astralis

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15530569/site/newsweek/

A Luckless Nation
As we hold our noses and vote Tuesday we have to wonder: where are the lucky breaks of yesteryear?

By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

Nov. 2, 2006 - It is a favorite theme in American lore, one we hear about from the time we are kids in school: how incredibly lucky we have been in our leaders at critical moments in history. How lucky we were to have had those brilliant and brave Founding Founders hanging together in Philadelphia in 1776 (else they would have hung separately). How lucky that our first president was an upright fellow like George Washington, refusing the monarchical powers that were offered him and opting for a republic. How lucky that we elected a homely fence-splitter of world-class leadership ability, Abe Lincoln, when the country was breaking up, and just as lucky that Franklin D. Roosevelt was there during our dire rendezvous with destiny in the 1930s and '40s. How lucky we were to be led by a failed haberdasher who turned into a genius statesman, Harry Truman (not Henry Wallace!), as the cold war began; and just as lucky that an unprepossessing former B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, managed to grasp exactly how to end that war.

What a glorious couple of centuries it has been, all held together by this great string of luck. "The Lord looks after drunks, children and the U.S.A." went the old saying, and it seemed true. But the thing about luck is that, eventually, you run out of it. Everybody craps out in the end. And that is what has happened to us. As Americans go to the polls Tuesday we must confront the fact that we have become a luckless people, all across the political spectrum.

Was there any more mind-boggling bit of historic bad luck than what happened after Election Day 2000, when those 537 votes in Florida wobbled, then stayed in George W. Bush’s column? Never mind what kind of president Al Gore would have been—he would have been adequate, I suppose, but so would have most Republicans—it is hard now to avoid the conclusion that Bush was precisely the wrong man at the wrong time. Perhaps Bush would have been OK fighting another kind of war, a Jacksonian Battle of New Orleans-type war. But at a moment in history when we faced the most subtle sort of global threat, when we needed not just a willingness to use military force but a leader of real brilliance—someone who would carefully study a little-understood enemy—we got a man who actually took pride in his lack of studiousness. No surprise: Bush never once presided over a grand-strategy session to divine the nature of Al Qaeda, and he ended up lumping Saddam and every Islamist insurgent and terrorist group with Osama bin Laden. He ensured that a tiny fringe group that had been hounded into Afghanistan with no place left to go—one that could have been wiped out had we focused on the task at hand—would spread worldwide and become a generational Islamist threat.

And at a time when we needed a world leader who understood the nuances of burden-sharing in the international system, we got a president who so badly wanted to be a cowboy and not his father (offending even some Texans: "all hat and no cattle" is the term they use down there) that he proudly declared he doesn’t "do nuance." Bush stomped around huffily in his first term, talking loudly and carrying a big stick, in the process all but trashing a half century of carefully nurtured American prestige. No surprise: he alienated a world we desperately needed on our side, thus leaving America alone with all the burden and generations’ worth of bills to pay. Now we face two serious rising threats, North Korea and Iran. And having squandered our attention, resources and prestige on a trumped-up threat, Iraq, we are simply too weak and friendless to confront them as they should be. That’s what I call bad luck.

And what about the fellow Bush put in charge of the "war on terror," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Again, it’s difficult to imagine that we could be any unluckier. At a moment when we needed a master of orchestration to unite the key U.S. government agencies involved in national security—the only way that complex counterterrorism and nation-building tasks can be achieved—we got the exact opposite: a man most notable for his talent at vicious bureaucratic infighting. No surprise: after 9/11 Rumsfeld proceeded to destroy the interagency process rather than make it work better. He delayed the destruction of the Taliban and Al Qaeda because he couldn’t stomach giving the job to the CIA, then cut the State Department out of the nation-building process and the Geneva Conventions debate. As recently as this week, the Iraq inspector general, Stuart Bowen, concluded in a new report that the Pentagon still isn’t working well with State on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, which the administration once relied on so much in Iraq.

On Wednesday, President Bush assured us that he and Rummy would be in it together until the end, that he would not fire the man who most people in his party, and many in Bush’s own White House, want dismissed immediately. How fitting. And how incredibly unlucky.

