hello

Nicholas was an arch-conservative and autocrat. His minister of education announced a program to instill the principles of "orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality." This was often expressed as "One Church, One Tsar, One Russia." As you might imagine, the Germans who had been brought to settle Russia, especially the Ukraine, with a promise of freedom of conscience from his grand mother (Catherine II) were less than thrilled. The same goes for the Muslims in the Caucasus--the Ingush and the Chechens rebelled against him in what turned out to be the last year of his life, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1853 (what we call the Crimean War).

I think Putin would like nothing better than to recreate the Russian empire, and to impose cultural, religious and political imperatives on that empire. One of his problems, though, is that he and his cronies has been so busy looting the national treasury and promoting every variety of grafting and corruption, that he's never had the money to restore the Russian military to its former power.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:

Well...the previous administration DID deal with a number of important foreign issues in a "serious and timely" way, George...

...and the results of that have had an almost devastating effect on our country and the world.

For the most part, many concerned, rational people think we are much worse off for what they did...than for what Obama has done.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker that often applies:

DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING...SIT THERE!

I agree, you have point there. The lessons of history, just like the dynamics of any highly nonlinear system are detectable only in retrospect. Moreover, history, and all such systems, don't reveal their alternatives. We have a fairly complete knowledge of the bad side and after effects of the 1990 Gulf War, and the folly of our inept wiping out of all the institutions in the Iraqi government following our military victory in the second war against Saddam Hussein. However, we don't really know what might have happened had we not acted. Now we have to think twice about just what might be the lessons from it that are applicable to our new situation. Unfortunately, there's more questions there than reliable answers for us all.

I thank you for that response, George, and I agree and acknowledge that history cannot tell us what the alternatives to what we are inspecting might have been.

Quote:

I don't fault Obama's caution in getting directly involved in all this, but I do fault his unnecessary lack of principal in outlining our objectives and intent.

Not really sure what you mean here. Do you want any president to telegraph his punches?

Quote:

The needed alternative to overactive leadership is not no leadership at all.

Respectfully, I suggest you are assuming Obama is showing no leadership at all...more as a reflection of your political posture than the reality of what is happening. I think he shows plenty of leadership with his forbearance that I consider more effective than the John Wayne kind of leadership that some other presidents have shown.

(If your comment is motivated by my bumper sticker "Don't just do something, sit there"...please understand that is essentially a joke.)

Quote:

He has unnecessarily reduced our influence in the world...

And there are many, including myself, who would like to see that influence reduced a hell of a lot more.

So the fact that you see that as a negative...is just a reflection of how YOU feel about it. It not of necessity a negative for humanity...and can easily be considered a positive.

Whether or not he has actually done that, however, is still up in the air.

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...and behaved in a way that is getting him (and us) the contempt of those who wish us no good at all. That is stupid and dangerous,

Those who have contempt for us need no prodding. And it seems to me that some of the people showing contempt now are the ones who were showing great joy when we were being bullies...and some of the people who showed contempt for us when Darth Vader was running the show for George W...are now showing a bit less.

And...like with Obamacare where many of the detractors are detractors because they want to see a more aggressive program (but are counted as detractors)...many of the people showing contempt for us are showing it because they want to see us less aggressive in our international conduct...not more.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I think Putin would like nothing better than to recreate the Russian empire, and to impose cultural, religious and political imperatives on that empire. One of his problems, though, is that he and his cronies has been so busy looting the national treasury and promoting every variety of grafting and corruption, that he's never had the money to restore the Russian military to its former power.

Agreed. Your comments above also encapsulate what may be a fundamental contradiction between his aspirations and his behavior. However, even there the financial corruption may be merely the way he retains power.

The 21st century looks more and more like the 19th every day.

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@georgeob1,

I agree that he "buys" his power through institutionalized corruption.

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@Frank Apisa,

I once heard a very interesting talk given (many years ago) by Kirk Douglas, who was then addressing his profession, which he described as the art of creating illusions . He added that it was important for everyone involved in it to understand that basic fact, adding that "The problem with John Wayne is that he thinks he's John Wayne".

I also think there is a lot of good ground between the excesses of the last administration and the feckless introversion of our current president. We are faced with a worldwide crisis involving long-standing unresolved contradictions and conflicts within a resurgent Islamic World, and Obama (for reasons I don't fully understand) refuses to acknowledge that obvious fact. As a result he has palpably worsened the current situation in many areas. Asserting that one is not repeating the mistakes of his predecessor does not amount to much of a defense of a "new" policy. That is merely doing the obvious. We can and should expect much more than that.

