Our foreign policy discussion on death by drone hasn’t reached the useful stage. Hasn’t even reached puberty. Assassination by remote is evil, terrorism is evil, but this is no better than trivial:

Is it okay to pour water on a terrorist’s face if it’s dropped from an unmanned drone?
Jim Treacher | Daily Caller

. . Water on the face: “You monsters. It’s the end of the republic!”

Hellfire missile in the face: “Whatever you think is best, Barry.”

These are not serious arguments. Jim Treacher’s an idiot.

For what it’s worth, I’m okay with both waterboarding and taking out terrorists with drone strikes, no matter where they were born. But then, I’m not the one who thinks it all depends on whether or not Bush did it. It’s almost as if lefties don’t really believe the things they harangue the rest of us about. It’s almost as if their only principle is obtaining and maintaining power.

The UAV programs we use to hold on to the presidency. Right. It’s all about you.

Killing Us Softly
Daniel Foster | National Review

Dear Mr. President,

I noticed that your administration leaked a white paper from the Justice Department outlining your purported authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad when you determine them to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaeda or “an associated force.” Since I was planning a trip abroad this spring, I thought I’d write to ask if you would please not kill me while I am there.

Hyuk hyuk!

I should say that I sincerely wish you success with all of your other targeted killings. Honestly, I do. It’s not that I don’t want you to be able to rub out the folks you think need rubbing out, because that’s not my place — and, YOLO, right?

I’m smart! And as if I care.

I won’t pretend it’s an idiot’s place to push the nation into taking stock, morally, of how we behave. These people think ‘Barry’ reads their shit, that’s their shot at sophistication. But they both don’t want the program to succeed and don’t want the techno blasting to stop. Meanwhile, most of everything else Obama does is moral and fine and for that they’d kill him, if they could.

In figuring where to put our hard-earned money down, we should probably watch the behavior of the potential GOP Veeps. Any proudly and publicly shameless attempt to service The Candidate Who Wasn’t There, on anyone’s part, could go a long way in an utterly pathetic contest. Brazen whore-like efforts to catch Project Romney’s attention could be handsomely rewarded, by none so gratefully as a potential president known for his risk aversion, to the point of cowardice. The question is: who is this man? Who is made of The Right Putty?

RICHARD STENGEL: But you would — just to be straight about it — but you would sanction a strike before you would tolerate a nuclear Iran?

MARCO RUBIO: Yes, and I think that we need to begin to prepare people for that. See, I think that the — not just the people of the country, but the people of the world appreciate when their leaders walk them through this process and explain this is what we’re working on, and more importantly, these are the stakes of a nuclear Iran.

And by “Nuclear Iran” (disambiguation: rhetoric, Pam Geller rape fantasy, Air Force Academy officer’s club…), he means the stakes of a presidential campaign. Bravo for the 41 year-old who still hasn’t figured out how his family made the 90 miles from Cuba to America, now a master of the game they call ‘quasi-nuclear power destruction.’ Marco’s opening: All out war. Yoo-hoo, Mittens. Nodding continuously, gravely there, and fapping furiously, the Bolton coven. Heads-up for an apocalypse. This, Senator, counts for vice presidential material.

I recall, back in 2006, the Army expanded their service window to 42 years of age, and I suddenly became eligible to die in Baghdad. If Vice President Marco gets his way, he too will be immediately eligible to die, but in Tehran.

Let’s talk about The Candidate Who Wasn’t There. It’s extraordinary that some polls show Governor TCWWT leading President Obama. Given he can’t say how he’ll fix the economy, doesn’t know how the deficit works, thinks tax cuts are the same as GDP, and figures illegal immigrants really want to leave the country, it’s stunning. Given that he also knows dick-squat about the lives of his fellow Americans, it’s a shocker.

And look, he’s growing weary and defensive with the press. Jeepers, you media people. With your questions, don’t you have anything better to do? Me, I can imagine the next leader of the free world. And I think malaise. Devastating ennui. How much harder than a Mark Halperin interview can a nuclear conflict be?

Halperin: . . what specific skills or policies did you learn at Bain that would help you create an environment where jobs would be created?

Romney: Well that’s a bit of a question like saying, what have you learned in life that would help you lead? [...]

Halperin: But you welcome scrutiny of your business record, is that right?

