I think Gore really believes it. I think you are right, he is a "Dead Man Walking." The problem is there is no "Clinton" in sight to move the party to the middle. So the Dems will probably run to the left, and that is a death sentence for them, IMO, barring a catastrophe by the Republicans. Gore could well end up as the Candidate in '04. The choices out there for the Dems look really bad.
Yes, Gore is history, and the Democrats are in trouble. This worries me, not because I’m terribly fond of the Democrats, but because I don’t like the idea of either party gaining prolonged ascendancy. If one party becomes marginal enough that it ceases to exert an effective check on the other, we’re in trouble. None of these guys are people we can trust.
The only potential silver lining I can see to this cloud is that maybe the Democrats will have to look outside the ranks of the insiders, and maybe they will come up with someone interesting. I doubt it, but we’ll see.
No doubt about it. However, that is the result of prosperity that makes the money available. (Hey, place stinks, lets clean it up!) It would have happened without the loonies. The movement today reminds me of the old "Communist Front" organizations. It is mainly composed of many well meaning people who love civilization and believe they are doing God's work, but it's Ideologues are a combination of fugitive Socialists who are looking for a way to keep running peoples lives, and a group of loonies who hate people, worship "Ghia" and think the Human Race should be cut back to a group of about 250,000 "Hunter Gatherers."
Agreed. It would have happened without the loonies, and it did: the loonies are not the ones that made the cleanup happen, but people who have taken the reasonable principles of a necessary movement and brought them to an extremist level. None of this, as you say, is about protecting “Gaia”, it’s about the right of “Gaia’s” self-appointed protectors to tell the rest of us what to do. Since these people are accountable to nobody, they have to be resisted. I’ve seen what eco-fascism can do (could tell some interesting stories about that) and I want no part of it. Fortunately, I see little chance that the extreme version of environmentalism will gain sufficient influence to impose its principles.
Liked his Book. He was a great Soldier.
He was. I just wish he’d stuck he’d stuck to soldiering and stayed out of politics, or at least stayed out of Philippine politics. Ideology, ignorance of local conditions, sponsors with private agenda, and a whole lot of passion are a dangerous combination. Those was interesting times.
They both want to impose their beliefs on you, that's for sure. However, Christianity had a founder who believed in Pacifism, and Islam had a Warrior. The present day versions of both tend to end up with Muslims being much more willing to initiate the use of force.
Christ may have been a pacifist, but that was never an obstacle to Christians who felt like using force to advance their faith, or at least to advance the political influence that their faith allowed them to wield. Certainly today fundamentalist Muslims are more likely to be found using violence than fundamentalist Christians, but again, I think that’s more a factor of the nature of the places where the respective fundamentalisms are to be found than of the nature of the religions involved, or of any characteristics of their respective founders.
Clinton did not like the Military and was always looking for a "No Force" solution. You need a guy that makes it believable to your enemy that you will use force if necessary.
Clinton didn’t mind force, he just wanted it to be non-controversial, hence his affection for the cruise missile and the air strike. I think the restraining factor on the use of force in the ‘90s was less Clinton’s desires than political acceptability than the political will of the electorate. Even if a hawk had been in power, for example, I don’t think we’d have gone into Afghanistan to go after al Qaeda. Before 9/11, the political will and the political support just weren’t there.
If he knows going in that you will back off, you are dead.
Unfortunately, everybody in the world knows that no matter who is President, if the American people believe that the cost of pursuing a conflict exceeds the potential benefits, we will back off. If popular support for a conflict fades, either the party in power will back off to save their political skins or the opposing party will take up the other side of the issue and use it to get into power. That’s the Achilles heel behind our military might, and everyone in the world knows it. For better or worse, though, it’s something we have to accept, as long as we remain a democracy. |