I wasn't at all annoyed by your comment about "Don't just do something ...." I enjoyed it.

However , I disagree with your comment about Obama not telegraphing his punches. He is doing just that and, and to our great injury. It is sometimes said that the ultimate tactic in a game of chicken is the prospect of throwing your steering wheel out the window in full view of the other driver. Exploiting uncertainty in what you may do is a basic and necessary tactic in any contest. Obama appears not to understand that. Instead he endlessly spouts off about what he won't do, apparently to appease his domestic audience. He shows an alarming lack of sophistication, subtlety and experience in the real world of action ... as opposed to the world of mere ideas from which he supposedly emerged. He's in way over his head..

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Nicholas was an arch-conservative and autocrat. His minister of education announced a program to instill the principles of "orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality." This was often expressed as "One Church, One Tsar, One Russia." As you might imagine, the Germans who had been brought to settle Russia, especially the Ukraine, with a promise of freedom of conscience from his grand mother (Catherine II) were less than thrilled. The same goes for the Muslims in the Caucasus--the Ingush and the Chechens rebelled against him in what turned out to be the last year of his life, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1853 (what we call the Crimean War).

It's interesting to note that Leo Tolstoy's writing career started as a correspondent reporting on the battles and the siege of the Crimean struggle. In addition, an earlier favorite novel of mine, Lermontov's "A Hero of our Time" was written in Chechnya during his service there, and that the setting for the story is Nicholas' struggle to extend the Russian Empire into the Caucasus (a process which ended with the extermination of the Circassians , a much less publicized event , but with about the same human consequences as the subsequent Armenian massacres in Turkey)

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

I once heard a very interesting talk given (many years ago) by Kirk Douglas, who was then addressing his profession, which he described as the art of creating illusions . He added that it was important for everyone involved in it to understand that basic fact, adding that "The problem with John Wayne is that he thinks he's John Wayne".

I also think there is a lot of good ground between the excesses of the last administration and the feckless introversion of our current president. We are faced with a worldwide crisis involving long-standing unresolved contradictions and conflicts within a resurgent Islamic World, and Obama (for reasons I don't fully understand) refuses to acknowledge that obvious fact. As a result he has palpably worsened the current situation in many areas. Asserting that one is not repeating the mistakes of his predecessor does not amount to much of a defense of a "new" policy. That is merely doing the obvious. We can and should expect much more than that.

I wasn't at all annoyed by your comment about "Don't just do something ...." I enjoyed it.

However , I disagree with your comment about Obama not telegraphing his punches. He is doing just that and, and to our great injury. It is sometimes said that the ultimate tactic in a game of chicken is the prospect of throwing your steering wheel out the window in full view of the other driver. Exploiting uncertainty in what you may do is a basic and necessary tactic in any contest. Obama appears not to understand that. Instead he endlessly spouts off about what he won't do, apparently to appease his domestic audience. He shows an alarming lack of sophistication, subtlety and experience in the real world of action ... as opposed to the world of mere ideas from which he supposedly emerged. He's in way over his head..

You are a career military man, George...and you are thinking exactly the way I, as a citizen of this nation, want career military people to think.

As a citizen, I do not want the political civilian minds working that same way. For the civilian element, I am more in tune with the way Obama is thinking.

The previous administration seemed dominated by the "beat the piss out of 'em" mentality to "getting our way."

I do not think we Americans SHOULD be getting our way.

I want to see more LEADERSHIP coming from other countries...so that we are not the dominant force on the planet...mostly because I think we as a dominant force (anybody as a dominant force) bodes poorly for humanity and our planet.

I agree that "the other guys were doing a lousy job and this guy is doing something different"...is no assurance that what is being done now is better...or more productive.

I do see the hawkish bluster of several of the previous administration...being ultimately counterproductive, however.

But my comfort with what Obama is doing...is less a product of comparison with what I see as foolish and counterproductive administrations...but rather with the way I want to see the world operate.

I do not want to see a big dog in the yard...even if the big dog is mine.

On the other hand...I want my military people to think exactly the opposite way...because if the time ever comes when military might is needed, I want hawks not doves at the helm.

All that...and the fact that I think your political stance is clouding your mind about Obama.

Perhaps it is clouding mine also.

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@Frank Apisa,

People are people, and the categories of political and military you are using don't correspond very well to the realities of either political or military affairs. There's a lot of politics in making war and a lot in politics of the tactics of war. The line you are drawing, doesn't correspond to reality.

