The news that Gilbert Arenas and his fellow Washington Wizards pulled guns on each other in the locker room has me renouncing the NBA. The gunplay merely confirms what the tattoo epidemic has indicated for years now...the NBA has degenerated into a bunch of overpaid, talent-deficient thugs.
The senseless hubris that is at the heart of the federal government's problems for the last five decades, distilled into a single quote...
"We cannot limit ourselves to one objective at a time. We, like Caesar, have all things to do at once."
-McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor, May 1965
Don't think for a minute that the mentality has changed it all since Bundy put it out on the table.
My mordant musings have given birth to the following proposition: at the core of ideological intensity is an attempted transfer of angst by an unhappy individual to the rest of us. Regardless of whether the in-your-face fanaticism comes at you from The Left or The Right, the insistence that you embrace the same apocalyptic perspective (Obama is Stalin, Dubya is Hitler, global warming is destroying us all, we must ban the Victoria Secrets' Catalog to preserve the virtue of the youts, etc.) is really a function of an individual's personal angst, cloaked in the guise of a public cause and ostensible idealism. More simply expressed, ideological intensity is a form of emotional aggression against the rest of us, an effort to Jedi-mind trick a largely contented majority to become as agitated about an issue as the angst-ridden individual. George Will once tartly observed that, "some people only feel half alive if they aren't consistently indignant about an issue." I would put it less eloquently: you're extremely unhappy about something in your own life, so you latch onto an issue and get in my face to convince me that this issue is a crisis in my life that necessitates me doing exactly what you say...otherwise, I'm a morally deformed person. Political conversation becomes an attempted emotional mugging, replete with tiresome guilt trips and threadbare, but shrill End-of-Days rhetoric. The conservative stance in such a situation is to politely fend off the emotional aggression and recognize the kernel of personal derangement that fuels the onslaught of angst.
Unless you're like me, and you're tired of being humoring the deranged bullying boor. Then you just get curt. An arsenal of possible responses in such a situation...
"Um no, studies DON'T show that."
"I don't believe that."
"Not true."
Or you can just back away slowly...
I don't want to see another president get in front of a microphone to speak to anybody without a necktie. Period. I am as sick of the open necked shirt on presidents as I am of tattoos on NBA players. A politician who attempts to communicate me without a necktie is unworthy of my respect, much less my vote.
On a related note, why did anybody let Janet Napolitano get on TV in a leather jacket and a turtleneck like she strolled in from a guest shot on "Cagney and Lacey." It was totally impossible to take anything she said seriously.
You want the power, wear the power suit.
I've wracked my brain trying to think of the president who started the open shirt casual look...I want to blame it on Carter. Him and his damn sweater, telling us to turn off the thermostat.
The now-infamous Flight #253 demonstrates that as a nation we have come full circle since 9/11. Eight years after absurdly lax airline security and an obscenely porous student visa program cost thousands of Americans their lives, we have achieved absolutely nothing in the way of improved safety for the country. After two invasions, tens of thousands of casualties, the expenditure of a trillion dollars, the erection of massive federal bureaucracies, the enactment of The Patriot Act, and a whole lot of hyper-patriotic chest-thumping, we are in the exact same place that we were on September 10, 2001...relying upon the exertions and efforts of the paying customers aboard the plane...
Having placed myself on a perpetual no-fly list, I can now plainly see that for all the derision that he endured, John Madden's aversion to airline flight was always just good sense.
Back in the early 1990s, Bill Clinton asserted that the nation's overall security was inextricably intertwined with the condition of its economy. His contention had a nice rhetorical ring to it, and seemed relatively plausible in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the towering ironies of the past decade however, would appear to be the operational refutation of that thesis. America has never been so insolvent, and yet its global grandiloquence has never been more immense. Bankrolled by a bitter, but helpless People's Republic of China (another towering irony...the geopolitical ambitions of the world's mightiest democracy being underwritten by the last great Communist country), the U.S. strides forth as the planet's policeman and social worker.
It would seem that Clinton was wrong, that a great imperial power can cast fiscal sense to the winds and pursue a utopian agenda indefinitely, that the laws of economic gravity have been suspended, and that a Pax Americana need not be buttressed by sturdy finances at home...
It will be the single greatest test of the notion of American exceptionalism, far beyond anything that Winthrop or Wilson could have conceived...
There was a lot wrong with Alabama governor George C. Wallace, but he hit upon an infuriating and depressing truth when he famously declared that there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference," between the two major political parties in this country. Any reasonably objective observer of the GOP and the Democrats would be forced to conclude that it is largely rhetoric and symbolism that distinguishes the two parties from one another. When in power, they're operationally identical. Wallace uttered his immortal analysis over four decades ago, and subsequent administrations have merely reinforced the powerful truth of his words.
Take health care, for openers. At the moment, the G.O.P. is uniformly and righteously opposed to the indigestible Democratic mess winding its way through the bowels of Congress. Congressional Republicans decry the various forms of chicanery and vote-renting deployed by the Dems to propel their unworkable and unaffordable health care utopianism to the Oval Office desk where Obamanon's pen awaits. The Grand Old Party is rightfully vehement in its castigation of this legislative abomination.
Yet they are also bloody hypocrites. They choose to forget that they played the EXACT same legislative games in order to inflict a similar fiscal ruin on The Republic back in 2003, with the prescription drug bill. When THEY controlled the White House AND both houses of Congress, they blasted long-term holes in the nation's balance sheet with legislation that they knew was fiscally catastrophic and philosophically anathema, all so they could peel off the votes of the elderly in 2004. Their professions of limited government and budgetary prudence were fully exposed as pure rhetoric. Six years later, they stand bereft of moral credibility or philosophical credibility when they deplore Democratic health care bills done in the name of Obamanon.
Further proof of the overall pointlessness of devout partisan affiliation can be found in the field of foreign affairs. Democrats lambasted Dubya and the GOP tribe for eight years, rightfully assailing his senseless war in Mess-o-potamia and his romantic desire to export democracy to benighted corners of Central Asia. Yet no sooner do they retake the reins of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, then they double down on a debacle in the Graveyard of Empires, pouring tens of thousands of troops into the historically proven futility of nation-building. Evidently both parties are allergic to the common sense policy of non-interventionism, relentlessly choosing to ignore the mountains of evidence demonstrating the wisdom of non-interventionism (namely, mountains of American bodybags) in favor of utopian nation-building adventurism.
The voter who stoutly prefers fiscal and military restraint is without a plausible partisan alternative. The option put forth by George Wallace some forty-one years ago was manifestly unappealing. However, a third party is sorely needed, a political party based on caution, common sense, and a sense of limits.
If you start them, FINISH THEM!!!
I tore through an excellent book this break, one that was supposedly scrutinized and dissected by the Obama White House before they made their Great Misdecision on Afghanistan...Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein.
Goldstein's biography of McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to JFK and LBJ from 1961 to 1966, largely focuses on the decisions that led to our entanglement in the morass of Vietnam. The primary lesson of the book can be distilled to a couple of highly pertinent lessons...
1. Machismo is the enemy of common sense.
2. Caution and skepticism are highly underrated, as well as scarce, in the highest circles of decision-making.
