"Brutus is an honorable man."

Ari Velshi insists he is "a capitalist" - meaning he favors capitalism over alternatives - even as he vigorously attacks capitalism in America with a fury to make any Marxist proud.

Speaking of capitalism the way Mark Antony speaks of Brutus.

Forcing people to do what their religion forbids

Nobody wants to be an absolutist about it, but such coercion can certainly be overdone.

Forcing medical professionals or institutions to perform procedures that violate conscience is overdoing it.

And in that regard abortion is not the only issue.

Another Catholic Hospital Sued for Refusing Transgender Hysterectomy

How much worse would things get in this regard if we had outright socialized medicine like the NHS of the Brits?

A lot worse.

Even handing over the entire health insurance market to a single federal government run insurer would significantly diminish this liberty.

And would subject provision of medical services to rationing on the basis of invidious comparisons of the worth of individual lives, and subject R&D to state-sponsored judgments of value, morality, and justice.

I am a Democrat and a progressive, but not an anti-capitalist and not at all a PC authoritarian.

The thug in the White House

We have known since the 2016 campaign he approves of the third degree, police brutality, torture, and war crimes like murdering the families of terrorists.

His voters like him because they share those attitudes.

Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher

Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.

Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.

Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.

Plutes gonna plute.

An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.

And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.

They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.

Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.

And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.

Might be a good idea, like trust busting.

Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.

And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.

Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.

Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.

All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.

They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.

Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.

But this is not.

There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.

Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.

Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.

It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.

Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.

The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.

That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.

So The Times is too conservative?

People say that a lot at Dem sites where both "socialism" and socialism are popular, and capitalism is not.

In recent weeks, The Times' front page has been relentlessly hammering Trump, the GOP, the USA, white men, and white people in general for racism, sexism, homophobia, and other sins too numerous and too diverse for me to recall them all right now, featuring multiple attacks above the fold (online edition, of course) every single day.

At least half the links and stories above the fold, and often more than that, are such attacks, nearly all of which at least include if they are not limited to the charge of racism.

But the ever more conspicuous Zinnite influence on The Times, actually more strident some days than The Guardian, shows increasingly in anti-capitalism, too.

As in this story, in which hammering the US for racism and slavery (ended by white people at the cost of some 700,000 dead, 154 years ago) provides a natural segue into hammering the US for capitalism.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

And yet, in this editorial - from the board, the publisher, and the editor, however, and in no way representing the newsroom or op-ed section - we see a defense of the Hong Kong rebels and a clear loathing of the red dictatorship of Beijing.

Hong Kong’s Challenge to Xi Jinping’s Iron Rule

All the same, most of the news stories concerning the situation have been sympathetic to the protesters and their aims.

With boring predictability . . . .

. . . . the Dem blogs this morning are crowing a big victory for their long-established favorites, the beloved leftists, over the klutzy, hated DINOs on the stage, heretofore known as "moderates", "centrists", or . . . "Democrats".

As for Chuck Todd "using Republican framing" isn't that what he's supposed to do?

Or did you think he was supposed to lob softballs right into the zone all night?

Oddly, the Times' headline - not so much, the story - is the least left-spinning of those in Dem media I have seen, today.

Sanders and Warren Battle Accusations of ‘Fairy Tale’ Promises as Intraparty Rift Flares

There was former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who accused Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren of making “fairy tale” promises; Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who lamented liberal “wish-list economics”; and former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, imploring the left not to overreach and “FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”

Arguing in somewhat subtler terms was Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who declined multiple chances to lash her liberal rivals by name but questioned the viability of their progressive stances on health care and education.

“I have bold ideas,” Ms. Klobuchar said, “but they are grounded in reality.”

With Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren refusing to yield an inch, the debate laid bare the stark choice before Democratic primary voters: whether to embrace an agenda of transformational economic change in an effort to motivate young and nonwhite voters, or to proceed more cautiously by embracing more incremental appeals that could win over moderates.

Or, here's a radical thought, the Dem voters could support candidates whose advertised agendas comport with their (the voters') own politics rather than so obviously playing bare-naked horse-race politics, treating agendas and aspirations as of no intrinsic importance, at all.

Though of course each group insisted a candidate (and party) with their type of agenda would do better in the general against the Duce (and the GOP on the whole).

<snip>

The most protracted exchanges of the night, and by far the most substantive ones, concerned Mr. Sanders’s signature proposal to replace private health insurance with a single-payer system of the kind employed in Canada and a number of European countries. 

Mr. Delaney and the other moderates attacked the proposal from the first minutes of the debate, calling it a politically toxic idea that would void the health care plans of union members and of employees of private businesses.

“We don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal,” Mr. Delaney said.

