Warrantless
wire-tapping, tort reform, real ID, groveling to the bankers and the
Israel lobby and so forth. K St loves Obama. So do the defense
contractors.
So what
happened to the Bush/Cheney pre-election attack on Iran? It’s like
everything else. You think you have months. You put it on one side, in
the “things to be done tomorrow” pile. Suddenly it’s a matter of weeks,
then days. Then the moment just slips away. The father of one of my
neighbors here in Petrolia had been a captain in the Wehrmacht and
fought at the siege of Leningrad. He’s dead now but a few years ago my
brother Andrew once asked him, “Captain, what happened at Leningrad?”
“Vell, Andrew, the Fuehrer wanted to avoid casualties. Und then the
equipment was running out. A tank here, a tank there. Und then..then it
was too late!”
NOTE: It is hard to believe that
contemporary American college students are more eager to be cut up, shot, and
killed in 2009 than they were in Johnson's Vietnam.
If a President Obama has a foreign
policy initiative that makes Bush's international interventions look tiny, it
would require a massive army and navy which would require a draft of
unprecedented proportions with a correspondingly great outburst of protest. -- Resisting Defamation
So don’t write off that attack on Iran quite yet. On Iran Obama is more hawkish than McCain; on Afghanistan and Pakistan too.
"I've
forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know,"
Biden says. It’s probably true. In the US Congress the bar is set very
low. I remember in the debate with Sarah Palin Biden was praised in the
press for his effortless mastery of detail. Jonah Goldberg wrote a
funny piece in the Los Angeles Times about this chorus of approval for
Biden’s knowledgeable aplomb:
Biden was at ease; he easily rattled off a string of falsehoods and gasbaggeries.
According
to the master senator, the U.S. and France "kicked Hezbollah out of
Lebanon." Afterward, according to Biden, "I said and Barack said, 'Move
NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if
you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' " Perhaps Biden meant to say the
U.S. and France kicked Syria out of Lebanon. But even this is woefully
glib. Syria never fully abandoned Lebanon. And there was no "vacuum"
for Hezbollah to fill. The terrorist group was already firmly in
control of southern Lebanon and part of the government. No one
remembers Biden and Obama fighting for the stupidly impossible NATO
move either….
The
constitutional law professor scornfully mocked Dick Cheney because the
vice president "doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution
defines the role of the vice president. That's the executive branch."
Wrong. Article I defines the Legislature, Article II the executive
branch. Both define the role of the VP.
The scrapper from Scranton boasted about bonding with the common folks at a restaurant that's been closed for two decades.
Warrantless
wire-tapping, tort reform, real ID, groveling to the bankers and the
Israel lobby and so forth. K St loves Obama. So do the defense
contractors.