A NEW CONCEPT FOR THE RIGHT-WING AND 'SOCCER-MOMS'
AS writes:
My major worry about Obama is the ghost of Jimmy Carter. Will Obama be too reflexively diplomatic?
Grrrrrr...!!!!
The real worry is that he fails to find a full-throated defense of diplomacy and "triangulates" with the blood-lust that is required by our war-culture, rather than do transformational politics. Even the military is calling for broad use of all the instruments of government. Newt Gingrich, an almost complete non-diplomat if there ever was one, has called for doubling of the State Department.
The word is that there are more lawyers at The "War Department" than diplomats at The State Department. More musicians too.
The idea that one has to apologize for diplomacy in America is a horrible defacement of the mission of State perpetrated by the Reagan Devolutionaries, now long in the tooth but hardly dispatched yet.
The Kossacks were right to laud Obama in the last round with McCain on that issue (precipitated by the Knesset fumble). The idea that one has to apologize for diplomacy in America is a horrible defacement of the mission of State perpetrated by the Reagan Devolutionaries, now long in the tooth but hardly dispatched yet.What's more, one should totally reject the notion that Carter, a Navy man, was "weak", I think. Especially with regard to Iranian hostages, Carter had the discipline to follow the strategic imperative of the situation, which was patience. All the hostages came home. (Bush-41, much criticized at the time, did not go on to Baghdad, because he had no defined, contained, military mission he could carry off. Was that weak?)
Along came Ronald Reagan, with his utterly cheap, feel-good politics. People re-imagine that the demagoguery of it all was "strong" (it certainly got political traction), but it didn't achieve much of anything, did it, except coarsen the American "We are #1" rhetoric, until it became possible to smoke that pipe to the tune of a $1 trillion dollar "war" against Saddam Hussein (and counting...).
Update: More here, from a viewpoint I agree with - a great deal, but not all, of the frustration of the Carter years was tied up with the Dem Congress...
