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October 15, 2004
A lot to look forward to By Tom Smith This is pretty good: You also have to ask yourself, who is going to carry out Kerry's multilateral approach? And on that score, things simply get worse. A Kerry White House would mean the Madeleine Albright B Team moving into senior foreign policy positions. And, with the notable exception of Richard Holbrooke (his hair may be on fire, but he gets things done), this would be disastrous. These are the same folks who fiddled for 8 years on counter terror, negotiated a terrifyingly naive nuke deal with North Korea, and generally treat foreign policy as a rhetorical exercise. This is a team who has demonstrated, in past position of influence, an alarming propensity to get rolled by their foreign counterparts. Let's pick just two: Susan Rice? Jamie Rubin?! Are you serious?? During her sojourn as assistant secretary for Africa in Albright's State Department, Rice had to be consistently bailed out of trouble by career diplomats. As for Rubin, he is anti-gravitas. He's Edwards-lite. It comes from a response to DD, who is going to vote for Kerry for pretty unpersuasive reasons. It would be interesting to try to articulate how it is that smart people go wrong on political issues. When smart, young people go wrong, it often seem to me a sort of naivite, as if there is some workable way to fight terrorism that does not involve many, large bombs and lots of scary guys. For older people, I think more often it's that they've ossified into some ideological view of the world. I really hope Kerry loses. At this point I would rather have Hillary as President than Kerry. She would be more of a man in foreign policy than he would be. She may be a shrieking socialist, but at least she's genuinely mean. I think once she figured out what is going on in the Middle East, she would be a terror. She scares me, and I'm not even a terrorist. Whether the economy would survive her efforts to ruin it, is another question, however. Bush is no Reagan, but at least he is tested. Kerry, I fear, will do his silly thing with our 'allies,' and not realize what a fool is being made of him. He is too much of a fool, I fear, to realize it. I also fear Kerry will follow a cut and run policy in Iraq, which really will be disastrous. I suppose the upside is that if Kerry is elected, there will be much that is comic, in a dark sort of way. |