McCain's loss was the fifth by a presidential candidate to have the better war record. (Bush 41 lost to Clinton, as did Dole. Gore and Kerry lost to Bush 43. Now, McCain loses to Obama.)
Obama did gain in the primaries for having declared the Iraq invasion absurd (or something to that effect). In that sense, it would be easy to see his election as an anti-war vote. But I wonder if it is something more.
What if we're beyond the anti-war and pro-war protests that marked the politics of the baby boomers and into something beyond that, a world where the first order of business is not to allocate half of the discretionary budget to defense or to get caught up in the false promise of beating UAVs into desktop computers? What if the argument between hawks and peaceniks seems as quaint to modern voters as the argument between advocates of bell bottoms and crew cuts?
[Now if R World had an editor, he would point out that this is a largely meaningless post. Or would he? Hm. I'm going to stay with it anyway, in spite of my imaginary editor's misgivings about the possibility that it says very little.]
3 comments:
I have a dream...of UAV's being beaten into desktop computers. Sounds like a great dream, even if it's Ron's dream.
This business of 50% of our discretionary budget going into defense is nuts! It's the road to bankruptcy. Our enemies don't need to attack us, they just need to wait until we spend ourselves into the ground.
Even if we cut defense back significantly, we'd still be twice as powerful as any two countries in the world. That's good enough for me.
LH,
I still can't figure why we need to spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. (Unless, of course, we dream of ruling the rest of the world.)
Ron-O: you know what I'm going to say about LH's and your thoughts and figures. Neither of you has the slightest notion of what you're talking about. Nothing personal. BTW, the argument is about preparedness vs lethargy.
LH: UAVs into desktops; very colorful. Next time I'm out at Creech looking at a Predator I'll try to see it momentarily as Alienware.
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