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It seems that we share a similar domestic outlook e.g. sound money, anti-federalism, anti-16th ammendment. Our real differnce is our take on foreign policy. I am all for a strong defense I just don't believe in a strong offense when no one has attacked us. Some think we can secure our liberties through foreign meddling but I see that as jeapordizing our liberties by making enemies where none need exist. Face it, we are the most powerful economy and the largest market - it is adventageous for others to deal with us. We are militarily strong and geographically protected. Our fights, logically, should be few. Unfortunately we have been in far more wars than there should have been. That thought saddens me.

While I am Catholic, I respect a useful operational concept of Orthodox and Chassidic Jews: Building a fence around Torah. They so revere Torah that they not only strive to obey it but to reach well beyond it, obeying an even stricter concept in many ways lest they get sloppy and inadvertently violate Torah itself.

Likewise it is better to fight our enemies in the Middle East on their turf at the risk of our soldiers and theirs but also with any civilian risk being theirs and any damage to property being theirs as well than to ignore their vows of destroying us, our religions, our civilization, our way of life and wait for the airliners full of our folks to be hijacked in our country and sent against White House, Congress, World Trade Center and Pentagon. If there must be a next time here, Mecca would make a good target along with the Dome of the Rock, Medina and anyone vowing vengeance. They should know that in advance as an incentive to corral Muhammed el Rootie Kazootie and the mad bombers. Enough of this.

You and I must have very different reactions to the goings on in Israel (the canary in the coal mine). I want these guys done BEFORE they start blowing up school buses here. If they will muder Israeli children, they will murder our children. In our world, we are NOT geographicaly protected as once we were, if at all. If we give up internationalist pretensions of how good our victory will be for them and concentrate on interventionist strikes that are good for us. We are not making enemies. The Islamonuts (not all Muslims) are our enemies and have been for a very long time and will be until they are crushed.

As to offense, few people of whatever persuasion had the effrontery or brazen nerve to hijack soviet airliners in the heyday of the KGB much less fly them into the Kremlin. They were far too feared for that. Soviet ambassadors were not assassinated. Likewise. Other than in the foolish overextension of trying to occupy Afghanistan, few soviet military barracks were attacked or soviet personnel. Likewise. As Macchiavelli observed, given a choice, it is better to be feared than to be loved. However unpopular, that is still the practical view. The UN, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, their collective Belgian and Luxembourgian poodles, and what not can fry ice. So can the UN. If we do some good along the way, it is nothing to be ashamed of.