When you watch a country fall apart, you understand things can actually fall apart. Americans are complacent.
Elections
Foreign and Domestic
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… (From the Oath of Enlistment)
It honestly kind of slipped my mind at first, that Monday morning was the anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the United States. It’s been 22 years since that horrible day. I had other stuff purely personal concerns on my mind.
For one, every single thing that I had to say about 9-11, I said, wrote and posted ages ago … and why re-run, one more time? There’s just nothing more to say, any more than there would be anything more to say about the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 one more tedious rerun of a recollection of where I was, what I was doing. It’s been a lifetime, in a way and for high-school and college graduates this year, it’s been all their lifetimes.
The other thing a more recent tragic anniversary which looms closer in time is the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, and the Abbey Gate suicide bombing there which killed more than a hundred civilians and thirteen American service personnel. Those deaths meant so little to President Biden that he kept looking at his watch during the ceremony at Andrews AFB when their coffins were unloaded. Those thirteen were the merely last American military lives frittered away in almost two decades of seemingly endless and pointless deployments to Afghanistan, culminated in a departure so botched that I’m still shocked that only a single commissioned officer resigned in protest. Sec Def Austin and General “Thoroughly Modern” Milley apparently feel no shame over bungling their responsibility to the Nation so horribly.
Quote of the Day
In November, the right won the election in Israel and then, upon assuming power in January, began to implement the policies on which it ran. At which point, some of the losers of the election took to the streets. Ever since, those in ideological agreement with the losers have expressed continual wonderment and pride at the fact that 8 or 9 percent of the population of the small country is out in the streets on a weekly basis. Yes, but more than 50 percent of the electorate in Israel voted the other way. Imagine if they took to the streets. But you can’t, because they won’t, because they shouldn’t have to. Democracies exist to make street action unnecessary…
You could say this about other countries as well.
Pugilists and Statesmen
Ads are being run against de Santis; he voted, they claim, to increase the retirement age amidst other possible solutions. He, like Ryan, are youngsters pushing their elders off cliffs; of course, some might see politicians manfully taking on a long term problem.
These ads may be effective but with them mere discussions become toxic – the opposite of a statesman’s approach Bush began with a high-powered, sensible committee; 9/11 intervened. Maybe they would have come up with nothing but it remains the problem it was well over twenty years ago. How many policy debates follow the same pattern?
The problem is the context as well. Trump is pursued by truly demonic (and unconstitutional) opponents. Ones who have sold us out for a few gold pieces to the environmentalists, the communists, the totalitarians, the. . . While they take pleasure in making our futures carless, gasless, air conditionless, they embrace nihilism. Indeed, half the country seems in an intense sado/masochistic relation with their overlords.
In a petty way, this ad poses a dilemma. Our positions imply to the simple minded that either
a) we buy into the least statesman-like and most perilous of positions about our future in that policy area,
or
b) we buy into the most aggressive, constitution-be-damned, politically motivated of our opponents clown shows.
Neither has our long-run interests in mind; both personalize and trivialize policy in an increasingly serious world.
I had hoped de Santis would run and Trump wouldn’t: I’d assumed Trump wouldn’t naturally take a statesman’s approach, more likely a pugilist’s, during the fallow period. There was hope: once elected he sometimes made good choices not traditionally considered winners. But this toxic perspective that will affect him as well as de Santis, making a good solution less likely. Surely no solution leaves the system untouched. Well, probably the Democrats have one – print more money.