Sunday, May 22, 2011

Thinking and Rethinking About Stuff

So, the candidates are dropping like flies. Getting so, we will need a program to tell us who’s left and who's next to go. I wonder what’s going on? It would seem that, just as a candidate wannabe get’s rolling, someone out there snarls and the candidate drops out, generally whining about how they are doing it for “family reasons.”  Can’t help noticing that they never drop out of Fox News for “family reasons.”
Pretty soon, we’ll be left with a lapsed Catholic who serially cheats on his various wives, a Mormon who thought it was principled for people in his home state to have health care, but socialism if the broader American public is to have health care, and that crazy lady from Minnesota. One assumes that Sarah Barbie is simply making too much money on the lecture circuit (soon she’ll be making as much as our failed President Shrub). The Republican convention promised to be a lot more entertaining a few months ago. This is going to make comedians all over the country have to work a lot harder over the coming months.  Well, so long as the Newtster is in the ring, we will have high comedy all the time.
But on another less comedic front, a recent article by Noam Chomsky on the assassination of Usama bin Laden caused me to rethink my sheer glee at his death. Chomsky is not opposed to bin Laden being brought to justice, but he argues strongly that neither bin Laden nor we got justice. Instead, we got an assassination.  Given our past stance on war criminals, i.e., the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after “the last good war” our current rush to judgment seems at best at odds with our own history.  Like many, I applauded the attack on Pakistan, and the killing. Now, Chomsky makes me doubt the wisdom of such an approach.  It does in fact resemble the George Bush cowboy approach to international diplomacy—“shoot first and ask questions later.”
I’m still glad that bin Laden is dead, much as I was glad that Hitler was dead. Still, we need to be mindful in such matters, that we haven’t become the very people we despise.

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