What to make of events in Georgia, or the obviously preplanned depredations of Russia’s Putin in responding to Georgian “aggression”? Are we entering an era of a renewed Cold War? Has history resurrected itself?

What to make of Evil that brooks no opposition, nor makes any effort to hide or disguise its true nature? How many times will the world need to relearn the same lesson in different guise?

Victor Davis Hanson evaluates reaction from certain quarters of the American political landscape, writing at The Corner:

Once again for the Left, if it is a question of supporting Democratic states and those in them from tyrants—or finding new creative ways of blaming the United States first—well, the answer is a no-brainer.

And from paleos one expected a sort of 'Georgia's bigmouth stuck his neck in a noose, so let him hang,' but the near gleeful admiration for the way 'ole Putin 'took care of business' in his backyard was over the top even for them.

Obama initially sounded like the therapeutic high-school principal and his 'zero-tolerance' doctrine of moral equivalence as he expels both the victim and the bully; but his calls for UN solutions, talks with equally at fault parties, and apparent trust in the wisdom of the EU and the power of NATO may not just scare Eastern Europeans but even those 200,000 who deified him at Berlin. (But in fairness, they were warned when Obama lectured them that the "world" had saved Berlin during the airlift rather than the US Air Force.) Nothing is scarier for a Western European than to be praised for his sophisticated diplomacy as a prelude to being asked to lead on his own in times of crises.

Complexities abound in the reality-based community. The real one, inhabited by people who thoughtfully consider the real world for what it is, not what they wish it to be. Not the kind of people waiting around for the world to realize they are the embodiment of everything the world has been waiting for.

Not the residence of the Hard Left, for whom appeasement and apologia for Slavic dictators and tyrants were their mother’s milk and strained peaches. Where every strain of American Exceptionalism is discounted, save the view that America must be uniquely condemned.

Not the home for the Stone Age Right, who view every international attachment through a racist prism, exaggerating threats to the Homeland and whatever genetic stock they enshrine. America First, America Only, America in splendid isolation from a barbaric world. The Big City might benefit from determined attention to the broken windows in the hood, but the wider world is better left to its own devices.

And as we face the most serious of choices this fall, do either of the major candidates live in the real gritty world with the rest of us?

Years in a Communist Prisoner of War Camp, years of solid but not uncritical support for fighting terrorism where it actually germinates or matures, make a pretty good prima facie case for real world residence.

A long but unpublished academic tenure, community activism, and a short but entirely unremarkable political career should give us pause.

Should we be more or less unsettled by a candidate’s long and collegial association with Marxist revolutionaries and Black Liberation hysterics? Or who can so frequently find common cause with known apologists for Communism and totalitarian regimes and dictators?

Just some worrisome concerns, from an old Cold War anticommunist.

Labels: politics