Disconcerting stuff. We face real enemies abroad, and it is dangerous folly to turn our attention inward to attack (and endlessly counter-attack) "enemies" here at home.
But this is characteristic of an administration whose focus seems eternally inward, resulting in an involuted, post-modern mess of a foreign/domestic policy. Obama's focus is all-but exclusively on the domestic, on the striving to re-make American society. All other priorities are seen as secondary, since there appears to be a sincere belief that a "properly" re-made America will fare very differently on the world stage.
Well, that much at least is true. But the changes which appear to be afoot do not bode well for allowing the luxury of extensive and expensive societal re-tooling. If nothing else (and there's *plenty* of "else!"), the geopolitical correlates of our gargantuan debt to China constitute a powerful lever on the course of our interests (e.g., how hard to push the PRC over sanctions on Iran...).
The choice of Classical columns for Obama's inauguration may have been more apt than I'd thought. Nero spends his political capital on a Stradivarius.
UPDATE: By the way, here's the text of that speech by Cheney to which Gibbsy chose to make his characteristically snide, waspish, and content-free retort. It is truly superb, and underscores the calamitous injustice which is routinely done to the caliber of leadership we'd had during the opening years of the Long War.
UPDATE 2: Well, good to see that Joe Biden is on hand to offer a trenchant and substantial response to Cheney's very specific criticisms. I believe he later added "Oh yeah?!"
No comments:
Post a Comment