The Goat Pen

Professor Tiger wrote:IB, the biggest difference between Libertarians and recent Republican politicians is, when Libertarians call for drastically smaller, less intrusive, less expensive government, they really mean it.

sardis wrote:My first and probably last use of an emoticon...

Second, and more important, the foreign-policy discussion, though limited, was marked by a new sobriety. There was no spirit of adventurism, there were no burly promises of victories around the corner and lights at the ends of tunnels. It was more muted than that, more realistic, different in tone and tenor from four and eight years ago. This signaled a real shift, and a heartening one.

Isolationists think they can be isolated, which is just another form of romanticism and unreality. We live in the world. We will never again be apart from it; trade and technology wouldn't allow us to if we wanted to. We have real alliances and real foes. But there is little taste now for what is fast becoming an old vision that progress can be made and U.S. security enhanced through invasion, pacification and occupation. There is little taste for the idea that we can easily, or even arduously, force the complete cultural change of other hearts and other minds.

So it's especially good to see the Republicans start to return to themselves, to their essential nature as a party, which was invented to be genially sober, like Lincoln, optimistic but not unrealistic, like Reagan, and accepting that life has limits and it's not unpatriotic to say so.

The problem with Afghanistan, and Iraq for that matter, is not only that after 10 years our efforts have turned out of be—polite word—inconclusive. We are spending money we don't have for aims we cannot even articulate.

sardis wrote:The best part of this article is at the bottom it says, "Paul Krugman is off today", but the rest of the article is pretty good too...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opini ... .html?_r=1