…is no conservative. Well, duh. Neither is George W. Bush (or his father).
One point he missed — Bush’s flouting of the Constitution in signing McCain-Feingold while declaring it unconstitutional. The House should have threatened him (appropriately) with impeachment for that. It was a blatant violation of his oath of office.
If you have a half an hour, you might also want to listen to Mark Levin’s righteous rant on this topic.
…in the Middle East:
We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
The Saudis showed great resiliency in defeating a serious Al Qaeda insurrection in 2004-2008, but that was a strictly internal threat that lacked a real foreign base. Simultaneous Al Qaeda bases in Jordan and Yemen would pose a more serious, if not an existential, threat to Saudi rule. If watching the fall or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more brittle than we have understood. The implosion of Turkish Arabia would test those regimes to the limit, and we cannot assume that the rulers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be any better equipped to defeat the potential challenge than Muammar Qaddhafi and Bashar al-Assad were.
The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.
Arabia has always had bloody borders. At some point, it will become logically impossible for even the most virulent anti-semite to blame this on Israel. Not that it will stop them, of course.
Let’s reduce government subsidized income inequality.
Will the California coastal elites continue to destroy the state’s economy?
They’ll certainly try to. And as he notes, this would be a great opportunity for the state GOP, if it wasn’t brain dead.
…unmasked.
The notion that he was ever a moderate was always lunacy, but he fooled a lot of the rubes, like Warren Buffett and David Brooks (not to mention Christopher Buckley, Peggy Noonan, et al) over the past five years.
[Update a while later]
Bad link, sorry.
For those who wonder why I occasionally have bad links, what happens is that I highlight the new link, but forget to ctrl-C, so the previous post’s link gets pasted, and I don’t notice.
If you want to attribute it to a senior moment, have at it.
From Brian Swiderski.
The main problem with his thesis, though I agree with much of it, is that no one said “failure is not an option” in the sixties. That happened with Gene Kranz’s book and the movie, in the nineties.
Is one in the works?
That’s the road we’re on, if Washington doesn’t change direction. And of course, it’s why the political class is so desperate to disarm us. Just as George VIII was.
We filed our final response to Michael Mann’s ridiculous lawsuit on Friday. It’s the last filing prior to a hearing on the motions to dismiss, which will likely occur in April. CEI General Counsel notes:
As our reply demonstrates, while Mann paints himself as a reluctant warrior in the global warming debate, he’s quick to fling epithets at his critics. Mann characterizes his opponents and their positions, variously, as “pure scientific fraud,” “bogus,” “hired assassin,” “shills,” “crimes against humanity,” and the ever-useful smear of “denier.” The professor claims that he’s been exonerated by numerous investigations, but those reports raise more questions than they answer. And his view of First Amendment freedoms is so incorrect that, in addition to the Nobel Prize he wrongly thinks he won, he may now end up with a Pulitzer — but it won’t be for nonfiction.
From the filing itself:
The trumpets had sounded long in advance on the main claim for Mr. Hagel—i.e., that his experience as an enlisted man, a combat veteran, had endowed him with special expertise not given to others, on matters of war, on our nuclear capacity, the size of our defense budget, a capacity to take the measure of Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Hagel had come by this wisdom, we were informed, because he had been at the front, seen men die, and knew, as we were frequently reminded, what the ordinary soldier thought and felt. All of this, the argument ran, gave him a unique capacity to head the Defense Department.
Could rational men and women seriously credit such a claim?
They think that we’re as stupid and illogical as they are. This is almost as nutty as thinking that shouting “What difference does it make?” is somehow an effective rejoinder to your mendacity.
Not all that many decades ago, it would not have been considered exceptional that a senator or congressman had served in the military. The halls of Congress were packed with Americans who had seen war. It says something about the political class today that the experience of having served in the military is such a rarity that it is seen, not infrequently, through a distorting lens. In no other period in the country’s history would it have been considered unseemly, indeed ungrateful, that a combat veteran nominated for high office should be forced to face aggressive questioning.
Indeed.
Ah, diversity.