Politics Gotta Have a War
unless we make it into a sport
I just read yesterday that the CIA has 5 secret bases in Eastern Ukraine, since 2014. Oh wait! According to The New York Times and Yahoo News it’s 12 secret bases, not 5.
Hey, I wonder how many secret bases the Intelligence Community has in the Trump campaign.
If, as Mike Benz says, the IC switched from a “foreign predicate” to a “domestic predicate” in 2016, what’s the odds? Hey, don’t you love that bureaucratic gobbledygook!
Spies gotta spy, right? Just like politicians gotta get their 10%.
OK, I admit it. Ever since reading Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political and encountering his simple — no, Real Simple — concept, that the political is the friend-enemy distinction, I can’t get it out of my mind.
Because, if Schmitt is right then the only thing that politicians know or think or care about is taking the fight to the enemy and rewarding their friends and/or supporters.
Our job, if we accept it, is to stop them short of World War.
OK. So back in the Beginning of Time in 1945, it was obvious that with Joey Stalin we needed to stop the march of Communism right there in the middle of Germany. And fine, we set up NATO as a military alliance so that all the weak countries in Western Europe could shelter in the glorious shade down sun of Uncle Sam. That’s the way the balance of power is supposed to work, according to Henry Kissinger. The smaller countries need to gang up against the big country.
But imagine — yes I know our leaders can’t imagine: they are too dumb — that in 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union our President Bush had said: OK fellahs, let’s take down NATO and fold it into the EU and the Germans and the French — about time! — can get together and form an alliance to deal with any troublemakers in the East. Keep the Yanks out of it, because, well, they live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: what do they know?
OK, so the Russkies would have taken back Ukraine and Belarus, or at least brought them into the Russian orbit. I’m sure that all the Poles and Hungarians and Czechs and Slovaks would have palled up with the French and the Germans, just in case. And a very good thing too.
But then, what would the US have done for a foreign policy? Good question. It couldn’t have been worse than all the stupid Mideast wars we’ve been losing for the last 20 years. Or could it?
And that’s the problem. If the US doesn’t have the Germans to bully around or the Russians, then the only people left are the Chinese.
And really, I don’t trust our leaders to do anything sensible with the Chinese. Where is Henry Kissinger when you need him?
Gotta have a fight. And apparently it’s not enough to beggar the country with stupid energy policies to save us all from the nightmare of carbon dioxide boiling the earth with a 0.04% concentration in the atmosphere. It’s not enough to have nice black DEI ladies completely bollixing up government and education and Big Tech.
It’s not enough to start a war against Christian nationalists. It’s not enough to beggar the average young couple with unaffordable housing as house prices hit a new peak. It’s not enough to flood the country with illegal immigrants. Gotta have a war!
What I say is that we need to convert politics into a sport so that aggressive young men — and dumb old men — can work out their aggressions in harmless pursuits, so that the heroes of the new political leagues are just as honored as winners of the Super Bowl.
So how do we do it, geniuses?