Category: World

Via Pejman comes an entertaining article about the benefits of a more isolationist US:

A U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East will cause chaos, of course. Then again, a U.S. intervention in the Middle East has caused chaos already. And, during those periods of history when the U.S. was neither intervening in nor withdrawing from the Middle East, there was . . . chaos. The situation is akin to the famous complaint women have against men: failure to acknowledge that not every problem can be fixed. Sometimes the best thing is just a little sympathy. America had everyone’s sympathy after the World Trade towers were attacked. We can get that sympathy back if we limit our foreign policy objectives to whining.

Even the traditional media can be right twice a day. ABC news has an article about the decline of the main threats to a peaceful and democratic Iraq.

I heard the phrase “total and utter disconnect from reality” applied to Bush the other day, and I could only think “takes one to know one”. I suppose if your only source of information is the major media you might actually have an excuse for this attitude.

Thank God for the blogosphere, is all I can say. Gigabytes of raw data, which you can filter yourself, unencumbered by the covert censorship of traditional media editing, which is made doubly perverse by the pretense of objectivity. Once you’ve read a few blog entries, you know exactly what the author’s biases are, and if you’re unsure about the facts of something, Google will soon deliver hundreds more sources for you to compare.

You really should be reading Lileks every day, but today’s bleat is an extra good one.

After the Gnat survives a grocery-cart accident, Lileks expresses the frustration that many people are feeling about, well, not really current events, but the media’s — and the anti-American world’s &mdash spin:

If anyone thinks Europe is “three or four more times as democratic as America” he is living in a dream world. A world where Russia lectures us about treatment of Muslim detainees, France is a model of nation-building, the Patriot act muzzles the press, and China is deeply concerned about the sovereignty of conquered nations.

Read it all.

If you want a far more accurate summary of current events than you’ll get from the traditional media, read Den Beste‘s recent post “The Truth Is…“.

What with the recent discovery of chemical weapons munitions in Iraq, and increasingly well-documented links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, the “Bush Lied!” crowd is rapidly losing legs to stand on.

And now Fallujah is calmer and Sadr is backing down.

Rope-a-dope, baby. Come election time I’m sure there will be campaign ads capitalizing on all the things Bush was right about in the end.