Let me begin by acknowledging that the globe is a complicated place, and that when vexing questions get insulted with answers that are too facile, then those answers should be rejected for being, um, too facile. At the same time, when certain errors (especially in economics) are almost universally embraced, the results are consistently the same kind of bad, and the solutions can be consistently simple, at least comparatively.
Cultures like ours are not overthrown — when they go down, it is almost always suicide. And when crises of various kinds arise, our handlers almost always opt for managing and massaging them, instead of solving them. Crises are to the feddle gummit what gasoline is to your car, only they get their crises a lot more cheaply than you can get your gas anymore.
One example would be the war on terror. I do believe that Islamic fundawhackjobs do present a serious threat of some magnitude, and it is not a made-up one. The Religion of Peace has generated thousands of terrorist attacks since 911, and so there you go. But I don’t measure the true nature of the threat to our way of life from some color-coded warning system, for pity’s sake. I (and you) should measure how threatened we actually are by how explicit profiling gets at airports.
Lots of people complain about the irrationality of screening your 83-year-old granny for hidden bombs, along with an assiduous insistence on treating Muhammad Hussein like he was Sven Svenson from Minnesota. Lots of people see how crazy this is, and attribute it to mindless bureaucracy in action, and there is certainly some of that. But I use it as my very own personal system of determining how seriously our handlers believe us to be actually threatened. Just keep your eyes open as you walk through life. What they do is louder than what they say.
Another example: the approved memorial for Flight 93 in Pennsylvania is a gigantic red crescent oriented to Mecca. Ponder the implications of that for a bit. Are the folks in charge concerned? Maybe they should be, but they do not appear to be.
But all that is not my point here, but is rather just an illustration of the principle. What you say is the issue is one thing, and whether you act as though that is the issue is quite another. The Left does this very same thing also, and their concerns about America’s neocon foreign policy (which I share) reveal this. Actually, I think I really am concerned about America’s growing hegemony, and (to my point) I don’t believe the Left is at all. The “no blood for oil” chanters and placard wavers are thundering and outrageous hypocrites on this issue, and here is why.
If they really objected to us being dependent on foreign energy sources, along with the resultant need to protect those sources of energy militarily, then those who are so concerned about “no blood for oil” would be adamantine in their insistence that we bring it all home. They would say, “Why do we have to go to the Middle East?” We have coal, we have natural gas, we have reserves on the north slope, we have oil in shale deposits, we have nuclear, we have solar and wind. Let’s just lift all government restrictions on domestic energy production — better yet, let’s create tax incentives (as in, virtually no taxes) for those companies that develop new energy sources domestically.
And when the Left complains, as they will, that this kind of thing would obstruct their view, or whatever the lofty reason is, then that is the time to nod sagely and say, “Ah, I got it. You’re one of them blood-for-oil johnnies.”
It is not enough to be for peace, as I am. It is not enough to realize that energy entanglements all around the world mean military entanglements will follow, as I do. No country of our size and productivity is going to quit all that without a plan.
Sarah Palin is (as it appears to me) a default neocon in foreign policy. But when it comes to energy issues, which is why the international issues are really complicated, she is an expert, and she is enthusiastically in favor of building, drilling, piping, refining, developing, and researching. And that makes her the peace candidate.