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John Bolton doesn’t like our new North Korea policy.
North Korea has now achieved one of its most-prized objectives: removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. In exchange, the U.S. has received “promises” on verification that are vague and amount to an agreement to negotiate the critical points later.
In the Bush administration’s waning days, this is what passes for diplomatic “success.” It is in fact the final crash and burn of a once-inspiring global effort to confront and reverse nuclear proliferation, thereby protecting America and its friends. …
Same with Anne Applebaum.
… For the record, North Korea has sold missile technology to Syria and Libya, has assassinated diplomats, and has kidnapped Japanese and South Korean citizens and refuses to give a full accounting of their fate. North Korea also keeps untold numbers of its own citizens in concentration camps, which are direct copies of those built by Stalin, and knowingly starves many of its citizens to death as well. By any normal definition, North Korea is still a “terrorist” state, and everyone knows it. The administration’s decision was thus not a recognition of any change in North Korean behavior. It was, rather, a negotiated exchange of one set of words for another: We withdraw terrorist—and, in exchange, they offer a “promise,” once again, to dismantle their nuclear facilities. Ritual favors were bestowed as well: Presumably as a sign of the respect in which they hold him, the U.S. official negotiating these terms was, on his last visit to the north, ceremonially allowed to travel by car through Panmunjom instead of being forced to fly in from Beijing. …
Spengler says Americans are gamblers.
America’s homeowners feel like busted gamblers after a bender in Vegas. They wagered not only the nest egg, but the nest, with the abandon of tulip-bulb traders in 17th century Holland. Americans are hard put to explain how the American dream turned into a chip on the craps table. The focal point of speculation was the asset one usually associates with secure domesticity. What happened to the risk-averse Economic Man of textbooks?
The textbook was misleading to begin with: we are all gamblers and always have been, argues Reuven Brenner, the Repap Professor of Business at McGill University. In a series of books beginning in 1983 with History: The Human Gamble and culminating with his latest volume, A World of Chance: Betting on Religion, Games, Wall Street, Brenner yanks economics inside-out by placing risky behavior at the center of the economic model.
Conventional economics describes an artificial world of slight deviations from equilibrium; Brenner presents the real world, in all its danger and uncertainty. Man lives not only by the sweat of his brow, but by the fortitude of his intestines, for survival demands that we take mortal leaps of a kind that are unknown to the conventional model. Men who would prefer to be timid risk everything to leapfrog their peers before they themselves are left behind.
Rather than award yet another Nobel Prize to an economist who put bells and whistles on the conventional model (Princeton University Professor Paul Krugman was honored this past weekend ”for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity”,) the Swedish Academy should have honored Brenner, who gives us a model that makes sense in the real world of tumult and uncertainty – 2008 should have been Brenner’s year, given the cataclysmic breakdown of the conventional model. Only a few months ago, the governments of the world went about their business as if nothing unusual was at work; now they are lurching from one emergency plan to another and warning of a new Great Depression. …
A retort to Mike Bloomberg’s big head when George Will argues in favor of term limits.
… The Times dutifully reported that 37 governors, 15 state legislatures and nine of the 10 most populous cities have term limits, which remain popular with the people who imposed them: “Recent ballot initiatives to alter them, including one in California in February, have failed.”
Two amusing arguments against term limits are that political novices are too susceptible to the wiles of lobbyists and that term-limited legislators, worrying too much about their next jobs and too little about their current ones, are constantly in campaign mode, thinking of the next election rather than the next generation. The idea that when term limits are absent, these difficulties are absent is refuted by one word: Congress.
“Make no mistake about it,” Bloomberg said when announcing his intention to revise the law without seeking the permission of the public that enacted it. “I still think term limits are a good thing.” Just not for him, not now, in these “tough times.” Yet again, the political class’s reaction to term limits is a powerful, indeed sufficient, argument for them.
Speaking of clowns, American Spectator on Biden.
… Well, take a glance at Senator Biden’s performance just last month. On September he 22 bragged to a Baltimore audience that, “If you want to know where al-Qaida lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me. Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” Two days later he continued his B.S.-ing that al-Qaida’s headquarters had been moved to “the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where my helicopter was recently forced down.” Both statements were rehashes of his September 9 garbagespiel that “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan [is] where my helicopter was forced down.” Left unsaid by the senator — who rarely leaves anything unsaid — was that the helicopter was “brought down” not by enemy fire but by inclement weather.
Okay, maybe those outbursts do not reveal Senator Biden as an airhead, but they do reveal him as a phony. So consider a couple more of the senator’s September follies. …
Thomas Sowell wonders why telling the truth becomes “going negative.”
… When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?
How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?
Yet those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The oft-repeated mantra is that we should trick to the “real issues.”
What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction– and somehow an unworthy distraction.
Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do– and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.
Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide– after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.
Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.
Charles Krauthammer says Obama’s friends are a legitimate issue and McCain was remiss in not taking up the issue sooner.
Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.
But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.
McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama’s associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate. …
Dilbert is here.