George Le Masurier, Publisher
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Well, this is a fine mess.
Suppose that the Environmental Protection Agency were to admit offhandedly that the fluoridation of water had only modest communist mind-control effects. Or the United Nations were to concede it has been running fleets of black helicopters over American cities, but only in the course of conducting extensive goodwill tours.
Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple of times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Rodham Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as the spokeswoman at the State Department.
Along with a boosted Buick LeSabre, another incident listed on a crime report Sunday in Arlington County, Va., was a creepy attack by a man on a woman.
The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It’s about control. America doesn’t control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn’t establish effective control.
At this point the economic case for austerity — for slashing government spending even in the face of a weak economy — has collapsed. Claims that spending cuts would actually boost employment by promoting confidence have fallen apart. Claims that there is some kind of red line of debt that countries dare not cross have turned out to rest on fuzzy and to some extent just plain erroneous math.
For all the armchair generals advocating U.S. military intervention in Syria, I have a few questions:
Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination.
During the 2012 campaign, the president and his top advisers liked to make the argument that if he was re-elected, the “fever” would break. Washington, D.C., would no longer be the graveyard of progress, the crypt of consensus. Once dystopian Republicans accepted that President Barack Obama was not running again, they would start cooperating with him.
Boom.