Romney: . . I spent twenty-five years in the private sector. And that obviously teaches you something that you don’t learn if you haven’t spent any time in the private sector. If you were to say to me, tell me what you learned from your schooling that would help you be a President, it’s like, well, how do I begin going through a list like that?

If Mitt were merely running for congress, you’d say, “What a know-nothing bitch.” But he’s Republican and running for president, so you’re supposed to say, “What a testy block of granite,” or something. Don’t tread on me. Because I’m going to bed, alright?

Now, as usual, when an election approaches, Republicans pull together nicely. And so it goes. Increasingly, Team Wullard will have surrogates and heavy hitters available to do what poor TCWWT can’t. Speak. To humans. On Thursday, this guy did it:

Mitt Romney has always had trouble igniting the Republican base, and apparently some key surrogates have now taken to begging for support.

Bellicose former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who has been informally advising Romney on foreign policy, was the keynote speaker at a GOP fundraiser in Iowa last night where he pleaded, “Even if you’re not at this moment an enthusiastic supporter of Gov. Romney, will you please get yourself together in the next three or four months?”

Let’s get to the straight talk. For the slaughterhouse bunch, GOP unity can be had, but for a price. Bolton’s gravitas wouldn’t lift a finger without some promises. He gets his cuts. A chunk of the administration. Remember this whenever you see evil step up and start talking the wonders of Mitt: John’s doing it because he’s going to run a division of the enterprise. You don’t have to guess anything about the Spineless Man’s presidency.

In typical Bolton fashion, he also told the Polk County Republicans that a dollar spent on defense is better “than a dollar spent with the Department of Health and Human Services.”

You already know. It will be chock-full of Boltons.

Well, the elected and powerful have officially joined the Tea Party. ‘Officially joined’, here, means the new faithful called a press conference last Wednesday to announce a list of House members that have joined the shiny new Tea Party Caucus.

Minnesota’s greatest, Michele Bachmann, and several other patriotic congressmen held a presser today announcing the launch of the House Tea Party Caucus! Her office also released a list of inaugural members — some of whom didn’t know they’d signed up.

Oops. Tea Partiers hazy in the head? I mean, err, huzzahs! I’m sure they’ll be blazing bold new paths and breaking down barriers unilaterally because this is some radical new political shit, indeed. You cannot box this sort of lightning, no sir, not this ball of fire.

Tea Party Caucus members endorse Israeli attack on Iran
Posted By Josh Rogin | Monday, July 26, 2010 – 2:30 PM

Now that the congressional supporters of the Tea Party movement have formed their own caucus, their policy positions are becoming easier to track. Expanding their foray into foreign policy, 21 members of the new caucus have now come out explicitly endorsing Israel’s right to strike Iran’s nuclear program.

Aww, fuck. Ball of Fiery Armageddon, anyone? So much for all that “The government’s out of control!!” And “It won’t listen to the people!!” Now, for the Bachmann Tea Party, it’s “The government needs to start a World War!!” And “It’ll totally be worth another trillion of your hard-earned tax dollars!!”

Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers cosponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.”

That’s great. I’m sure that while Israel launches a massive airstrike against Iran, and the Tea Party Caucus are all excitedly jumping up and down, creaming in their shorts, they’ll also be inventing all sorts of clever strategies to sidestep being sucked into a Middle East conflagration.

Unless, you know, the new House version of the DIVERSE TEA PARTY is merely made up of hysterical far right-wing Republicans. Because those guys would likely happily march thousands of Americans into the maw of Looks Like The Apocalypse in defense of Israel. And isn’t that very minimally governmental? Doesn’t that reek of fiscal responsibility? Isn’t that deeply respectful of individual freedoms?

Well, lookee — here’s a list of those freshly minted Tea Party rebels, and, yes, it’s the usual assholes. Founder Batshit Bachmann loved the trillion dollar wars and George W. Bush so much, she couldn’t stop kissing and hugging the chicken hawk budget buster.

Steve King never met a war he wouldn’t fund but was one of only 11 congress people to vote against the $52 billion in aid appropriated after Hurricane Katrina. Pete Hoekstra called a press conference in 2006 to claim the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction — voila — had been found. Moron. Pete Sessions voted for the Iraq War and for that Tea Party vat of cyanide, The Bailout, but just opposed a few billion bucks for unemployment benefits in the middle of the Great Recession. Paul Broun opposed healthcare reform so vigorously — which will save us money — that he said Socialists “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.”

