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| Home Front: WoT |
| Stomping Bush may impose a steep price. |
| 2006-11-24 |
| by Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal Excellent piece on the potential consequences of the unholy alliance between "realist" foreign policy and Democrat political ambition. A few key passages to get you going: . . . someone ought to step back and consider the cumulative political effect of what of late has turned into an unrestrained gang-stomping of the sort normally seen at Miami-Florida International football games. We are ensuring that no future president, of either party, will project military power anytime soon short of retaliation for a nuclear attack. Every potential presidential candidate, including John McCain, has to be looking at the Bush administration's experience and concluding there is simply no political upside in doing so. We are backing the country's political mind into the long-term parking lot of isolationism, something fervently wished for at opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum. . . . Like the Europeans, we may talk ourselves into a weariness with the world and its various, unremitting violences. No genocide will occur on American soil, but the same information tide that bathes us in Baghdad's horrors ensure that Darfur's genocide will come too near not to notice. Too bad for them, or any aspiring democrats under the thumb of Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela or Islam's highly mobile anti-democrats. We've got ours. Let them get theirs. Does this overstate the buildup of anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment? Will U.S. policy, in the hands of ideologically frictionless bureaucracies, slide forward? Maybe. But even the realists and cynics might concede there has been some benefit, perhaps going back as far as Plymouth Rock, in having one nation standing for the conceit, or even the ideal, that men elsewhere with democratic aspirations could at least count on us for active support. This is the core idea in the Bush Doctrine. If its critics don't start making some distinctions, they may discover that profligacy of opinion in our time carries a very steep price. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 "We are ensuring that no future president, of either party, will project military power anytime soon short of retaliation for a nuclear attack." And ensuring, also, that a terrorist nuclear attack is all but inevitable. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2006-11-24 13:26 |
| #2 If they are unwilling to support democracy elsewhere, why do you assume that they support democracy here? Cause they say so? Actions speak louder than words. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2006-11-24 11:19 |
| #1 This piece dovetails nicely with what Hitchens has been writing on a regular basis since 9-11. The libs in this country cannot truly be called liberal because that would imply they actually have principles. |
| Posted by: doc 2006-11-24 10:59 |