Things are looking up since last I had a moment to surface and jot a few cogitations, before scurrying back into my underground lair. Marine Corporal Hassoun has been, ah, released, or found, or turned up safe at any rate, and is on his way back to the US. And, *yawn* the most damning news we've heard from Iraq lately was that we were wrong about Saddam having WMD.
Ho-hum. That whole argument has become so old as to be barely worth rebutting, especially since I rather doubt most of its proponents really believe it or care about it with much conviction. Most who gleefully celebrate the absence heretofore of really big caches of WMD are likely less concerned with the specifics of the matter and more so with sticking a rhetorical finger into our President's eye.
Saddam is a bad man and we're better off with him out of power. Enough said. Those who petulantly and sophomorically claim that we are no safer with him in prison than we were with him in power can't seriously give a fig about the war on terror, as they have been clearly blinded by their spittle-flying hatred of George Bush. Those who want to parse legalistic niceties about whether WMD was our primary reason for going, or just our alleged primary reason for going, while disregarding any grownup principles of national security, are probably glad that an experienced ambulance chasing trial lawyer is standing for vice president on the democratic ticket.
With the exception of the recent pussilanimy of the Phillipinos, whose early withdrawl of its 51 peacekeepers has no practical affect other than to encourage al Queda and cause John Kerry to run his mouth still further, matters in Iraq are actually proceeding rather well. They might start to proceed even better if France and NATO at least became uninvolved onlookers instead of active obstructionists. Which reminds me of a grand thought experiment which occurred to me:
George Bush should appoint John Kerry as the head of a bipartisan Senatorial delegation to NATO to request the alliance provide all the troops they clearly would be providing, were it not for George Bush having forgotten Chirac's Mickey Mouse Club secret handshake. Kerry still presses this issue, lately saying that we need from our allies "not resolutions, not words, but real support of sufficient personnel, troops and money to assist in the training of security forces." Since Kerry clearly has the inside track with Chirac and can speak la francais to boot, he should be assigned the task of getting "sufficient troops" from NATO: say, perhaps, 10000 men from the members of NATO who aren't already members of our "fraudulent coalition?" If that's too easy, 20000 would be nice too. What do you say, mon cher senateur? Non?
So what does Edwards bring to the table anyway? He's pretty and he touches Big John quite a lot, which gets kind of unnerving to watch after a while, though these are the only specifically identifyable benefits which Big John gets from having Little John around. But my guess is that there's a reason, possibly even a good one, that even hardcore democrats didn't vote for him in the primaries. If they didn't like him then, I fail to see how he really brings much to the ticket, touching notwithstanding; the comparisons bounding of Kerry/Edwards to Mondale/Ferarro seem amusingly apt, now that the Veep portion of the ticket is occupied by a young and comically inexperienced liberal.
But I keep having this haunting notion that if, on the eve of the election, Bush holds more than (say) a five-point lead, Kerry will pull a Bob Toricelli on the nation and sorrowfully announce that he feels he must withdraw because of the Republican's shameful dirty politics and character attack machine, etc, and he will make such a sacrifice because he considers it his duty to America to stand aside so that someone can beat Bush, whose losing is far more important to the nation than any man's winning, etc, and much much more along those lines. I believe the democrats since 2000 have become kind of eerily desparate, using quasi-legal and extralegal tactics such as the Florida Supreme Court debacle and the New Jersey Supreme Court atrocity--all in the name of some vague notion of fairness, with no regard whatever for the law. Recall that the state of being a nation under the rule of law, not of men, is supposed to indicate a reasonably advanced civilization.
All this is by way of apology for having written so little lately; I recently picked up a copy of Ron Chernow's outstanding biography of Alexander Hamilton, and also a five-CD set of collected Ronald Reagan speeches, so I've been kind of absorbed of late. I'm trying to fit all these little pieces together into some grand treatise which makes sense of both the whole states-vs-federal government debate, and modern corollaries to the Cold War in the war on terror. And how I can consider both Alexander Hamilton and Ronald Reagan to be two of the most essential Americans ever, and whose influences were so uniformly salutary. At least that's how it stands at this point in my reading; check back tomorrow and see if I've learned anything which changes my mind!
Posted by JKS at July 14, 2004 06:55 AM