Tuesday, April 29, 2003

From the Oliver Stone Dept. So there's a thought from the conspiracy-friendly part of my brain. What if Santorum drew the short straw? That is to say: the Republican powers designated him to be the guy to create a diversion for the leadership as a whole. Think about it. At a time when so many things of monumental historical importance are being decided, the center and left wasted lots of energy and political capital on an issue that really bears little on any active legislation or policy. This looks like the classic scenario of creating a diversion over here so you can get away with something else over there. Santorum took one for the team. Or maybe he's just an anti-sexual, anti-privacy moron who doesn't know when to shut up. Y'know, either/or. 11:33:58 AM    Put your John Hancock right here!

Links This is classic. Check it out: Bush Regime Playing Cards And this is both classic and really creepy: Onion article from Bush's swearing in: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over 10:22:50 AM    Put your John Hancock right here!

Vacuum So here's a concern that I've developed recently. What if the so-called "projection of American power" that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et. al. have undertaken is irreversible in the forseeable future. Here's how the argument goes. Before, say, Bush's "Axis of Evil" State of the Union address, there was a certain level of stability in the world. Yes, 9-11 showed that it was not quite as stable as we had previously imagined, but there were certain things that we took more or less for granted, and geopolitics had a modicum of equilibrium. Well now, thanks to the Bush administration's ideology of self-righteous machismo, the givens are no longer given, and the equilibrium has been disequalized. They have created a pressure out in the world which did not exist before. The concern is that our government simply coming to its senses and returning to a sensible and moral foreign policy would now leave a relative vacuum that didn't exist before we raised the pressure. Furthermore, we'd be leaving this vacuum behind in a world where it's no longer taken for granted that wars of aggression are unacceptable to the respectable nations of the world, that treaties are to be abided by, that the UN is to be respected. If anyone's got any rational theories of where we go from here, I'd like to hear them. 10:01:00 AM    Put your John Hancock right here!