Oh, the state of things. Where to start? <\/p>\n
It appears that we’re on the way to pulling the same thing in Iran that we did in Iraq. I was half joking with some friends today that I’d be willing to bet that we’ll have attacked Iran in some for or fashion in the next 18 months. Seymour Hersh has a recent article<\/a> in the New Yorker that basically says we’re gearing up. I realize that he has an axe to grind against this administration, but I don’t have any other reason to doubt him.<\/p>\n Christopher Albritton<\/a> has a relevant post<\/a> from last week. Here’s my favorite part:<\/p>\n Be sure and mention all this to the war-boosters, who are, dorkily, coating their fingers with blue ink as a sign of solidarity “with the Iraqi people.” Hm. I don’t remember them doing that for Afghanistan… Why don’t they just ‘fess up and say they’re giving the finger to us doubters? This is not solidarity; it’s a taunt along the lines of, “We were right, nyah nyah!” instead of a celebration of democracy. Make no mistake: Sunday was not a validation of Bush’s policies. Most Arab states would like to have democracy, yes, but not at the barrel of a gun, which is how it came here. If the choice is being invaded, occupied and force-fed controversial elections that might lead to civil war versus working at democratic reforms at their own pace and in their own way, I suspect most Arabs would choose the latter. And who could blame them? Iraq is not an example to emulate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Allegations of the GOP and\/or the White House either paying reporters\/commentators or making up reports continue (remember that fake Medicare report that was circulated to many local news outlets?). Apparently, there’s been a fake reporter from a fake news service lobbing softball questions to Scott McClellan during white house press conferences (JuliusBlog<\/a>, DKos<\/a> and others).<\/p>\n Lastly, I head this story<\/a> on Morning Edition on the way to work this morning. It touched on many themes relevant to current foreign and domestic affairs: China’s rising influence on the world, the inevitable gap of supply and demand for oil and their effects on our foreign policy. Of course, I’m 100% certain that, for the next four years, we’ll do exactly the wrong thing, screwing us for years to come. I hate to resort to the old parental cliche, but I’m really scared for what things will be like in 25 years for my kids. Am I just succombing to the fear mongering or is it really that bad? My suspicion is the latter, but I’m not generally the most optimistic person.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh, the state of things. Where to start? It appears that we’re on the way to pulling the same thing in Iran that we did in Iraq. I was half joking with some friends today that I’d be willing to bet that we’ll have attacked Iran in some for or fashion in the next 18 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-2-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3fonJ-1n","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechunk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}