Author: capcom

The election in Iraq is a success to this point. The large numbers of Iraqis that turned up at the polls shows that I was mistaken when I wrote earlier that the Iraqis may not be ready for, or even want, democracy. They turned lives that had been lived under a brutal dictator, without a nascent movement for democracy, into a clamor for democratic self-rule within a matter of months of the beginning of the American occupation. Many people were surprised at the fervor shown by so many Iraqis not just on election day, but in the months leading up to it. The political mood in Iraq can easily be characterized as one of vigorous debate. Continue reading “Ends and Means”

The Republicans are a pompous group of blowhards who revel in their power by smoking cigars and exhaling mirth in the direction of their vanquished foes, the Democrats. They are the perfect, unrestrained example of the sore winner. Their gloating, their absolute belief that providence has led them out of the shadows of American politics to lead this nation towards the bright future of conservatism, is an amazing contradiction for a party that professes faith above reason. The Republicans are guilty of the sin of pride. Continue reading “Don’t Be So Damned Smug”

The president has overreached.

Ever since he outlined his plans for reshaping the future of Social Security, he can’t buy good press. Every day at least a dozen articles hit the pages of newspapers across the country and on the internet, lambasting his misguided attempts to gut the most popular government program in the history of the country. Liberal pundits, op-ed columnists, reporters, commentators, even the publicly-expressed doubts of Republican senators and representatives, have all served to make this a difficult time for the Bush administration. Today, in fact, conservative legend Alan Greenspan cast doubt on the president’s Social Security plan in his regular testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Mr. Greenspan has a large amount of credibility in this country and abroad when it comes to money, and it is encouraging to see him, maybe, throw off the mantle of being a Bush yes-man and get back to the business of fiscal responsibility. But praising Alan Greenspan is not my reason for putting pen to paper today, as it were. Continue reading “Hopping on the Bandwagon”

The cries have begun in earnest. Almost two years into a war that was supposed to last for only a few short months, talk of an exit from Iraq has become commonplace in the arena of public debate. Continue reading “No Exit Strategy”

Yesterday, the second term of President George W. Bush began. There is no doubt that the focus of his administration’s foreign policy in the next four years will continue to be the spread of globalization. Continue reading “Globalization Marches Forward”

I spent a week this holiday season in Ohio. I grew up there. I still have family and friends there. I went back to celebrate Christmas and then the New Year, but since this was my first return to the land of my youth since the summer, I wanted to find out what went wrong in November. Continue reading “A Holiday in the Midwest”

The latest estimates from the pentagon place the number of insurgents in Iraq at around 15,000, a tenth of the 150,000 on the American side. Step back and think about that number for a second. If 15,000 is an accurate assessment of the amount of men our military is fighting, then I would not wish to contemplate what would happen were we facing an enemy equal in number to our own forces. Continue reading “The Invisible Enemy”

Lest we continue to get carried away over the notion of red states and blue states, I have made this map of the results of the election that present the results in less of a simplified manner. Continue reading “No More Red and Blue”

In her book, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman begins chapter 17, “In 1915 a book about the invasion of his country was published in exile by Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914 had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that were then believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with this dedication: ‘He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly a pacifist…For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomes diminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.’ Continue reading “Election Day”