Right, Paul. Very right-wing, the lot of you. You’re not co-opters of a popular and ill-defined movement merely to get back in power. No, you just care about life and freedoms and responsible public service, so go ahead and vow you’ve always been about limited government. And do that while you want credit for the ‘win’ produced by wasting 100,000-plus lives and a trillion dollars in that unintrusive government program you concocted the last time you ran the show: The War in Iraq.

Old British guys are editors at the National Review. Old British guys who are editors at the National Review criticize Obama. Old British guys who are editors at the National Review criticize Obama’s Russian nuclear arms control agreement. Old British guys are bomb-a-loons:

Saturday, March 27, 2010

America’s Infantile Foreign Policy
by David Pryce-Jones

Call me a cynic, but the latest agreement between the United States and Russia to cut their stocks of nuclear weapons seems nothing over which to expend any enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. It’s a hangover from the dead and distant days of the Cold War.

There’s no need for it? Only in a wingnut’s brain is the end of the Cold War a good reason to stockpile nuclear weapons. I’m not buying it. In my wildest, most apocalyptic nightmare, I have a hard time seeing the need for more than a couple dozen hydrogen bombs, enough to kill millions and millions.

Disarmament mattered when Ronald Reagan faced Mikhail Gorbachev, because it expressed the understanding that mutually assured destruction was not a real policy.

What? It was definitely a real policy. The U.N. reported there were about 40,000 nuclear warheads in existence in 1980.

Each side (the U.S. and Russia) still has at least 2,000 ready weapons and access to maybe 10,000 more. There’s absolutely no need for those appalling numbers of atomic bombs, their only real purpose would be to render humanity extinct.

Russia today is a very different proposition to its forebear, the Soviet Union. To be sure, its leaders, President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, are keen warmongers, and paranoid, so gestures to reassure them are in order . .

Firstly, Russia looks different to the Soviet Union? I can imagine the USSR’s eyesight is a little wonky, likely because it died a few years back. Perhaps he meant ‘in comparison to’ or some such epically interminable phrase.

Secondly, the folks who’d be “keen warmongers, and paranoid” would be Americans, Dave. We’re the only ones who recently invaded an innocent nation and slaughtered more than a hundred thousand people, many of them women and children. Two million more have left Iraq to avoid the carnage that the paranoid Americans started.

Barack Obama evidently has a belief that the whole world ought to be free from nuclear weapons, and the United States has to show them the way. Such a belief is as commendable as it is infantile, a sort of pacifist delusion about the nature of power politics. How are India and Pakistan to be persuaded? What about China, already flexing its muscles as a super-power? A smaller arsenal in the United States will only help convince North Korea and Iran to build a bigger one, to equalise if possible.

We have 10,000 or more weapons. China, the 21st-century superpower juggernaut, has about 200. Iran and North Korea combined may have two or three. But to Pryce-Jones-Waterhouse-Carpetbomb, Obama is about to tilt the numbers dangerously to Kim Jong-Il’s favor.

The new treaty will extend the efforts of the previous one, START I, that expired in December of 2009:

The new agreement is said to further reduce stockpiled weapons by 30%. So, if we have around 8,000 warehoused around the country, that number could drop to 5,600. If we only have 5,000(!), the new number could be 3,500. And those are just the stockpiles, not the weapons ready-to-go.

3,500 + hundreds or thousands more is many more than three. But, to David’s thinking, it’s that sort of precarious reduction that will enable and inspire Ahmadinejad to crank out thousands of nuclear missiles in an effort to “equalise.” Recall, friends, that this is a Senior Editor at the National Review. He’s no ordinary fool.

What the latest treaty does is to confirm John Bolton’s nightmare that Obama is the first post-American president, and under him the United States is deliberately dismantling its status in the world, so that Pax Americana goes out of the window. It’s some consolation that the stock of nuclear weapons is still high, and the next round of disarmament talks is seven years away, by which time the man in the White House must be other than Obama.

John Bolton’s nightmare? John Bolton is a nightmare. He’d start a nuclear war and realize Old British Pax Americana in a heartbeat.