Local politics bores the fuck out of me. Local politics is like watching little kids fight over who gets to eat the cat shit in the sand box.
I'm seeing these articles from Right Wing Fucktards like John Bolton, Karl Rove and William Kristol about how President Obama has been "dithering" over Libya.
That's the Krazy Klown Kollege talking point Buzzword Of The Day. Dithering.
Obama is a "Ditherer".
John "Got Milk?" Bolton said it.
Krazy Karl Rove said it. Dithering!
William "Wild Bill" Kristol, in an article he apparently wrote next Monday and was kind enough to send back in time to us, also accuses Obama of "Dithering"!
To paraphrase Inigo Montoya,
"That word you keep using. Dithering. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I think the word they are searching for is deliberating.
It was in this context that I saw that the topic on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" today was "Sussing Out An Emerging Obama Doctrine".
Neal Conan would be discussing the subject with Bob Woodward, associate editor for The Washington Post and half of the Woodward/Bernstein Team that broke the Watergate Scandal and brought down the Nixon Presidency.
So, naturally, I had to fire off an email expressing my opinion on the subject.
Apparently someone on the NPR staff felt it was broadcast-worthy. Here is an excerpt from the transcription of today's broadcast:
"CONAN: Here's an email from Xavier, who writes: President Obama understands something a lot of people don't: Anything America touches is perceived by the rest of the world as being tainted and corrupt.
The only thing people in the Middle East despise more than their totalitarian dictators is us. After all, we bear primary responsibility for keeping those dictators in power by doing business with them.
When there's a popular uprising of people yearning for freedom, the best thing we can do for them is stay out of it and let them fight. As soon as we intervene, it becomes about us, and the freedom fighters are undermined by association with us.
Mr. WOODWARD: That may turn out to be the case, and it may not. If you -there's so much we don't know. If you asked who are the rebels in Libya? What are their names? I mean, there's vague data on it.
You know, apparently six of them are known; 24 or something like that are not known. You know, maybe these are wonderful people and great leaders. Maybe they're not."
You can find the full transcribe here.
You can listen to the full podcast here. Conan reads my email between the 19:09 and 20:09 marks.
Just to wrap this up, I'll point out that the oppressed people of the world aren't looking for us to liberate them.
They want to liberate themselves! Yes, they want what we have. They want freedom. But not at the price that we charge. They want to get it themselves, on their own terms, without owing America a Goddamn thing.
The absolutely worse thing we can do is to "help" them. They don't need or want the help of the people who facilitated their oppression by doing business with their oppressors and keeping them in power.
When we "help" people fighting for their freedom, the rest of the world interprets that as us co-opting the fight for our own political purposes and that delegitimatizes the freedom fighters.
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