OK, I’m not. In my last foray east of the Elbe, I hoped/opined that Vladimir Putin’s muscle-flexing re “break-away” Ukraine was just that. Little did I know that Vlad would pull a Bush (or an Obama) and decide that war is fun. Like them both, he’s discovered that the ultima ratio regnum1 is chockfull of…
Tag: Barack Obama
Mealy-mouthed diplomacy and vain posturing are not seldom the truest wisdom in politics
We can only hope that both Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin could be so smart. One can wish the two had a dialogue more or less as follows: Putin: What’s the idea of engineering the overthrow of a democratically elected government? I thought you were like pro-democracy! Obama: I have all these idealists to satisfy….
Vote for the Would-Be Murderer, not the Murderer?
Well, it’s a theory. As Glenn Greenwald points out, President Obama has fair claim to be absolutely the worst civil liberties President the U.S.A. has ever seen. The odds are, Romney would be better! That’s a valid inference, even if we simply consider the election a random draw. But, wait, there’s more!—the old “Nixon goes…
Vote for the Murderer, not the Would-Be Murderer
That’s my advice if you live in a swing state. Living in DC, with Libertarian Gary Johnson on the ballot, I have the luxury of making a protest vote. I’m not into libertarian economics, but Johnson’s foreign policy views are more than a breath of fresh air. DC will go so heavily for Obama that…
Ross Douthat’s Aura of Deceit
Ross Douthat has a posting, here, titled Obama’s Aura of Defeat. According to Ross, Obama’s campaign is sucking wind: Losing campaigns have a certain feel to them: They go negative hard, try out new messaging very late in the game, hype issues that only their core supporters are focused on, and try to turn non-gaffes…
Barack Obama: The Smell of Failure
There are a couple of interesting write-ups on the web interviewing a couple of well-known, undecided, unrelated voters—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, and 24-year-old pre-k teacher and “wage gap” questioner Katherine Fenton. What’s particularly interesting is that both these intelligent, well-informed people 1) don’t really know very much about politics and 2) though…
President Obama: Bumbling murderer
You’d think that a man who spends each Tuesday wondering who he’s going to kill next wouldn’t have much patience with the man who wants to take his job. But President Obama apparently had too much on his plate to bother showing up for the debate last night. Or maybe he had so much fun…
Yeah, that’s the problem. What’s the solution?
A couple of days ago I ran a brief riff on It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a brief book by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein whose basic premise is that right-wing Republicans are fucking up America, a premise with which I largely agree. As is so often the case, Mann and Ornstein are stronger…
Mitt Romney, the Republican Obama?
Only Nixon could go to China. Only Reagan could end the Cold War. Only Clinton could tame discretionary spending and reform welfare. And only Obama could tame entitlements. Okay, that last one didn’t work out so well. Of course, 95 to 99% of the reason why is that the Republicans didn’t want it to happen….
The Way of the Warrior
A couple of weeks ago, the war historian Max Hastings, whom I would call excellent if not eminent, had an interesting piece in the Daily Mail* on the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands “War,” that near-comic opera dispute—near-comic opera if you can get past the thousands of casualties, and 900 dead—between Great Britain and Argentina…