Reading this column made me thing of John Lennon's "Imagine" ... "nothing to fight or die for". I strongly suspect that Herbert can't "imagine" anything worth that kind of commitment, thus the column.
The strange idea that war at any level is a "shared commitment" that requires the "sacrifice" of tax increases, while massive entitlements apparently are not, is especially curious. Historically, the situation is exactly the reverse -- WWII, which Herbert holds up as an example was of course paid for via a massive level of government debt.
Virtually nobody sees national defense as anything but a national priority of the highest order. If a couple major cities are smoking nuclear wastelands, considerations as to "infrastructure" and the latest entitlement will drop extremely far on the priority list of the sane.
In the "Herbert Universe", both Bush and BO are "lunatics", and I guess "somewhere out there" exists the level of sanity confidently declared by Bob Herbert.
One quote:
It’s time to bring the curtain down for good on these tragic, farcical wars. The fantasy of democracy blossoming at the point of a gun in Iraq and spreading blithely throughout the Middle East has been obliterated. And it’s hard to believe that anyone buys the notion that the U.S. can install a successful society in the medieval madness of Afghanistan.
So BO just declared that HIS ADMINSTRATION had brought the troops home and was "declaring victory". So is what is happening in Iraq a "fantasy that as been obliterated"? Once we "put the lunatics manual" aside, what do we see? The world as seen by Herbert?
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