Posted on 06/05/2008 7:17:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober — if not grim — assessment of where we are.
Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When Election Day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.
This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world — Iran — is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.
The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran’s nuclear bomb will be the terrorists’ nuclear bomb — and they can make 9/11 look like child’s play.
All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand — however outrageous those demands might be — or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.
All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.
Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.
They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.
They have already telegraphed their intention to dictate to us with such things as Osama bin Laden’s threats to target those places in America that did not vote the way he prescribed in the 2004 elections. He could not back up those threats then but he may be able to in a very few years.
The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s — and our “leaders” and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the “leaders” and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.
We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again.
What does this have to do with today’s presidential candidates? It has everything to do with them.
One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear— or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.
There is one big difference between now and the 1930s. Although the West’s lack of military preparedness and its political irresolution led to three solid years of devastating losses to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, nevertheless when all the West’s industrial and military forces were finally mobilized, the democracies were able to turn the tide and win decisively.
But you cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back. You cannot even sustain the will to resist for three years when you are first broken down morally by threats and then devastated by nuclear bombs.
Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes president of the United States next January.
At a time like this, we do not have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for some third party candidate to show our displeasure — at the cost of putting someone in the White House who is not up to the job.
Senator John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, Senator McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.
On the contrary, he has paid a huge price for resisting our enemies, even when they held him prisoner and tortured him. The choice between him and Barack Obama should be a no-brainer.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
That’s right. We are in peril and we shouldn’t give a hang about what any other country thinks of us. Amen.
Not good enough anymore, not for me.
Source please.
Thanks FARS. A child stomping their foot, [ to the 'n'th degree ], would be the perfect 'eye example' of that stubborn mindset.
Well, anyone who actually likes either of them should have their head examined. The question is does the risk of a nuclear Iran in the short term outweigh the death of the Republican party, and fracturing the coalition of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and proponents of forward and proactive military power projection that came to fruition under Reagan
McCain is a danger. As a previous poster noted he can put together coalitions better than Obama, or President Bush. He has no respect for the first or second amendments. He is demonstrably corrupt.
“Vote John McCain! He's better than a radical, race baiting Chicago machine elitist with a nut-case pastor”!
Yeah, great campaign slogan we got in 2008.
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“We’ll get those Germans if they don’t treat the 101st nicely as POWs!”
- many on FR these days
[- many on FR these days]
We are fractured into many segments now. Gone are the days of common sense right or wrong, good or bad.
Now there are a hundred degrees of how good good is and how bad bad is. Right and wrong has lost meaning to many.
The “Best Buy Return” story is just amazing. I thought Target was bad but this beats all!
I’m going to email it out to friends and family.
The guilty who are made to feel or indoctrinated to feel this way will vote for the black man because he is black and it is fashionable, the intelligent will vote on substance,charactor,experience and judgement. Many of us do not see color, if Obama was a conservative he would have my vote!
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I’ll not post my thoughts on the Perot-Paul political geniuses on FR and elsewhere
All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.
Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.
He's right. It's who they are... They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.
Lol, that might be wise!!
I've experienced that too. With some of the types that usually never worry...
Senator John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, Senator McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.
Sowell's right on this...
It’s been a real eye-opener to re-visit the classics after all these years. It’s occurred to me that there were quite a few Greeks and Romans who understood very well what was happening - and what was about to happen - to their own cultures.
Livy also said in the introduction to his history of Rome that, “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self indulgence has brought us through every sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”
Men like Livy could surely see it coming, and by all lights, they were dead bang on the money.
It’s become so fashionable in popular culture to repudiate in the crudest terms the virtues and strengths that once made us free. Our prosperity has allowed us to forget that our freedom was on many occasions a near-run thing. Our prosperity has allowed arrogant, malignat narcissits like Obam and the Clintons to rise to postiions of power and influence. And the sense of entitlement that has accompanied that prosperity accounts for the cheering masses behind such public figures.
There is price to be paid for this, and history and human nature tells us that it will be paid in rivers of blood.
One Chinese general made a comment about losing a half billion as acceptable. However historically the communists, even with the Soviets, were for the most part not that insane since they were aware of their own mortality (although there was one time it got close in Eastern Europe, until Colonel Kuklinski leaked the Warsaw Pact warplan to the CIA). With Nutjob however, he views being annihilated as a quick trip to Paradise. Except the final destination is going to be a little warm. Then again maybe he likes the smell of sulfur.
The clouds are boiling on the horizon...but we yet have some time to prevent, or shield outselves from the wors gales.
There was talk today by McCain that Crist could be a good VP. I tell you, if he stepped over that line and named any pro-abort individual as his VP, it is the day he wholly loses my vote. I am willing to hold my nose in order to defeat Obama...but I will not step over that line.
One day I will stand before my God and account for my use of this great responsibility of liberty and my vote. I must stand before HIM and have a clear conscience when it comes to such innocent life.
I will still vote in the local elections in such a horrid case...and I would probably vote for the American Independent Candidate for President...and also hasten my own preparations for the coming storm. I believe once both major parties cross that line...even as millions still hold against it and fight it...that much of the Hand of Providence will be withdrawn from us.
Back to school for you.
After a long deadlock, the first results of SALT I came in May 1971, when an agreement was reached over ABM systems. Further discussion brought the negotiations to an end on May 26, 1972 in Moscow when Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.....
ps: I voted for Nixon!
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