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All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity. President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying. The New York Times editorial board chooses the not-quite-successful-yet six-month effort to kill Muammar Gaddafi or chase him out of Libya as an occasion to scold our NATO friends; Barack Obama runs recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan through the scrubber; David Ignatius gives Tom Friedman a run for the money. In an editorial entitled “NATO’s Teachable Moment“, the Times editors decry the degree to which the UK and France had to rely on the US to fill gaps in the NATO supply of munitions and accessories such as AWACs (Airborne Warning And Control System) aircraft during the six-month campaign against Libya. It is evidence, they say, that those countries are overly and unfairly reliant on the US war machine. They also resurrect former US secretary of war Bob Gates’s hilarious warning that NATO countries “risked becoming militarily irrelevant unless they stepped up investment in their forces and equipment.” To Gates and the editorial board, that’s a shameful future. But I ask you: could there possibly be any more cheerful fate in this day and age than to become militarily irrelevant? Yesterday I wrote this somewhat carefully considered thing about how Obama’s reelection prospects aren’t as bad as a lot of people think because he’ll have many boatloads of money and the only official GOP candidates who aren’t too obviously insane to win in the general election are saddled with a Mormon problem that will probably doom them in the primaries. That could change, but so far none of the Republicans who don’t have those problems seem to think they can win, so they’re not running. What never occurred to me is that Obama might run on his record; I just assumed he would run a two-pronged effort to paint Republicans as the slavering sociopaths they are while he proposes popular legislation that he can’t and probably doesn’t want to get passed. I forget that some people still take him seriously, and that presumably he and his staff do as well. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” Max Boot is my favorite neoconservative. He is completely unfamiliar with the concept of shame and like the rest of his clan he won’t ever flinch when it comes time to put somebody else’s life on the line. Anyone whose conscience survives initiation into that club soon gets voted out. Where Max really shines is as a polemicist. He’s a good writer. He can turn a juicy phrase like few others. That one above, his juiciest ever—and I know writers, I know he looked at it and thought to himself, “damn, I am good …”—went into a piece he wrote for the Weekly Standard not long after September 11. The majority reaction to bin Laden’s demise from people on the for want of a better word progressive email list of which I’m a member included some or all of the following. Obama’s reelection is now assured. Democrats can finally put paid to the “soft on defense” canard. Mission Accomplished! Fuck you, Donald Trump! . . . → Read More: News from the lunatic center: All the wars are still under warranty Evidence mounts that life is directed by Christopher Nolan. The New York Times is among a number of sources addressing the Obama administration’s supposedly recent decision to distance themselves from the lame duck president’s 2011 deadline to make plans to talk about a potential timeline for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan. Here’s Elisabeth Bumiller. . . . → Read More: We are shocked—shocked!—about Obama and Afghanistan, plus: Ghandi! While I’ve already addressed the Obama trip to India, and related items, I did not do so in British. For that, we turn to the Robot Pundits and their news and political analysis show, Beside The Point. They’re smarter! . . . . → Read More: Robot Pundits on the Obama excursion The United States is slightly less corrupt than France, exactly so as Belgium and more so than Barbados, Qatar and 19 other countries. This according to Transparency International, a shadowy group which is sort of like the Illuminati of transparency—I was going to say the Trilateral Commission but that organization now have a web . . . → Read More: America! We’re Number … Twenty-something. But we beat France! The shadowy, demonic organization known as WikiLeaks, until the past few days most famous for releasing tens of thousands of Pentagon documents reaffirming the degree to which the US adventure in Afghanistan was, is and will continue to be well and truly fucked, is now in the news for not releasing an even larger . . . → Read More: Anti-WikiLeaks clown car gets crowded, plus the World Bank and more When the military figured out the occupation of Iraq was bound to be long and bloody, they began looking for ways to bolster recruiting efforts that were beginning to flag because many potential recruits were beginning to realize that between Iraq and Afghanistan, the odds of serving in a combat zone were really, really . . . → Read More: Army sings the blues, or at least the “Too Fat Polka” |
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