This is where leading from behind gets you.

Sure, people make mistakes and then sometimes people are blind or blinded by ideology or are simply incompetent. No doubt about it, Bush got bad intelligence on Iraq. When I read that part of his book, Decision Points, frustration made me throw the book. Bad intelligence leads to bad decisions. In Libya, the intelligence was there, but didn’t fit plan, meaning these guys learned nothing from the “Bush Lied, Men Died” narrative they have been pushing for the last nine or ten years. It’s appalling.

Gene, if you find a certain antipathy to your leader here, it’s because well you know, even if we aren’t clinging to our guns, we are clinging to our religion and he’s declared war on religious belief and practice. You can be a servile and dedicated as you want, but some people know what this man is and represents.

But it was just reported in the last day or so that there was a request for additional security and it was ignored. In the first days after the attack, this administration attempted to tell the world that the attack was unplanned-like run-of-the mill protesters carry RPG’s. Now we know 9/11 was a significant date (duh), it was planned and had nothing to do with any stupid youtube video.

I’m so tired of Obama and his drones.

But glad you generally like the blog…

“In their pride as objective observers of the political scene, some pundits try to rectify that bias–like recently Mark Halperin did in his comments on the way the media covered for possible mistakes the Obama administration made in its dealing with the terrorist attacks which killed four Americans…”

How could Obama have been so lax and careless as to let four Americans overseas be killed in a terrorist attack! Why, that has never happened to any Republican president!

What? The star of the modern GOP firmament allowed 241 Americans overseas to be killed in such an attack?! Well, surely that’s the worst under any GOP president… Huh? Over 3000 killed, right here at home?!

Well, at least in 2001, we saw Halperin on the talk shows, saying how 9/11 meant we shouldn’t re-elect Bush, right?

No, he just kept on supporting him?!

Can anyone say “Partisan hack”?

If Tocqueville was correct then elections brought out the greatest political passions of the American people. Because even if we can assume Tocqueville was correct, or was honestly reporting his opinion, there is something seriously wrong in extending the logic of an observation to different times. Toqueville after all predicted that Washington D.C. would never be a great city, in part because it was built upon a swamp.

“If Toqueville is correct, then Washington D.C. has no airport, and no pentagon.”

You can still observe, and thus assume that elections bring out the greatest political passions of the American people. But not necessarily for the same reasons Toqueville himself advanced from his own observations.

The media itself is in the business of making continual observations, as well as having grounds for making continual observations(which means in some sense the “obsoleteness of the functionality of previous observations”). Both Toqueville and Lewis and Clark were excellent geographers, but Google maps as media continually updates itself.

Without a doubt we have moved from built to last, for very general multifaceted function (a frontier axe)…to built to be replaced (improved upon), for a very narrowly tailored function.

I agree in part with Lasch…but I also think that a large chunk of the media is professionally undecided. We are in a sense undecided on our orientation towards the very tools we use, and this character habit of being undecided on so many fronts, might indeed be different in kind from anything observed by a Tocqueville.

So I tend to have the same hunch about members of the media being the secret undecided. If the media was a farm, it would plow the ground in the morning, plant at lunch and harvest around dinner time. Views of what the sort-run, long-run and intermediate-term are vary considerably.