An absolutely awful Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times today. The authors of the piece argue that Obama’s desire to conduct high-level diplomatic meetings with America’s enemies is a bad idea, and to make the point they look at Kennedy’s summit with Khrushchev in June 1961. According to the author’s, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy at the meeting, and left the summit with the impression that Kennedy was weak. They argue that the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile Crisis both resulted from that impression. The implication is clear: because Obama is young and inexperienced, a similar fate could await him if he proceeds with these meetings. The problem is that, even if the author’s version of history is correct, we should draw the exact opposite conclusion that they do.
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I had the misfortune of listening to a Clinton speech today. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Clinton. I’ve thought her to be too hawkish on foreign policy for my taste. I don’t like her plan for health care. And I found her comments on the gas tax holiday to be shortsighted and foolish.
But today’s speech made me realize that she’s worse than that. Today, she said straight faced that she’s gotten more votes in the primaries than Obama, and that therefore if the super-delegates back him, they’ll be overturning the will of the people. Of course, this statistic includes Florida and Michigan, in which Obama wasn’t allowed to campaign and in one of which his name wasn’t even on the ballot. She also is conveniently ignoring all the caucus states.
In other words, she has more votes if you ignore a bunch of states in which she lost. Of course, that caveat was conveniently missing from her speech. In other words, she’s spouting rhetoric based on out and out deception. If this were the only example of this, I might let it slide – but its one more incident in a pattern of behavior, and enough is enough.
I, for one, have had it. I’m sick of having a president who distorts evidence and statistics to support a particular line of thinking or policy position. Bush’s policy was awful, but what was so infuriating was how he tricked people into supporting it by using disingenuous data and statistics – citing discredited reports, manipulating numbers, etc. Clinton is more of the same. If anything, this campaign has shown her to be even faster and looser with reality than Bush, if it suits her purpose.
Clinton’s recent behavior has made her totally untrustworthy in my mind. I will not vote for her if she should miraculously wins the primary. I will not vote for her in future elections. And if Obama choses her as his running mate, I will strongly consider not voting for him on that basis, for worries about presidential succession. If we as a country want politicians who will deal with us squarely, we have to punish those that engage in bald-faced lying.
I haven’t ever thought of this before, but it kind of makes sense: a federal appeals court just ruled that it is discriminatory against the blind for the United States government to produce paper currency that is completely indistinguishable for those with poor or no eyesight. Admittedly, this is a small problem in the context of the larger problems that American society has. But it also seems like it’s a little absurd in an increasingly aging nation that we still produce completely uniform green bills.
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According to this article from Yahoo News, congress has passed a bill to have the justice department sue OPEC for violation of anti-trust law. American anti-trust law. OPEC being the Organization of Petroleum Exporting COUNTRIES. So… why exactly would we expect Iraq and Venezuela to follow US laws? And say we sue them… in… American courts? What motivation do they have to pay any attention to a ruling and start exporting more oil. Perhaps they might retaliate by cutting production…
Imagine if China were to sue the US in Chinese courts for failing to follow Chinese laws (after all, we allow our journalists to criticize the Chinese government, which is clearly against Chinese law). How would the US react to that? It would be met with either ridicule or hostility and there’s no way it would have its intended effect. Can somebody please explain to me what possible benefits could accrue from this strategy?
All evil can be separated into one of two categories: goals and tactics. An evil goal might be excessive power, excessive wealth, etc. An evil tactic might be violence, torture, etc. (Some would argue that the morality of the tactic is in large part defined by the goal–hence the phrase “the ends justifies the means”. I strongly disagree; but we can have that debate some other time.) This is true of individuals, and it is true of states. I know this may sound obvious, but all too often it seems that we fail to make this distinction–and as a result, we end up with bad policy and confused debate.
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