But, let’s face it, our bad luck is bipartisan. We learned that anew this week, when old fumblemouth himself, John Kerry, did his best to remind us of why he and the Democrats lost in 2004. With his unmatched talent for unlucky sound bites, Kerry "botched" a joke that summoned up all the worst doubts about the Democrats’ fitness for war-fighting on the eve of the election. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership is slowly realizing that Hillary Clinton, the woman attracting all their money, is all but unelectable. If the Dems regain control of one of the houses of Congress on Tuesday, it will not be because anyone particularly likes them but because the country can’t take any more Republican rule without risking spontaneous combustion. No wonder everyone is flocking to the eloquent Barack Obama, though he’s been in office less than two years and is plainly too green.

Man, we need a lucky break.

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Anon

I have to take exception with that article.

Roosevelt was a socialist moron who in many ways totally mismanaged the war and through his actions laid the very seeds for the Cold War.

I am no fan of FDR, and i'm not exactly a big fan of Harry Truman either.

In fact, upon re-reading all of that article, i think it pretty much sucks. I also don't believe in luck...

KPR

I've read that Roosevelt actually gave Soviets the fissile material and maybe know-how to make an atomic bomb.

Ray

That story is too far out for anyone to believe!

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

gunnut

I find it interesting that the author now sides, however reluctantly, with the "unprepossessing former B-movie actor" about the end result of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan once remarked, regarding how the Democrats say "we" won the Cold War, what do they mean "we?"

Every single liberal socialist environmental hippie commie hated Reagan's guts. They did everything in their power to oppose his Cold War policy at every turn. Now they reluctantly agrees with this "unprepossessing former B-movie actor."

Give it some time before declaring Bush wrong in his stand against radical islamists.

Hindsight is always 20/20.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Anon

Damned straight. They grew on trees, and were even more hateful of Reagan(who they'd all decided was the anti-christ) then they are of Bush.

Excellent observation my friend.

gunnut

Thank you, I'm flattered.

However I can't take credit for that observation. I heard it from a local radio talk show host who's a die hard anti-commie and a big Reagan fan.

Blademaster

********. Truman first started the wall that stood up to the Soviets with his Marshal Plan. JFK stood up to USSR when he ordered the Berlin airlift and blockaded Cuba. They were democrats.

Please stop trying to rewrite history that the Republicans were the only that stood up to the Soviets and won the war.

Hell even Jimmy Carter contributed in some ways. He expanded the submarine program, the bomber program, fighter program. Reagon just inherited the already blooming projects and did his bit to speed them along.

Republicans and Democrats stood up to the Soviets. Period.

Wooglin

It is? I was born and raised in this country, and never once have I heard the idea that all our history was based on luck. The premise is bogus and so is the rest of the article.

Anon

Dude, wtf are you even talking about?

Reagan won the cold war. If you can't accept that fact, you are in a very small minority.

And oh, yeah...the liberals HATED him. I remember...i was alive then, a teenaged student in a big liberal cesspool education system in America. I know all about what the lib-tards thought of the great-communicator.

Carter(and to a lesser extent Truman) was a MORON. Seriously, one of the worst presidents of the 20th century, and the worst president of my lifetime. Easily.

Yeah, with a trillion dollar spending program that only HE managed to force through. By supporting anti-communist forces with cash and arms the globe over- sometimes against the law. And he alone had the communications skill to rally all the forces at play into a unified course of action and actually achieve unacheiveable results.

He had the big balls, he made the big calls, he got the big results.

B actor my balls, Reagan was one of the greatest actors of all time.

The dems get none of HIS credit.

No one said dems didnt' "Stand up".

That was not what was stated. What was stated was that Reagan won the cold war, and that is the absolute truth. Even the democrats will largely acknowledge that fact.

gunnut

JFK also said "ask not what your country to can for you, ask what you can do for your country." That doesn't sound like any Democrats that I know.

The Democrats of the old are dead and buried. What we have today are socialist commies who hijacked the party starting in the 70s, and have veered left ever since.

OK, Republicans were the only ones who did not waver throughout the Cold War. Is that OK?

Really? Explain B-1, MX, and Pershing 2. Who axed B-1 and who brought it back?

In the early days. Later on Democrats became Lenin's useful idiots.

gunnut

I think you just missed LBJ years. He easily beats Carter as the worst president of the 20th century, hands down.

Anon

Yeah, you're right. What was i thinking...

Carter was still really, really bad though.

gunnut

Does this sound like a quote from a Democrat?

gunnut

Oh Carter was bad, no doubt. The worst thing about Carter is he's still bad AFTER he left office.