Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Infantile Nation

by Patrick J. Buchanan on AntiWar

Does this generation possess the gravitas to lead the world?

"Considering the hysteria that greeted the request of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at Ground Zero, the answer is no.

"What is it about this tiny man that induces such irrationality?

"Answer: He is president of a nation that is a "state sponsor of terror," is seeking nuclear weapons, and is moving munitions to the Taliban and insurgents in Iraq.

"But Libya was a "state sponsor of terror," and Col. Ghadafi was responsible for Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie massacre of school kids coming home for Christmas. And President Bush secretly negotiated a renewal of relations in return for Ghadafi giving up his nuclear program and compensating the families of the victims of that atrocity. Has Ahmadinejad ever committed an act of terror like this?"

  • ... but Nixon went to Moscow
  • Nixon went to China to toast Mao
  • Eisenhower met with Khrushchev
  • Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis
  • Holocaust deniers meet regularly here in the US
  • but somehow Ahmadinejad, with no air force or navy to speak of, no nuclear weapons (Israel has 3,000 thermonuclear warheads and will pave the entire nation of Iran with glass - the product of sand melted by extreme heat - in a heartbeat if they feel threatened) ... somehow Ahmadinejad is a real major threat as far as the Republicans are concerned.

Read the rest here ...

My comment: Does this generation possess the gravitas to lead the world? The answer seems to be a resounding no and will continue to be as long as those who lead us do so by using fear, the demonization of the enemy-du-jour and dream of world domination through military might.

We have dealt with real threats in the past but we are no longer capable of doing so. We have lost our sense of proportion and perspective. We have become, under Republican Reich-wing leadership, a nation of little children who have become afraid of shadows on the wall. Over the last 65 years we've gone from the "Greatest Generation" to this ... and it looks like its downhill from here as far as being a light unto the world and a beacon of freedom. We have gone from the example to which every one aspired and become the vision of what no one wants to be. We have taken the good will from around the world, resulting from fostering peace through the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps and a thousand-and-one humanitarian acts around the globe and squandered it ... and in seven short years, we've become the preemptive, rogue state we'd warned the world about for three generations.

I rarely agree with Pat Buchanan but this time around, I have to admit, he has a point.

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