Those who say President Bush’s State of the Union speech was a disappointments forget that such addresses must contain laundry lists of recommendations and do not generally contain high flights of rhetoric. But Bush’s did. The content of his speech and his very effective delivery will make it a model for such addresses to follow. Among those who dissed it was Billy Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard which comes close to being my favorite magazine. Nevertheless seeing Kristol the other night on Fox News, I was dismayed to hear from this oracle that Bush was insufficiently warlike vis-à-vis Iran. We can only fight one war at a time, Billy. Moreover I would suggest that somehow either The Standard or The Committee for the 21st Centuiry to which Billy belongs find a way to send him to Iraq to observe the fighting there so that he can get his belly full of danger. It might change not just his belligerent views in behalf of wars young men would have to fight—but modify this talking head whose voice has been modulated to a soft purr fit for the Harvard faculty lounge. With his all-knowing supercilious smile which flashes the message “I’m every bit as smart as I sound” Billy is becoming, as he ages, a William F. Buckley ultra-sophisticate. All he needs to do is to learn to pop his eyes in mid-sentence, move his hairline up and down as he talks, punctuate his sentences with “aw-aw-aw” and affect Buckley’s Brit-rich-rich Connecticut accent to complete the caricature.
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Christine Cegalis, they tell me, is a leftist of the charming Howard Dean school and is not going to take the challenge from Tammy Duckworth in the 6th district lying down. That may be all well and good, but Cegalis is too timid to appear on my WLS radio show, her campaign manager having turned it down absolutely for the foreseeable future. The show is top-rated and has never been so studiously avoided as by Cegalis who evidently is afraid that the Republican, whomever it would be, would be too tough for her to face. Tell me, what Democrat on the show was ruined by an appearance? Becky Carroll, the governor’s budget spokesman, is a stand-out and probably no one I’ve heard has done a better job for the Dem party either statewide or national than does she.
Someone who could possibly rival Cegalis on the Republican side is, inexplicably, Kevin White, the lawyer who is challenging Rahm Emanuel. Why in the world would someone running for Congress have to think over an invitation to appear on WLS? If he’s like Cegalis and too timid to take on anyone from the opposition party, why is he running? Oh, well. It takes all kinds, I guess.
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Which reminds me that this Sunday the guests will be Ken Arnold, a Republican candidate for 8th district Congress (who has been lobbying to get on) and Mark McGuire, the Constitutional scholar who ran as a Democrat some years ago for Circuit Court judge. My guess is that the Superbowl will turn out to be so over-balanced in scoring early that we’ll have the full listenership when we go on WLS at 8 p.m.
Iran is several years away from developing nuclear weapons. Neocons were wrong aobut Iraq, they are wrong about Iran.We need real conservatives to stand up for America, not multinationals and not Israel.
ReplyDeleteAmerica does not portect its borders. Charity begins at home. America first - always. Republicans deserve to lose if they keep following the same propoganda. Americans - both conservatives and liberals, are sick and tired of the lies and crying wolf of the neocons. It is time to reclaim American policy for America and not the highest bidder.
...or were intelligence efforts rejected by administrations from GHW through Clinton and GW?
ReplyDeleteFrom "All Those Lies," the last chapter of Iraq Confidential, by Scott Ritter:
"The notion of the war in Iraq resulting from an intelligence failure is very convenient for all parties involved. The intelligence community can simply say that intelligence is a tricky business, and sometimes you get it wrong. This, of course, provides a convenient excuse for the politicians, and compliant media, to contend that they were simply acting in the public interest based upon the information they were given…..Certainly the Iraqis themselves didn't help matters by being less than straightforward with the international community. But the real reason that the inspections regime which began in 1991 failed to certify Iraq's weapons status was that the United States of America never intended for it to succeed (regime change was the goal). Although at the United Nations the USA paid lip service to the idea that Iraq would get sanctions lifted if it complied with the inspectors, time and time again as an inspector I came up against the fact that whenever we were close to a breakthrough on Iraq's final status, the USA would withdraw its support. The conclusion is inescapable: they did not want us to offer a definitive assessment of Iraq's weapons status."