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October 15, 2007

Questions That Should Be Asked

Justin Katz

Jay Nordlinger poses a series of questions that ought to be asked of the current crop of presidential candidates:

Putin's latest attacks on U.S. missile defense remind me of something: Do Democratic presidential candidates agree with those attacks? Sympathize with them? And, if one of them is elected president, are our efforts to defend ourselves, and our allies, against missiles off — dead, suspended until the next Republican president?

Will someone ask Hillary & Co. about this?

His latest Impromptus column also makes me feel a little better about not getting into a certain Ivy League graduate program (despite grades, recommendation, GED, etc.):

The Nobel peace committee is not so much a peace committee as a standard left-wing pressure group — sending these Mickey Mouse "messages." They're like the board of the MacArthur Foundation, or the English department of Brown University or something — there is no connection between what they do and quality. It's just straight politics, or, more accurately, ideology.
Comments

"Putin's latest attacks on U.S. missile defense remind me of something: Do Democratic presidential candidates agree with those attacks? Sympathize with them?"

Oh! Oh! I know this....

All Democrats (=liberals=socialists) hate America and seek her destruction. Therefore, yes, any effort to defend America and our allies is dead if we elect a Democrat president.

Posted by: Thomas at October 15, 2007 9:05 PM

Sorry, Thomas you're wrong.

Mainstream Democratic foreign policy ideology embodies two key principles ...

  1. "Realism" in the foreign policy sense, which holds that all states inevitably align themselves against the most powerful state in the system, and
  2. A more visceral, 60s style feeling that something about America is not good for the rest of the world.
The result is a belief that the existence of U.S. will make otherwise peaceful states act aggressively, unless the U.S. constantly undertakes highly-visible appeasement actions to prove that it is not a threat.

The colloquial name for this fusion is "blame America first".

This ideology has tended to lead many Dems to believe that it is in the best interests of the American people to unilaterally disarm and to cede as much control of our foreign policy as possible to international institutions, so that other states will see that we are not a threat, and therefore not be "forced" to act aggressively.

Posted by: Andrew at October 16, 2007 9:01 AM

Why does Bush invite Putin to Kennebunkport for the full tush-kissing treatment when Putin probably poses greater danger to us than those cartoon characters in Iran and Venezeula?

Posted by: Rhody at October 16, 2007 11:10 AM