Not so. It is more true to say that all politics are tribal.
For the 1991 prediction of Arthur Schlesinger – “Ethnic and racial conflict, it now seems evident, will soon replace the conflict of ideologies as the explosive issue of our time” – has proven prophetic.
As Schlesinger was writing, the Soviet Union, a prison house of nations held together by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the Red Army, the KGB and the Communist Party, was disintegrating. Out of its carcass came 15 nations. Causes of secession: ethnicity and culture.
Does this generation possess the gravitas to lead the world?
Considering the hysteria that greeted the request of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at Ground Zero, the answer is no.
What is it about this tiny man that induces such irrationality?
Answer: He is president of a nation that is a “state sponsor of terror,” that is seeking nuclear weapons, and is moving munitions to the Taliban and insurgents in Iraq.
It may have been politically incorrect to publish the thoughts on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, but what Colin Powell had to say to GQ magazine needs to be heard.
Terrorism, said Powell, is not a mortal threat to America.
“What is the greatest threat facing us now?” Powell asked. “People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?”
In Russia’s Ulanovsk region, Sept. 12 is Conception Day.
Workers are given the day off and encouraged to go home and do their best to conceive a new Russian. The hope is to have a bumper crop of babies on Russia’s national holiday, nine months off.
Conception Day has occasioned much mirth and ribald humor. But for Mother Russia, the issue of her children is no laughing matter.
Two decades ago, the Soviet Union was three times the size of any of the other giant nation – the United States, Canada, China, Brazil – and the third most populous, with nearly 300 million people. Came then the great crack-up of 1990-91.
Senior Republican on the House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Middle East
Speech at Illinois College on September 18, 2005
——
To explain my wrinkles, I admit that my first convocation lecture at Illinois College occurred forty years ago, twenty years before most of you were born. Wow! The march of years!
The college offered me the same privilege perhaps a dozen times since, but this time I invited myself. I did so because I have a message arising from the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and another I learned sixty-five years ago from Joe Patterson Smith, a blind Illinois College professor. Both messages, I believe, are vitally important to everyone in this chamber.
When he turns over the presidency on Jan. 20, 2009, there will likely be as many U.S. troops in Iraq as there were when Congress was elected to bring them home in November 2006.
That is the meaning of Gen. Petraeus’ recommendation, adopted by President Bush, that 6,000 U.S. troops be home by Christmas and the surge of 30,000 ended by April. Come November 2008, there will likely still be 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
Lower birth rates will alter both society and strategy.
Military analysts are always talking about strategy. Often they are proposing one that they have just invented and naturally think will be the solution to the nation’s security problems. The present time, filled as it is with the threat of Islamist terrorism and with the debacle of the Iraq War, is especially marked by the proliferation of strategic proposals.
More seasoned analysts know, however, that if any strategy is to prove effective, it must fit social and structural realities, including the state of technology, the economy, and the political system. Less noted is the role of demography.
In November 2006, Republicans were voted out of power in the Congress and Democrats installed to bring an end to U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.
The war had been going on as long as America’s war on Nazi Germany. No end was in sight. U.S. casualties and costs were rising. Bush’s approval rating had sunk to record lows.
The day after the GOP rout, Bush cashiered his war minister, Donald Rumsfeld. In December, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by Bush I Secretary of State James Baker, released its report.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
- The American Conservative
Asked during World War II why the British continued to fight so ferociously, Churchill is said to have snorted, “If we stop, you’ll find out.”
The question arises in the war on terror: we know who the main enemy is, al-Qaeda, the men and movement responsible for 9/11, but what are they fighting for? What is their war all about?
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Judging by the sounds of the laughter of the other Republican candidates directed at their rival, Ron Paul has now reached the second of Mohandas K. Ghandi’s four stages. It is still unlikely that he will win the nomination of a party which has proven it doesn’t deserve him, but it is far less unlikely than it was back when Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain were still considered “electable” by most political observers. The candidates, never a particularly bright lot, may be laughing, but as the neocons and party leaders turn to Fred Thompson in desperation, more intelligent observers are not. Why is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?
“Mexico does not end at its borders. … Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.”
That astonishing claim by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, in his state of the nation address at the National Palace Sunday, brought his audience wildly cheering to its feet.
Were the United States a serious nation, Calderon’s claim that Mexico extends into the United States would have produced an instant demand from the U.S. ambassador for clarification. Failing to receive it, he would have packed his bags, and the United States would be on the verge of severing diplomatic relations.
The publication of The Bell Curve in the fall of 1994 created a major uproar in newsrooms in Washington and New York. The book was a big problem for many editors and journalists since they were unsure about—and largely unfamiliar with—the book’s empirical claims. At Newsweek, where I worked as a library assistant, the book generated a buzz that led to awkward conversations and intense discussions. Everyone had an opinion about Herrnstein and Murray’s controversial work.
Can Buchanan, a bombastic figure in American politics, win a Senate seat?
“If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is,” wrote William Thackeray in the novel Vanity Fair. Senate Republicans, reeling from scandal and disunity, fully understand how easy it is to merge onto the freeway of failure.
It was only 13 years ago that Newt Gingrich, then the Braveheart of the GOP, led Republicans into Washington to drain the swamp and dispose of the vermin. A decade later, the party that championed an end to business as usual has become the monster they sought to destroy.
The story of what happens to everyday Americans when corporations go to war.
Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed, and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so… Read more on the official website at: http://iraqforsale.org/
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Those who hoped that – with the victory of the antiwar party in 2006, the departure of Rumsfeld and the neocons from the Pentagon, the rise of Condi and the eclipse of Cheney – America was headed out of Iraq got a rude awakening. They are about to get another.
Today, the United States has 30,000 more troops in Iraq than on the day America repudiated the Bush war policy and voted the GOP out of power. And President Bush, self-confidence surging, is now employing against Iran a bellicosity redolent of the days just prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
After Legalizing Same-Sex ‘Marriage,’ More Canadians Want to Redefine Marriage
VICTORIA, British Columbia — British Columbians, arguably Canada’s most morally permissive population, are discovering that tolerance has its limits.
At issue is the polygamous behavior of the breakaway Mormons of Bountiful, a community of about 700, tucked away in the mountainous southeast corner of the province close to the American border.
British Columbia Attorney General Wally Oppal repeatedly has stated his desire to prosecute the handful of middle-aged men with multiple partners like Bountiful’s unofficial leader, Winston Blackmore, who has reportedly fathered 100 children by 20 wives.
By Congressman Paul Findley
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
“If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is,” wrote William Thackeray in the novel Vanity Fair. Senate Republicans, reeling from scandal and disunity, fully understand how easy it is to merge onto the freeway of failure.
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