I like the headlines in the National out of Abu Dhabi. Today one headline is "Double Down," a double entendre of Lehman and Merrill going down, 7 years after the Twin Towers went down. You can do that kind of wordplay if you're halfway around the world. I don't think you could get away with it in the U.S. The pleasure of the headline is that "Double down" has now become the MSNBC cliche of choice for political risktaking in the presidential race. Though lately Chris Matthews has been trying to mainstream "skin in the game," saying the neocons never had any real skin in the game. Taking a Hollywood money-idiom and making it about actual physical risk. A little ghastly, but true. And of course there's always the Holocaust echo, which Hollywood guys can get away with.
In the National's "Double Down," Max Rodenbeck likens the runaway fiscal policies of the last 7 years to our foreign policy. Not sure if I buy this one. I know nothing about money, just ask my wife, but didn't we go global-bananas under Clinton/Rubin too? Rodenbeck is best on foreign policy:
might be described in similar terms, as a spectacular failure of threat
management. As we know, the September 11 attacks were the work of a
tiny cult of violent radicals. [Amen] Their unprovoked viciousness presented
an opportunity to rally the world against their brand of obscurantist
extremism. [fabulous!] Yet instead of identifying the aggressor accurately and
launching a response that was proportional, appropriate, and designed
to enhance American power and prestige, the Bush administration
constructed an imaginary adversary, a vague array of rogue states who
were said to be plotting to place weapons of mass destruction in the
hands of a giant Islamofascist ogre. [sweet!] Countries that failed to share
this same vision were condemned as villains, or derided as snivelling
“surrender monkeys”… it is hard not to hope that, just as America, in the wake of Vietnam,
entered a period of self-questioning and readjustment, that the same
may happen again.
I have a dream: That Bill Kristol becomes a flagellant, that David Frum walks the axis of Georgetown in sackcloth, and Richard Perle opens his French villa to the International Solidarity Movement for R and R from Gaza. Notice that Rodenbeck never even mentions Israel/Palestine. And I almost didn't either!
