Huckleberry
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Is Gourley in a glass kennel? is the weekly dogtrot our own sort of "Cat Videos"?
Some of them cat videos are pretty good.
Well, the Kristol/Kagan argument for getting between them would be that from such a position the US could attack both ways...
What are the Iraqi regime's views on the Syrian situation? How might they respond to further US intervention? Are they getting a cut from the western flow of supplies?
Is it possible that any new regime in Damascus that is less than homicidally anti-Shia might continue to allow Hezbollah's re-supply? If nothing else, than as a way of keeping Western attention on Nasrallah? As I recall, far stranger arrangements have been made in that part of the world (Xhibit A: Iran-Contra).
Debating whether or not this president was worse than that president (or vice president) misses what for me is the main point: the office itself has grown too powerful, too secretive and, frankly, extra-legal, under presidents of both parties.
That Dick Cheney was quite frank about his authoritarian streak (Unitary Executive on 'roids) does not in this sense make him worse than Obama, whose style is simply that of the skin-and-grin. So while I believe the entire Bush war cabinet should have been sent to the Hague, that is neither here nor there. The song remains the same: a man becomes president, he believes himself responsible for the defense of the nation, which over time gets confused with his own political fortunes, and so forth and so on to scandal, cynicism, bloodshed and hagiography. So it goes.
There's a reason the "We" in the preamble to our (antique?) constitution referred to a "common defense." It is not the responsibility of any one man, it ought not to be within the power of any one man, and thus not suceptible to the quirks of one man (paranoia, stupidity, addictions, religiosity, etc.)
It sure looks slimy. But I'd hate to "prejudge" this, as it were.
That said, for me the tell here is that Holder recused himself.
On a slightly related note, I have been meaning to report for some time that you've got my buddy Dwayne's attention and support. He does not do the internets, but when I finally got him to put down the Robert E. Howard and pick up the Thomas E. Ricks, he plowed through Fiasco and Generals in about a week and a half.
Clearly we need another eight or ten more air craft carriers. Me and Senator McCain were ringing alarm bells about this last year, when our carrier gap viz-a-viz the Chinese dipped below 11:1.
Democratic Peace Theory, whatever its merits, was siezed upon by the American Right for two reasons: (1) they sought to give Reagan credit for the spread of at least superficially democratic institutions after 1989; and (2) it provided further justification for aggression against non-neoliberal regimes.
@HUNTERS @Huckleberry So it's a Nobel Peace Without Honor Prize? (heh)
Addendum:
Is honor a static, dynamic, eternal, or situational notion?
What does honor mean in a world in which a former Pistons foward appears to be on his way to winning a Nobel Peace Prize?
http://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2013/05/dennis-rodman-im-doing-obamas-job-163688.html?hp=r6
Honor: dead concept or center of the profession?
Answer: Yes!
And that's the problem here.
Honor appears to be very much dead everywhere else in our culture. Like men wearing hats. In the Olden Times, there was at least the need to pretend. This does not appear to be the case any longer.
But I'd agree that Honor does make things like soldiering, policing, a Good, as both moral and, in the long run, expedient.
But our culture has long ago come to ground on the expedient as the greatest good. In our political economy, "Death Before Dishonor" is for suckers. And professional soliders. And thus the latter will become more and more alienated from the thing they are supposed to be defending.
'n write, too. We just got to get him a new bibliography.
No, bubba, we cannot stop trying to have it both ways. That would be un-American, in the parlance of our times. We are going to keep trying to have it both ways until we can't afford any way at all, not economically, strategically, socially, or spiritually.
RubD: Stratton's been out reading Giovanni Arrighi and GM Tamas, is what I heard.
I know at least one 22-year old "We" who told me that we had to drop the Atomic Bomb on The Vietnamese because they were killing The Jews.
The guys in the picture do not look like cops to me. Why should they be expected to act like cops?
@JesseSinaiko I've got Postwar on my Ipod. It is a good book.
There is a huge market for history, but there is really no market for academic history outside the academy.
The topics that most academic historians write about is of no significance outside the academy. Also, most academic historians couldn't write a plain English sentence if their tenure depended upon it (which it ought to but doesn't).
One of my ex's lives in Texas.