foreign policy

Eric Alterman points out that Rupert Murdoch (see Fox News) has now gotten hold of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). He already had the editorial pages of the great old paper under his wing. Now he’s appointed a “right-wing curmudgeon” by the name of Gerald Baker in charge of the paper’s news pages. Baker thinks Obama is a “dangerous left winger” as he explains here. Here’s a sample:

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

Though Mr Obama has done a good job, as all recent serious Democrats have done, of emphasising his belief in American virtues, his record and his programme suggest he is firmly in line with this wing of his party.

HEY! See my previous post! ha ha

Well, seriously, I’d say that that wing of the party is a pretty good wing! It’s just what we need to bring the USofA screaming into the 21rst century and get our economy moving again, and morality brought back into the world! GO BARACK GO!

Oh boy, some more wonky boring stuff out of SeevsPlace. ha ha Well, what the hell, I think I’ll make a post on this anyways. I just got through listening to what I thought was a very interesting and truthful, as against the bullshitty “truthiness” that we usually get on our media here in the good old USofA, discussion by two knowledgeable persons, as against bullshit artist, mainly Republican, politicians and gutless media persons! It’s refreshing to hear people give facts and opinions uncolored by the usual, oh boy we may have to bomb Iran they’re bad guys we’re good guys better vote Republican things are either black or white and they’re black in Iran so we better bomb ‘em right away, vote McCain! ha ha?

Gary Sick (unfortunate name?) of Columbia University is one of the most reasonable and knowledgeable foreign policy experts around, a great personage who has written many books (none of which I’ve read) and the other guy is John Hostettler, a former Republican congressman who was against the Iraq war. So, this isn’t a case of the usual on-the-one-hand on-the-other-hand type discussion, typical of our gutless, corporation controlled media unwilling to point out what’s reasonable and what isn’t. Anyway, this video is a real good discussion of where we are, where the world is, in terms of us, the US, and Iran. The interviewer is a reasonable guy by the name of Riz Khan, not your typical smarmy Tom Brokaw type, which is refreshing in itself! Hey, if you’ve got over 12 minutes, but less than 13, to waste, take a look at this thing.

No, he’s not taking an aphrodisiac to avoid choking later on a Viagra pill, he’s just confused about who Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain, is. He evidently thinks he’s one of those South American bad guys. Josh Marshall proves this quite nicely in this video of the confused repartee between McCain and an interpreter from a Spanish language radio station:

Josh points out that Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy adviser and full fledged neoconservative, says McCain was not confused at all, and was simply refusing to commit to a White House meeting with Zapatero as part of policy. So, who is running the McCain campaign, McCain or his handlers? Does McCain know what’s going on? Does the rain in Spain fall mainly on McCain? (I read that on somebody’s blog comment today.)

Here’s Ron Paul on Meet The Press yesterday, December 23, 2007. If only he weren’t for elimination of the income tax! His foreign policy, which he gets into in the later part of this interview is right on! Listen to Tim Russert try to trick him into saying he supports Al Qaeda. It doesn’t work!

UPDATE: Josh Marshall has a worthwhile post on the Ron Paul alternative universe here.