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POPSWhy Putin Should Scare Us - Ralph Peters Good article. "Meanwhile, our next president will have to cope with this brilliant, dangerous man. That's going to require the experience and skills to exploit every element of our national power; to convince Europe that appeasement will only enlarge Putin's appetite; and to draw clear lines while avoiding drawn guns. Above all, our president will have to take Putin's measure accurately and not indulge in wishful thinking. Managing Putin's Russia could emerge as our No. 1 security challenge."
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POPSMcCain 'jokes' about killing Iranians The joke : Sen. John McCain hasn't had good luck joking about Iran. But he tried it again Tuesday. Responding to a question about a survey that shows increased exports to Iran, mainly from cigarettes, McCain said, "Maybe thats a way of killing them." He quickly caught himself, saying "I meant that as a joke" as his wife, Cindy, poked him in the back.
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POPSPolluter appeasement But unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are by far the greatest preventable threat to Americans' LLPH. Yet the government spends virtually nothing to fight global warming -- certainly no significant amount of new money has been allocated for this major threat (the Clinton administration tried, but the Gingrich Congress reversed that effort, reducing or zeroing out every program aimed at climate mitigation or even adaptation). Indeed, most conservatives, including John McCain, oppose even continuing existing incentives for carbon-mitigating strategies like solar and wind power. Conservatives in Congress seem likely to strongly oppose any major effort at a legislative solution (see "Anti-science conservatives must be stopped").
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POPSTalking to the Taliban. More Peace Talks. Well is this appeasement? Peace seems to be breaking out despite Bush. That's Korea now and Afghanistan! Where next? Obviously this took the White House by surprise or we'd have Rice as usual flying in to breakup the party. Now he'll have to nuke Iran to keep the money flowing in to his contractors and banks.
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POPSThe Contrarian Nature of George Bush But recent events have led me to choose one of the movie's lesser characters -- Younger Bear, Little Big Man's nemesis within the Cheyenne tribe. In the course of the movie, Younger Bear becomes a "contrary," a strange phenomenon in Native American plains culture who says and does the opposite of what he actually intends. He rides his horse facing the rear, says "hello" when he means "goodbye," washes in the dirt and dries off in the creek. I came to this conclusion after Bush's recent speech in Israel, where he famously equated Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's willingness to hold talks with Iran with the appeasement of Adolf Hitler prior to World War II. Pretty inflammatory rhetoric anywhere, but in front of the Knesset? Really over the top.
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POPSMcCain: A Critical Weakness on Foreign Policy
McCain's critical weakness on foreign policy is that he knows next to nothing about it. Although I have a lot of respect of McCain, I think he falls into the typical trap of myopic patriotism. Many people love their own country so much that they are blind to the reality of the world outside their borders. The outside world is a place where America is a pretty good nation, but has certainly seen better days. The outside world is a place where our enemies occasionally have legitimate points, and certainly have lives and families much like our own. In the reality beyond our borders, the US isn't guaranteed to win every fight, especially when we go in on shaky ground. In the reality beyond our borders everyone has to talk, whether they like it or not, because in the end, nations, like people, are created equal. McCain knows everything about the US Military, but knows nothing about our enemies. With a perspective like that, how can we expect to win?
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POPSConservative whining about appeasement has long history Conservatives even applied this critique to one of the most dangerous moments in human history: the Cuban missile crisis, during which the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to nuclear blows over Moscow's deployment of missiles 90 miles off the American coast. When President Kennedy successfully negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the crisis, conservative icon Barry Goldwater protested that he had appeased the Soviets by promising not to invade Cuba if they backed down. Via Matt Yglesias .
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POPSObama Owns Appeasement Update: Newt Gingrich calls this a study in guilt: Instead, he got volcanically defensive, which suggests that even Obama sees the parallels between his everything’s-on-the-table approach and the Chamberlain diplomacy which resulted in dismantling Czechoslovakia. And if Obama considers discussion of foreign policy “divisive”, then he should hide himself right back to Academia. Guess what, Senator? Presidential elections focus on foreign-policy principles, and if you can’t defend yours, then you have no business running for office.
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POPSBush is an Idiot Bush, never one to rely on diplomacy when bombs will do the trick, opens his mouth again and nonsense spews out. What a loser.
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POPSThe Axis of Evil: An Idiot's Guide: David Frum Joseph Cirincione, the man most widely identified as Obama's top nuclear-affairs adviser, last September pooh-poohed as "far-right" "nonsense" the early rumors that the Syrian nuclear facility was indeed a nuclear facility. Cirincione wrote on the Foreign Policy blog: "This appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria." Cirincione seems to have been so determined to avert what he regarded as the threat of U.S. over-reaction--so eager to promote dialogue with Syria--that he blinded himself to the reality of a nuclear threat.
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