That our allies aren't pulling their fair share of the load is hardly a new observation,. The problem, of course is that is a more or less permanent fact, based on the very human calculation of such situations.

For many years during the Cold War we were frustrated with the fact that, apart from then West Germany, none of the NATO nations fully lived up to the formal commitments they had made for defense spending and the readiness of their military forces in Europe. These commitments arose out of joint estimates of what would be required to deter a Soviet non nuclear military invasion of West Germany. It was a serious episode of a generation long standoff that was finally resolved without a cataclysmic war. The simple fact was that the Europeans correctly calculated that we had as much to lose as they in the issue, and that for our own survival we would make up the difference, and owing to our relative sizes, would face less political cost in doing so. They were correct in that analysis.

The same is true today with respect to the challenge from a highly deranged Islamic world. Moreover I see no indicators that Obama's policies are having a net beneficial effect. On the contrary the collective situation of the Western world is deteriorating.

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@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

The previous administration seemed dominated by the "beat the piss out of 'em" mentality to "getting our way."

I do not think we Americans SHOULD be getting our way.

I want to see more LEADERSHIP coming from other countries...so that we are not the dominant force on the planet...mostly because I think we as a dominant force (anybody as a dominant force) bodes poorly for humanity and our planet.

I believe that , if you reflect on these statements, you may recognize that, for good or ill, the world simply doesn't work that way. I can't think of a time in history when different peoples in contact with each other lived together in peaceable harmony with none dominating the others. There have been times of relative peace and stability, but all have occurred under the shadow of some dominant force. In the absence of such domination the world has seen only protracted struggles for domination by competing candidates for it.

That indeed is what natural selection and evolution are all about - the adaptation of species for survival and the disappearance of those that are out competed in their environments.

In today's world we shall see either the continued dominance of the Western world or a new coalition either of China and Russia or something else. We're also seeing a resurgence of a very fractious Islam that is reemerging on the world with all its historical unresolved contradictions of religious and secular rule still intact, and exacerbated by anger and resentment after two centuries of European colonial rule. We stepped into that mess after WWII and an attempt by Europeans to exterminate their Jewish populations, and, augmented by our own economic interests, have found it to be a tar baby from which we can't easily become unstuck.

It is possible to partly and temporarily resolve competitions between political powers and systems without cataclysmic wars, permitting some better accommodations to evolve. However those occurrences in history are few and tenuous, The Cold War is an example, but even that was an expensive and occasionally bloody struggle.

Pretending the conflict doesn't exist and attempting to resign from the struggle simply doesn't work - as Britain and France discovered in 1937.

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In this last, lingering few meters of the race, I think Joni Ernst (it's in the margin of error, though when aren't we?) really ought to run an ad set in the Ernst home, at Christmas, family standing near the glittering Christmas tree. Kids. Grandma. Jesus. They are numinous in the soft light, and singing, "Pig nuts roasting on an open fire."

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@blatham,

There's Bernie, good to see ya.

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@blatham,

John Ernst? and he is SOn of?

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@farmerman,

I have no idea what any of this means.

Bliss.

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@McTag,

I lookd up Jon Ernst and I got an ad for a JOHN Ernst, over near Harrisburg. He apparently is a house painter o some repute

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@McTag,

McTag wrote:

I have no idea what any of this means.

Bliss.

Very few of us do.
(I am not among them.)

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Sheesh. I might have gotten a more with it crowd if I'd walked into a Lubbock bowling alley.

Hi Osso

OK. A clue. Good grief, the standards are fallen. Do a rapid survey of google image files on Republican senatorial candidates in close races and choose the one who could most convincingly star in a tv series featuring an evil Betty Crocker.

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@blatham,

This candidate?

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140815182044-joni-ernst-story-top.jpg

I don' know nothin', will read up.

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@ossobuco,

Uh oh..

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2014/senate/ia/iowa_senate_ernst_vs_braley-3990.html

That's just a quick look, more later.

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@ossobuco,

Inasmuch as I have never been in Iowa in my life, I have no idea why I should have been familiar with those names. Not exactly household words.

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@blatham,

blatham wrote:

Sheesh. I might have gotten a more with it crowd if I'd walked into a Lubbock bowling alley.

"With" what? Do you believe you are that much more sophisticated than the patrons of bowling alleys? One stranded on a lonely island might imagine himself king of all he surveys. but that doesn't make it true.

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