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Using the NY Times article on Obama’s youthful foolishness at Columbia, Caroline Glick warns Israel not to get ambushed by these views since he has yet to embrace the world like an adult.
… THERE IS NOTHING shocking about Obama’s embrace of radical politics as a college student. Particularly at Columbia, adopting such positions was the most conformist move a student could make. What is disturbing is that these views have endured over time, although they were overtaken by events 20 years ago.
Just six years after Obama penned his little manifesto, the Iron Curtain came crashing down. The Soviet empire fell not because radicals like Obama called for the US to destroy its nuclear arsenal, it fell because president Ronald Reagan ignored them and vastly expanded the US’s nuclear arsenal while deploying short-range nuclear warheads in Europe and launching the US’s missile defense program while renouncing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
On Monday Obama arrived in Moscow for a round of disarmament talks with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. According to most accounts, while in Moscow Obama plans to abandon US allies Ukraine and Georgia and agree to deep cuts in US missile defense programs. In exchange, Moscow is expected to consider joining Washington in cutting back on its nuclear arsenal just as the likes of Iran and North Korea build up theirs.
Of course, even if Russia doesn’t agree to scale back its nuclear arsenal, Obama has already ensured that the US will slash the size of its own by refusing to fund its modernization. In short, Obama is working to implement the precise policy he laid out as an unoriginal student conformist 26 years ago.
BY NOW of course, none of this is particularly surprising. Since entering office seven long months ago, Obama has demonstrated that his guiding philosophy for foreign affairs is that the US and its allies are to blame for their adversaries’ hostility toward them. All that needs to happen for peace to break out throughout the world is for the US and its allies to quit clinging to their guns and religions and start apologizing for their rudeness. In furtherance of this goal, Obama has devoted himself to putting the screws on US allies, slashing America’s defense budget and embarking on a worldwide tour apologizing to US adversaries.
The basic reality that the US is being led by a radical ideologue who clings to his views in the face of overwhelming proof of their falsity is the most fundamental fact that world leaders must reckon with today as they formulate policies to contend with the Obama administration. This is first and foremost the case for Israel. …
Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t like the idea of reintroducing beavers to Scotland.
… For me, the problem with reintroducing beavers to Scotland, where they haven’t lived for 400 years, is that pretty soon the Highlands will be a broken and desolate place full of nothing but poisoned oxbow lakes, dead deer and grouse moors that look like the UAE’s empty quarter.
To understand the problem, we need to go back to the 19th century and the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Obviously man knew best, so to make sure it was as diverse as possible, bears and wolves were not encouraged with quite the same fervour as various deery things. Which meant that pretty soon the whole place was awash with elk. Lovely.
Unfortunately, elk absolutely love aspen trees, which meant that soon enough they were all gone. And that was a problem for Johnny beaver, because without the aspens he couldn’t dam the rivers and streams. So he moved out. And without the dams, the water meadows dried hard in the summer months, meaning there was no grass for the deery things to eat. So they started to move out as well.
Unwilling to accept they’d made a mess, the authorities blamed the migration on carnivores and started a cull of wolves and bears. Which meant their numbers started to fall, too. Until in the 1950s pretty much all any visitor could see on a trip to Yellowstone was about a million bored elk wondering if the fender from Wilbur and Myrtle’s Oldsmobile would keep them going till the aspen trees came back.
And then came the clincher. Unlike the Indians, who had regularly burnt the region, the whitey eco-ists had steadfastly waged war against all forest fires. This meant the ground was littered with tinder-dry fallen twigs and branches. So when the lightning struck in 1988 and the fire started, it burnt close to the ground rather than in the trees. This meant it burnt hot and could not be extinguished and the result of that was simple. The soil in the entire park – all 2m acres of it – was rendered sterile and useless.
That’s what will happen to Scotland. Oh, they may say the beavers will be monitored and they’ll be good for the tourist industry. But that’s what Dickie Attenborough said about Jurassic Park just before the T-rex ate his children. …
David Harsanyi thinks we need better standards for cabinet members.
Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood can’t be serious.
Or, at least, I hope not.
When I had the chance to meet him here at The Post recently, I was fully prepared to endure a healthy dose of rambling about how antiquated, inefficient, money-losing choo-choo trains would replace cars.
One can also be prepared to only laugh on the inside when a Cabinet member asserts, in all earnestness, that cycling our kids to school en masse (and this adult has yet to master the art of driving his kids to school) was the answer to our national congestion problems.
One could even deal with LaHood’s hyperbolic statement, “America is one big pothole,” because as anyone who lives in America knows, this is unqualified bunk. Acting as if everything is falling apart, though, is a rhetorical imperative during stimulus season.
But when LaHood berated me for suggesting that flying in a commercial airplane was a safe mode of transportation, I knew he was perfect for a Cabinet position. …
Jennifer Rubin was watching the Sunday shows. She comments on Colin Powell.
Colin Powell on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday spoke out in favor of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. It was vintage Powell — the Powell who is light on facts, wedded to affirmative action, dismissive of critics, and either factually ill-informed or banking on his audience being so. Asked about Sotomayor, he declared:
She’s from my neighborhood, yes. She seems like a very gifted and accomplished woman. She certainly has an open and liberal bent of mind, but that’s not disqualifying. But she seems to have a judicial record that seems to be balanced and tries to follow the law.
What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor who is announced, and based on one simple tricky but nonetheless case at the Supreme Court has now decided, have her called a racist, a reverse-racist, and she ought to withdraw her nomination because we’re mad at her.
First, there is the trademark provincialism. Obama was “transformative,” as in, how great to have an African American president! And Sotomayor is from his neighborhood. Case closed, right? …
And she noted Joe Biden’s Israel/Iran statements.
With Joe Biden you never know if he is speaking out of school (i.e., candidly revealing what is administration policy) or just making stuff up. On the Sunday circuit he seemed to give Israel the go-ahead to strike Iran: …
And once again Biden is slapped down.
IBD editors watched Biden’s stimulus gaffe.
Mark Steyn Corner post on health care.
Good news from Boulder. The execrable Ward Churchill was denied reinstatement. Eugene Volokh has the story.