Tag Archive 'vanity'

Blameless are the Bellicose?


(photo: Pavel Trebukov | blog)

From the gang who brought you the “because Georgia has invaded its own country we had to attack” rationale for the South Ossetian War, Poland has now apparently “made itself a target” for Russian nuclear strike, by agreeing to base an entirely defensive missile system which could not possibly repel even a small Russian ballistic missile salvo.

Alas, this preposterous Russian claim like so many others, can find plenty of eager advocates in the West, who believe it is “aggressive” to create a defensive system against an Iranian missile threat, because Russia (!) says her “right” to target a country with ICBMs could be infringed…only to then confess the lie of that, by targeting the country with missiles. It’s an utterly immoral and entirely ludicrous formula on its face; indefensible from every direction.

And such a painfully helpless claim for erasing or even obscuring the fact that it was Russia alone which invaded Georgia, and it is Russia alone which is targeting Poland — and most sadly of all, it is Russia alone which is destroying Yeltsin’s great security achievement of an international framework for peaceful borders between friendly republics. A squandered and priceless inheritance, traded cheaply, in favor of an engineered frontier war for the vanity of militarism.

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Ignorance & Pride

Obama might be giving McCain more ammunition for the contention he is a condescending elitist. Denouncing Republican attacks on his energy plan as lies, he countered that “these guys take pride in being ignorant.”

Huffington Post and the leftblogs are naturally eating it up (boom, boom, boom, boom). But it probably won’t play as well with Middle America, where partisan conceit of this sort is typically unwelcome.

Or perhaps anywhere where the allegations of ‘Paris Hilton celebrity’ –which could be described as a combination of vanity and vacuity in itself– have done real damage to Obama. Obama’s suggestion might have a certain flavor of irony there.

At any rate, behold a nastier campaign of a very old sort. Credit goes to both men.

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