Democracy is taking a beating. The Honduran military has sent its leftist president into exile. The Iranian government is suppressing the Green Revolution. China arrested prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo. And Governor Mark Sanford decided that he could best serve the interests of his South Carolinian constituents by hightailing it after his Argentinean mistress.
Taliban might be crazy, but they don’t have nukes and we don’t expect them to bomb Waikiki any time soon.
Wars usually end with talking. With the blood still fresh on the battlefield, politicians sit down at a negotiating table for peace talks. Words, after all, are their currency.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a mea culpa from the 43rd president. Instead, it’s left to Barack Obama to come to terms with the Bush legacy.
On June 4, 1989, history forked.
The former vice president is Leatherface, Jason, and Freddie Krueger all rolled into one: lawless, methodical, and unpredictable with firearms. He’s had more sequels than Chucky: White House chief of staff, House minority whip, secretary of Defense, CEO of Halliburton, vice president, and now rogue pundit.
What would it look like if Quakers ruled the world? The World Bank would be renamed the International Frugality Fund. All political institutions would run on the principle of consensus. And there would be meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. It would be like living in a huge group house.
St. Augustine fooled around a lot as a young man. At one point during his philandering, according to his Confessions, the future Church Father uttered the immortal lines: “Give me chastity. But not yet.”
Think about the term “money laundering” for a moment. It suggests that the more often dirty money changes hands, the cleaner it gets. In fact, globalization just moves the dirt around.
One hundred days isn’t enough to judge a presidency, the cautious pundits say. “It takes time for a president to put his team in place, formulate policy, steer legislation through Congress, and conduct foreign negotiations,” history professor Allan J. Lichtman writes in The Washington Post. Look instead, he says, to the next 100 days.