The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Calm Like a Bomb, Part II

This is probably way too long for the comments, so Cole gets his own blog post. Yay, or something. It's been a while since I've had a good political argument.

I once heard that if you don't have a job, you should treat job hunting like it's your job, and make that clear to your parents. I have no idea of the usefulness of the advice, but it sounds good, so I pass it along.

This, of course, is what they've been saying as well. Some days this works better than others.

Speaking of Calm Like a Bomb, I watched the Matrix on TBS last night. It was sorta screwy how, in the foyer shootup scene, they had the security guard say "Holy smokes!" instead of "Holy shit!", and then kept every single frame of shooting.

Another me would rant about the hypocrisy of that sort of thing, but I find that I've lost my energy for that sort of thing over the years, and people like Ebert say it better anyway.

On to other things.

Dwip, I know this will make a lot of people furious, but what the world can't stand is a leader who thinks he's right, and does what appears to be the right thing in a timely manner. They especially hate it when he is right in what he does, but that is my opinion which has little bearing on this group of left wing extremist people.

There's part of this that I agree with, and part of this I don't. I happen to be one of those people that thinks that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or at least a better thing to do than what we were doing, which wasn't exactly a paragon of success. Similarly, I'm not especially happy with the UN among others for being all wishy-washy on the whole thing, and let us not forget France and Russia in there, too.

On the other hand, there are basically two problems I have with the whole operation. First of them is, yes he did it, but he seems to have done it without any sort of realistic plan in place. And if you look at things long enough, it becomes fairly obvious that no, the administration didn't seem to have a whole lot of plans for the peace. Then again, with as much as Bush beat on the whole nation building concept in the 2k election, and I remember him doing it, I shouldn't be surprised. In short, I pay these people quite a bit of money to make decisions and act in a competent manner, and when they do not I feel the need to question them on it.

The second part of this, and perhaps the most serious, is that in order to pull this whole thing off, the administration either lied to us, was misled, or willingly decieved itself into believing a whole host of things. Amongst those things were the Niger uranium deal scandal/Plame affair and all that British WMD evidence that was apparently based on a whole lot of nothing. I recall thinking at the time of Powell's big presentation in '03 something along the lines of "That's it? This is the best evidence you've got to offer us, despite hyping it to us for weeks? You expect us to go to war based on THIS?" And I'm a hawk, remember. And then when one hears stories about manipulation of the CIA and exposing agents for political gain, well, one is not impressed. And let us not forget the supposed Al Queda ties. I'll forgive the WMD, but not that. If Bush didn't blame 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, he sure didn't go out of his way to try and stop us from thinking it.

And this whole policy of truth thing, or lack thereof, extends further than Iraq. I just got done reading a rather persuasive rebuttal of the whole Swift Boat Vets Against Kerry thing, a group which Bush either supports or refuses to denounce. And on that whole subject, there's always that fun military records stonewalling we've been having since, oh, hell. Before 2k, anyway. The list goes on, but I can't be troubled to repeat it.

In short, then, if the United States is going to proclaim itself as some sort of force of moral righteousness in the world, and engage in the level of moral crusading we've been engaging in lately, I expect our leaders to be, well, moral about it. The means, in other words, does not always justify the ends.

And, hell. While we're at it, let's just tackle the whole left-wing extremist part of the whole thing. I should note that I've been accused of that by all of like three people, all of whom are exceedingly partisan Republicans. I know a number of partisan Democrats and the like, whom I disagree with on a variety of things, and yet I've never been called a right wing extremist. Hrm. Me, I prefer to think of myself as a political moderate, but the reality, I suppose, is more complex. I'd characterize the far left as being very freedom of choice (repeal drug laws, pro-abortion choice, etc). Most of that I'm ok with, to a degree. Lower the drinking age. Do SOMETHING about the failed War on Drugs. Yay choice. So probably pretty much guilty as charged. Too, I would characterize the far left as being pretty much regulatory/protectionist on economics. Me, I'm a sort of iffy free marketer, if you could call me anything. Regulation has a place, and I'm generally in favor of things like, say, the minimum wage. I'm also something of a conservationist. There's got to be a balance somewhere between, say, drilling the ANWR and outlawing nuclear power. I think that's a pretty centrist sort of view on things. And getting back to Iraq, and foreign policy in general, the far left is pretty isolationist/non-interventionist as a whole, I think. And of course I'm all for the whole nation-building thing. So, you know, whatever. If anything, I suppose I'm sort of a Bill Clinton Democrat, never mind that I'm a registered independent. This, of course, is enough to get me labeled all sorts of nasty things by the sort of Republicans who have an almost irrational hatred for the man, much in the same way some people have an almost irrational hatred of Bush, or of Reagan for that matter. Be that as it may, there's a considerable amount of ground between Clinton and, say, Nader.

That having been said, let us attempt to characterize the other people who I can think have posted on poltical issues here lately. This is, of course, rather unfair to them, and they should by all means feel free to contradict me, but, and in order of appearance in this thread:

Regina: Socially conservative to some degree or another. I can't recall a position on economics, or for that matter the war/foreign policy.

Clyos: One of two resident Republicans.

Tim: Too little interaction to really say, but I'm guessing at least somewhere on the left.

Whir: Pro-anime.

Marechal: Our other resident (raging) Republican, when he decides to reappear.

Anyway. On to yet another comment.

Afganistan is trying to do to us what it did to the USSR. But we are doing to it what we did to Cambodia. (That statement is not in any way based on anything I've read, only my guess. It's as good an answer as anything I've read though.)

Do elaborate. I'm curious to know what you mean, exactly.

Posted by Dwip at August 10, 2004 7:39 PM