Sunday, December 21, 2008

Sunday's offerings

There are a couple of easily digestible nuggets in today's PG forum section. First, in the "Cutting Edge" section, a quick quote from the President via "The American Prospect": the thing Bush most regrets from his term is the failure of intelligence in Iraq prior to the invasion. So not the invasion based on the faulty intelligence, not the (tens or hundreds of) thousands of deaths, but the bad intelligence. I would take that a step further. Would it be a good thing if there had been WMD's in Iraq? If Saddam had smuggled one into the US? Or, more likely in my estimate, smuggled one (or two) across his border and detonated it (them) in Jordan next to Israel or/and in Iran in Tehran? Bush's way of thinking is once again startling.

The other small piece worth looking at is once again Jack Kelly's column. Kelly looks at the Thirties, where he advances the claim that the Nazis were able to take power only after the US, looking at the depression, called in loans it had made to Germany. Kelly states that the Nazis only won a handful of seats in 1928, and then won a majority in 1932. I would note that's when FDR, a neophyte in foreign policy and a Democrat, came in. Kelly does not mention Obama by name in the entire column, but clearly that is who he has in mind as he mentions (current) Pakistan having a huge number of men of military age and Islamic fanatics, and Iran, Venezuela and Russia, suffering as oil prices fall. Incredibly, Kelly seems to be arguing the US needs to increase its foreign oil dependence by using and thus buying more gas, and I guess increase our foreign aid to Pakistan. Mostly he is calling us (again) idiots for having elected Obama over McCain. Go figure.

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