Archive: August, 2008
It's almost chilly here in Philly this week, not what you expect in the fog days of August. So I guess that whole global warming thing really was a hoax then, right? Uh, not where such things count the most, in the Arctic:
EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) — A chunk of ice spreading across seven square miles has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday.
"American Morning" -- a world, found particularly on CNN. where new "revelations" from a supermarket tabloid about the sex life of a twice-defeated presidential candidate are deemed more important that the breaking news from a deadly war with major implications for America and the world.
I'm not saying John Edwards isn't newsworthy -- lying politicians should be held accountable -- but how hard is it to put things in the right perspective? This is more like "America After Dark."
So I guess this means Ronald Reagan really didn't win the Cold War.
(Apologies to Atrios for stealing his standing headline.)
Adding Georgia to the NATO lineup probably seemed like a good idea at one time, but -- regardless of the merits -- if that had become a reality then we'd be a day or two into World War III (or maybe V, I've lost count) by now:
Meanwhile, there are players (largely, though not perfectly, overlapping with the folks who got us into Iraq) in the US who want to use this period of relative (though diminishing) Russian weakness to push American security guarantees (primarily NATO) not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we've largely already done) but actually within the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we've begun to do in the Baltics). John McCain has been a supporter of inducting Georgia into NATO. And it is worth noting that had we done that we would currently be in effect in a state of war with Russia since we would be obligated to see the treat the attack on Georgia as an attack on us. Indeed, McCain is saying now we should move ahead quickly and bring them into NATO.
It was strangely flattering that several folks in the weird world of journalism reform were mad that I was away from the computer last week and couldn't rant about the great newspaper kerfluffle in this city, about whether certain kinds of news from the Philadelphia Inquirer gets published first on the World Wide Web or on the bark of dead trees. Wrote media guru Jeff Jarvis: "What a rotten time for Norgman Will Bunch to be on vacation and offline."
Maybe for him; frankly, I was quite happy to be 3,000 miles away from 400 North Broad Street last week. But now, the "Norgman" has returned, and so I guess I'll have to weigh in on this. First of all, David Carr of the New York Times did a good job summarizing the issue this morning:
I'm back on the case, although it's going to take some time to get back up to speed.
For example, why is Russia attacking Georgia? Is there a global shortage of Waffle Houses, Ford pick-up trucks and losing football teams?
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