More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.
As the cancer on this presidency continues to metastasize, with trust in the president continuing to deteriorate, and a growing realization that the federal government is growing, or perhaps has grown beyond the limits and control intended by the Founders, it’s worthwhile to start to consider the possible political implications down the road. The conventional wisdom remains that, at worst, Barack Obama will lose the Senate next year, fail to regain the House, and be the lamest of ducks until the natural end of his term in 2017. But if things get bad enough, there is a much more radical, but completely constitutional scenario, in which the Republicans could get somewhat of a do over of last fall’s election. This will particularly be the case if enough people come to view its results as illegitimate, having been influenced by the tyrannical actions of the IRS and other federal agencies.
“We don’t know how to prepare teachers,” said Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of a scathing critique of teacher preparation. “We can’t decide whether it’s a craft or a profession. Do you need a lot of education as you would in a profession, or do you need a little bit and then learn on the job, like a craft? I don’t know of any other profession that’s so uncertain about how to educate their professionals.”
Just what is that’s “moderate” about this guy, again?
…if we are to speak objectively and without comparison to even more extreme actors, these “pragmatic moderates” are anything but moderate, and their insidious “pragmatism” — i.e., their pose as conventonal political operatives rather than fire-breathing jihadists — makes them more dangerous.
And Assad was a “reformer.” Just ask that idiot, Hillary Clinton.