Two news items caught my attention more or less simultaneously, and taken together, they constitute a test of my oft-repeated determination to support the lesser of two evils while keeping alive my fantasy of a just and decent world. The first was a report that Rand Paul is moving aggressively to position himself for a 2016 presidential run with a whirlwind tour of Iowa [I am trying to include as many cliches of political commentary as I can squeeze into one sentence]. Bizarre as it has seemed, the quirky self-credentialed boy opthalmologist is emerging as the front-runner in the clown-car Republican race.
The second item was a report that Hillary Clinton is criticizing Obama's foreign policy from the neo-con hawkish pro-Israeli side of the spectrum, thus staking out a position that puts her well to the right of Richard Nixon, Dwight David Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush, among others.
A Rand Paul presidency would be a disaster not to be contemplated. Only someone drunk on the dialectic could imagine that America, by becoming unimaginably worse, would somehow heb itself auf and emerge on the road to revolution. But a Clinton presidency would be -- perhaps I should say will be -- a nightmare of its own. She will certainly choose her economic advisors from Wall Street, as Obama did, and pursue the patented Clinton policy of "triangulation" even were she to be blessed with a Democratic Congress.
If things play out as I suspect they will, my eighties will come to an end before we are quits with this particular nightmare. All I can do is keep taking my morning walk and hope that my nineties will be better. I don't know how long I can keep this up, folks.
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4 comments:
To be candid, I would vote for Rand Paul over Clinton (presuming I felt compelled to actually vote - which is rare). The benefit of a strong libertarian candidate like Paul is that activism can flourish, and people overseas can stop being droned without due process. Under Obama - and any future president wielding his NSA - activism is a terrifying experience, and activists are suffering overwhelmingly severe punishments.
This is but one small fish in the pond.
http://www.vice.com/read/new-laws-would-make-protesting-environmental-devastation-terrorism
I wonder if you are ever tempted to remain in France on one of your many visits. I'm not familiar with the politics there.
The real impediment is that our apartment is 330 square feet! That is a trifle small for more than six weeks or so. The politics are imn some sense better, but France has massive problems of its own that would dismay me if I allowed them to. On the upside, in Paris butter is good for you. It is a strange biological fact. :)
Mmmmm ... le beurre....
Do you have an opinion of what country "gets it right" (or comes closest at least)? American leftists often point to northern Europe for example.
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