Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

According to Labor electoral genius, House Government Whip,  former Minister of Defence and Federal member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, this electoral result was " a good outcome ".  For once I find myself agreeing with this nepotistic, entitled, reality-challenged blowhard. Saturday's vote removing the Australian Labor Party from office in New South Wales was indeed a very good outcome for the people of this state. The bastards deserved everything the electorate gave them. They had become incapable of even understanding that being elected to government requires you, as a minimum, to believe in acting responsibly in the interests of the people you govern. It was not a victory of one view of what is in the best interests of the people over another such view, as is ordinarily the case in such battles in advanced democracies. It was more a crushing defeat of a party who didn't even know anymore that the interests of the people it governed mattered. The Union mo

You can''t make this stuff up. This is what now happens to vipers who are clutched to the breast. Satan is no match for silicon implants. A parable for the innocence of merely biblical evil in the 21st Century?

(... except when you have to ?) George Friedman in his peice at Stratfor wants this old and glib defeatist rubric (allegedly uttered by Douglas MacArthur to JFK and kinda quoted more recently in the movie " Princess Bride "), elevated to "a principle of U.S. foreign policy". It looks to me more like a thin and easy assertion of tactical rhetoric masquerading as grand strategy (how apt therefore that its source should be the egomaniacal MacArthur). The more compelling proposition is probably something more like: now that China is a real military threat to the US, a land war in Asia is more likely than ever to be a disaster. This is just a statement of the obvious. Friedman's (and MacArthur's) proposition however seems to wilfully elide some more important issues. Firstly, to publicly proclaim such a doctrine would be to unilaterally substantially weaken the US's ability to influence events in Asia. And that is just plain dumb. Secondly, it bespea