Back in 2008, the choice of future foreign policies was clear: An old prisoner of war known to have a temper who joked about bombing regional superpowers for fun and who might actually have been just a little crazy and a professor.
Well, we know what we elected.
Our enemies might not have respected McCain, but they probably would have feared him a little bit. And let’s just cut the crap about multipartitism or international organization and treaties and soft power. At the very root level, the least lawabiding regimes in the world and those who would twist international cooperation to their own ends don’t care about the kabuki of the United Nations or the Hague or anything. They care about their well-being, and if the United States makes it perfectly clear that it’s not going to revoke diplomatic impunity, they’re going to do what they want regardless of international harrumphing.
Would North Korea still have shelled South Korea with McCain as president? Probably. The Chinese still played bumper cars with our electronic surveillance plane when Bush was President (albeit before he toppled a couple regimes).
But I would feel better if I didn’t suspect President Obama’s response to a dirty bomb in Topeka or a nuclear explosion in the port of Long Beach (or even a truck bomb at a holiday ceremony in small town Oregon) would be very similar to this dissembling response, albeit slightly less dissembling because he’d have his teleprompter contrast set as high as he could.
(Video seen at A Trainwreck in Maxwell.)
