the guts to say, “The minimum wage is bad economics, degrading to those it supposedly benefits and is nothing more than the feigned pity of power-mad socialists.”
