Bloodless Coup

Random Thoughts

No time. Very busy.

1. The Democratic convention wants to make me stab myself with a dull screwdriver. There isn't anything passionate and/or interesting that I've heard in excerpts of any of the speeches (including Hilary, though she wasn't bad). After eight years of Bush, and McCain acting like an insane and ignorant gunslinger, you'd think that a mass of Democrats might manage to make a few points. They haven't.

1A. I heard the Governor of Massachusetts for ten minutes last night. If he ever goes near a microphone again, someone tackle him and lock him in a janitor's closet for a week. I thought my brain was going to gnaw its way out of my skull I was so bored.

2. When did McCain go completely around the bend? As best I can tell, his foreign policy consists of a more bellicose version of the present President's foreign policy.

3. When did McCain completely throw out his morals? His response to just about everything seems to be "I was a POW." I respect the service McCain put in, but my own position is evolving towards the idea that military service is not necessarily beneficial to a politicians ability to conduct foreign or domestic policy. It can be (see: Clark, likely Petraeus in the future), but just being an grunt in uniform doesn't give you any greater insight into foreign policy (or dealing with, say, Iran) than slinging burgers at McDonalds.

4. Russia is going to keep the parts of Georgia they want, and looks to be moving into position (literally) to keep Georgia weak. While I still don't think there is much we can do to cheaply punish Russia for the initial invasion, we might want to re-think our options if Russia is just going to keep troops in what are clearly undisputed parts of Georgia. That's a precedent I don't think we want to set. On the other hand, I have no idea what we can do about it.

5. I just added the National Review's "The Corner" to my RSS feed to see what those folks were thinking about (everybody always links to something one of them says, so I thought I'd take a look). That might be the most insane set of ideological ramblings since Charles Manson.

6. Is the fact that China put a big national push on to (A) have a (boringly) flawless Olympics and (B) win more gold medals than anyone else supposed to impress me? Is there anything at all that's relevant about this?

6A. I think I'm more scared (long term) of Chinese nationalism than I am of Iranian nuclear weapons, Al-Qaeda terrorism, Russian resurgence and North Korean missiles combined.

6B. The Chinese had an officially designated "protest zone", but anyone who applied to protest got "re-educated"? I understand there can be cultural differences and misunderstandings, but someone seriously didn't read the book. It made them look silly.

7. I think media coverage of the Presidential race has reached a new nadir. There isn't anything particular I can point to (maybe the constant barrage of "Hilary versus Obama" issues about the convention: don't they understand that the fight is over? Obama won, and the rest is window dressing and completely irrelevant to everything. Hilary delegates or voters aren't going to vote for McCain in any significant numbers...Does the US media really not understand that?), but they all seem to be morons of the highest order. At this point, I just plain can't stand to watch any network news for any length of time.

That's all I can think of.

Posted by baltar at August 27, 2008 04:12 PM | TrackBack | Posted to