TIM | 2007-11-29
Tim says: So if I were in office right this minute looking for advice on what approach to take. What advice would you give? And don't say: "Tim, just put your foot down." I know that. What are your ideas on these international issues we are obviously going to be dealing??
(Bob, you can chime in as well)
The most important thing about this election is that, more than any in recent history, IT DOESN'T MATTER. For all the horror stories about Hillary and others and what they WANT, all they really want is to be president. An adviser would not be telling them what they SHOULD do, but what they CAN do. And that is almost nothing.
There was a time when a McGovern could demand immediate total withdrawal from Vietnam and Goldwater could hint at nukes. We all know what happened to THEM.
So no one demanded we FIGHT in Nam or that we withdraw from Nam. So it stayed a half-assed war, not really a war, and therefore doomed.
Likewise Iraq.
Socialized medicine? Kyoto? Immigration? It really doesn't matter what Hillary or Obama or George Bush WANT. The system now is locked into half-assed everything.
People wait around for the courts to decide in any case where a decision really has to be made.
It amuses me that people talk about "practical politics." The practical fact is that the system is jammed and, as in Nam, this is fatal. America in Nam went out the way the Soviet Union eventually did, the way Cuba did.
Overnight. Everybody has his pants flat on the floor.
The system will unjam. THAT is practical politics. When it unjams it will be like any other dike bursting. Cuba, Nam, the USSR, races the same, again and again the Practical Men tell us about playing with the thermostat while reality keeps telling us that what the pros talk about is, by definition, unimportant.