Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
What should have Bush done that he didn't do uptil now?

That's a good question. My sense is that his administration has been paralyzed because different factions have prevented any one policy from going forward. Also, there don't seem to be any good military options.

[SlaveNoMore]

ltl/fb
So, watching the footage of GN&GL, and wow, do Slave and Hank and Penske ever sound like Joe McCarthy.

Great movie. And like most movies, not exactly historically accurate.

Oddly enough, the lefties around here sound awfully like the Rosenbergs, Sacco, Vanzetti and Alger Hiss.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
That's a good question. My sense is that his administration has been paralyzed because different factions have prevented any one policy from going forward. Also, there don't seem to be any good military options.

Kristol, from the latest Weekly Standard:

The difference between the Bush administration and its Democratic critics now amounts to six-party talks or two-party talks with North Korea--as if talking would stop Kim Jong Il. It turns on direct or indirect negotiations with Ahmadinejad--as if he were willing to negotiate away his nuclear program. With the exception of Bush's commendable steadfastness in Iraq--combined, how ever, with debilitating stubbornness on troop levels and strategy--and his support for Israel, Bush's foreign policy is now Clintonian in its combination of weakness and wishful thinking.

[SlaveNoMore]

hits it right on the head, as always:

From the CS-T today:

...Thomas Sowell says the question for this election is not whether you or your candidate is Republican or Democrat but whether you're "serious" or "frivolous." A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity. It's like going to the theater. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the 1990s, Americans opted for the sex comedy -- or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. The mood of the times was to kick the serious stuff down the road so we could get back to President Lounge Act offering to feel our pain. With North Korea, the people delegated to kick the can a few years ahead -- Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter -- are now back, writing self-congratulatory op-eds about their genius and foresight. Not at all. Albright's much-touted "agreement" was a deal whereby Washington agreed to prop up a flailing basket-case state in order to enable it to buy enough time to become a serious destabilizing threat to its neighbors and beyond. Many of our present woes -- not least Iran -- derive explicitly from the years when Carter embodied the American "superpower" as a smiling eunuch.

Thanks in part to last decade's holiday from history, North Korea and Iran don't have to buy any more time. They've got all they need. Life isn't a night on Broadway where you can decide you're not in the mood for "Henry V" and everyone seems to be having a much better time at "La Cage Aux Foley." Forget the Republicans for a moment. In Connecticut, the contest is between a frivolous liberal running on myopic parochial platitudes and a serious liberal who has the measure of the times and has thus been cast out by the Democratic Party. His state's voters seem disinclined to endorse the official Dems' full-scale embrace of trivia and myopia. The broader electorate should do the same.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Well, what he did do was declare that we Defeat Evil, not Negotiate with It. It's a fine moral philosophy, to be sure, but its practical limitations are becoming apparent.

A Please Hurry Up and Die, You Asshole policy might work fine for the Cubas of the world, provided we have about 50 years to work with and no enrichment facilities sitting in Havana, but I'm not sure it worked so well here.

So what should we have done?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Great movie. And like most movies, not exactly historically accurate.

Oddly enough, the lefties around here sound awfully like the Rosenbergs, Sacco, Vanzetti and Alger Hiss.

Except the lefties here, who post things like the post that precipated your response above, are more stridently ignorant than the world-class lefties you cite. We have the lower tier Kool--aid drunks here. FWIW, I have emailed Hillary numerous times about joining our forum (I believe that, unlike her husband, she has not been disbarred, in fact or constructively, yet). She would at least raise our board's cumulative leftist IQ a couple of point.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
hits it right on the head, as always:

From the CS-T today:

Exactly, Clinton lived it up madd crazee pimpin style, while Al Qaeda attacked us repeatedly and set the stage for 911; and NKorea worked on its nuke acquisition.

Is it too late to bring treason charges?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That's a good question. My sense is that his administration has been paralyzed because different factions have prevented any one policy from going forward. Also, there don't seem to be any good military options.

I was watching this panel last night on C-Span put together by Foreign Policy magazine on the Korean situation. They were all saying that South Korea and the United States now have two totally different strategic interests in North Korea. South Korea does not war under any circumstances. War is their worst nightmare. The United States does not want North Korea to give its Nuclear Technology to anyone else or develop a reliable system to hit the US. If the US finds the North Koreans trying to give nuclear weapons to Al Queda it will certainly mean war, but that is not what the South Koreans want.

The US wants the North Korean Regime to collapse. South Korea fears that because they will have to pay for North Korea like West Germany had to pay for East Germany. They will also have to deal with millions of regugees. China does not want a collapse because that would mean a lot of refugees and a Korean peninsual controlled by South Korea, which they see as a staunch US alley.

Japan wants North Korea to stop building nuclear weapons but isn't all that excited about a united Korea, considering Korean antipathy to Japan.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Spanky
So what should we have done?

Pelosi and Biden and little Neddy Lamont tell us that we should have reasoned with him.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Great movie. And like most movies, not exactly historically accurate.

Oddly enough, the lefties around here sound awfully like the Rosenbergs, Sacco, Vanzetti and Alger Hiss.

My grandfather served in the Marines with Joe McCarthy (although I think they were both in reserves or something because they were both pretty old and they were in the US during WWII). My grandfather brought Joe back to my grandparents house for the weekend and my Grandmother said he was really creepy. They had an African American maid who wouldn't go near him and my grandmother thought that he might have made some unwelcomed moves on the maid.

My grandparents were staunch Republicans and anti-communists, but thought that there was something really wrong (not polically but personally) with Sen. McCarthy.

[SlaveNoMore]

Spanky
My grandfather brought Joe back to my grandparents house for the weekend and my Grandmother said he was really creepy. They had an African American maid who wouldn't go near him and my grandmother thought that he might have made some unwelcomed moves on the maid.

Sounds remarkedly like a description of William Jefferson Clinton.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
So what should we have done?

Not try to blame a bad situation on Clinton. That should count as "frivolous," to use Slave's lingo.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Spanky
So what should we have done?

I agree with Ty that there don't seem to be any good answers. Since we seem enamored with calling each other anyone not named Bush around here Rosenbergs and appeasers and shit, I thought I'd observe that
GWB has added almost nothing to the conversation other than some good moralizing about Not Talking With Evil (until we do).

There's an intersting piece in the LAT today making the point that with us abandoning the NPT and instead of continuing the trend of reducing nukes that we embrace further research on bunker buster tactical nukes, etc., that further proliferation, difficult under any circumstances, becomes inevitable.

So now we've got NK, and we probably have to live with that. Stay tuned for Syria, SA, and others. If our stance truly is No Nuke Or Else for Wackadoo Countries, our DoD is in for a busy decade or two.

Gattigap

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Gattigap
I agree with Ty that there don't seem to be any good answers. Since we seem enamored with calling each other anyone not named Bush around here Rosenbergs and appeasers and shit, I thought I'd observe that GWB has added almost nothing to the conversation other than some good moralizing about Not Talking With Evil (until we do).

Apparently Talking With Evil is OK if there are other parties at the table, or something.

To answer club's post above on this subject, I don't think Democrats or Republicans have particularly principled reasons for supporting or opposing multi-party or bi-party talks here. Some people -- not just Democrats -- suspect that elements in the Administration are using this question to avoid real negotiations.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Sounds remarkedly like a description of William Jefferson Clinton.

2.