Chris Berman Foreign Policy

Ever notice how schizophrenic our US foreign policy is?  Like a bad politician, we were always "for that dictator before we were against him"!  It's not like our foreign policy is "evil" or the product of bad intent though - the United States has always been well-intentioned enough when it comes to our dealings with other nations.  It's just that we really don't know enough about what we're doing.  There always seem to be a slew of unintended consequences to our foreign entanglements (of course the same can be said for all manner of central planning!)

Take Iraq for instance...  We went there to eradicate Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" and to stop him from "handing them over to Al Qaeda".  Then, when it turned out that neither of those reasons were valid, we changed it to a Wilsonian "spreading of democracy".  All of those things are well intentioned and noble on their face, but unfortunately, like every big government intervention into volatile areas, reaped all manner of unplanned consequences (more oil contracts for China and more dead Iraqi Christians to name just two.)

And, have you ever noticed how every time we slap sanctions on a country, Russia and China step in and start trading with that country?  Is it because Russia and China are our sworn enemies?  Or is because they are smart enough to recognize large untapped markets when they see them?  I have to think it's the latter.  Of course this leaves all the "experts" scatching their heads and wondering "why do Russia and China always oppose us?"  Well DUH!! 

In truth, our foreign policy can only be described as---to paraphrase ESPN's Chris Berman---"bumblin', stumblin', foreign policy!"

Why Are Conservatives Such Pussies?

I was listening to Mark Levin on my way home from work and he made a statement to the effect that "when conservatives get into office they try to shrink government but when liberals get in they try to grow it".  All I could think was "why are conservatives such failures?"  Nobody's shrunk government in decades!  In fact, government grew exponentially with Republicans in charge of everything!!  It immediately hit me that the reason conservatives are such dismal failures is because they fail to embrace any sort of radicalism for their cause.

Take the debt ceiling debate last year: conservatives had the chance to make a radical change in the way government works... all they had to do was vote against raising the debt ceiling and immediately the federal government would have been forced to live within its means.  But did they do it?  Hell no!  That would be "too radical!"  And the debt spirals out of control.

Now look at the Republican presidential candidates: only one of them is proposing anything close to "radical" spending cuts and the entire Republican establishment can't do enough to distance themselves from him.  All I can say is WTF?  Ron Paul proposes a trillion dollars in real spending cuts and the "conservatives" run and hide!  "It's too radical!"  "We need someone electable!"  And the debt spirals out of control.

What are Romney's proposed spending cuts?  How about Gingrich's?  Santorum's?  Nobody knows because every conservative journalist, every conservative talk-show host, every conservative debate moderator will not ask the question!!  "We can't talk about spending cuts - that's too radical and it might scare people!"  And the debt spirals out of control.