Mr. Sanders defended his plan ferociously, with periodic help from Ms. Warren. 

He cast Mr. Delaney and other Democratic doubters as champions of an indefensible system, and argued that opponents of the single-payer format tended to brand it with traits — like costliness and unpredictability — that the American health care system already possesses.

“The answer,” Mr. Sanders said, “is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies and the insurance companies, move to ‘Medicare for all.’”

Spoken like "profit" is a dirty word, in the manner of a true socialist in the real sense of the word, entailing and usually motivated by anti-capitalism.

Visceral, in Sanders' case.

Both he and Ms. Warren depicted skeptics of single-payer health care as being in league with the G.O.P.: Mr. Sanders accused a CNN moderator, Jake Tapper, of using a “Republican talking point” when raising questions about his plan, and noted that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight on this program.” 

In a similar complaint, Ms. Warren urged Democrats to “stop using Republican talking points” on the issue.

. . . .

The harshest counterattack on the moderates, however, may not have come from Mr. Sanders or Ms. Warren.

“I wonder why you’re Democrats,” said Marianne Williamson, the author and spiritualist. “You think there’s something wrong about using the instruments of government to help people.”

. . . .

The same center-versus-left divide evident on health care was also on display as the candidates clashed over trade and immigration, and whether some of the proposals offered by the liberal candidates would represent a boon to Mr. Trump.

“We got a hundred thousand people showing up at the border right now,” said Mr. Bullock. “If we decriminalize entry, if we give health care to everyone, we’ll have multiples of that.”

Turning to Ms. Warren, he accused her of “playing into Donald Trump’s hands” for wanting to make illegal immigration a civil penalty and seeking to provide federal benefits to undocumented migrants.

Ms. Warren fired back that “seeking refuge, seeking asylum” is “not a crime.”

A similar crossfire unfolded on trade, as Mr. Hickenlooper and Mr. Delaney accused Ms. Warren of pursuing a trade agenda closer to Mr. Trump’s than to that of the last Democratic president, Barack Obama. 

Ms. Warren’s agenda, Mr. Delaney said, “would isolate America’s economy around the world.”

. . . .

The evening seemed to expose the rifts in the party that might ultimately define the Democratic race once the party’s primary field narrows, and Mr. Biden comes face to face in future debates with Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren.

. . . .

Ms. Warren ignored a question about her boasts that she’s a proud capitalist — a barely-veiled contrast with Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist — and used the prompt instead to talk of her battles with Wall Street. 

Mr. Sanders even praised his colleague at one point, echoing her tough talk on corporate America.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “is absolutely right.”

Of wolves in sheep's clothing, one thinks, thinking about her protestations of non-socialism, of commitment to capitalism.

What we are looking at is a small group of fierce anti-capitalists who really are socialists in their hearts masquerading as capitalism-preferring and -loyal progressives, vs a coterie of actual progressives whom they are trying to portray as Republican bare-knuckle reactionaries.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Marooned Together on Fantasy Island

Of course, Bernie and Pocahontas are perfectly right that those candidates who belabored their agendas as fantasies oppose them, and would react with horror if they turned out not to be so fantastic, after all.

And the same is generally true, I suppose, in the commentariat.

But I am not at all sure about Frank Bruni.

Dickens v. the rabble

In the later chapters of Barnaby Rudge, D repeatedly portrays the rioters as violent, murderous criminals bent more on limitless destruction and anarchy than any real political goal.

Their actions repeatedly stem from hatred of the authorities and the haves - however little or much they have - , and it is these latter, persons with property, who have his undivided and wholly unabashed sympathy and loyalty.

Along with defenders of property, order, and authority.

Dickens a socialist?

Not on your life.

Which is not at all to deny his endless, heartfelt, and sincere sympathy for the deserving poor or his support for both private charity and state action aimed at relief within the context of a wholly undisturbed capitalism.

Who was it, which converted red, wrote that the entire red plague of the 20th Century was based on blind hatred of the bourgeoisie?

Oh, yes.

Francois Furet.

Though he was certainly not alone in that.

Of course, that plague was over by 1990.

A whole generation of adults was born and came to maturity after that.

Chartism, ch 2

The sorts of statistics we hear of every day - rates of saving, unemployment, average wages - none of that was available to Carlyle or anyone else.

Parliament had never troubled itself to ask whether people were saving at all -  C thought that a likely sign of the level of economic distress - , nor whether a "labouring man in this England of ours, who is willing to labour", can find work.

[Correction: information was available about savings accounts, but ordinary people were still in the habit of sticking cash under the bed or in the mattress, and nobody had any way of tracking money lent by individuals to other individuals at interest, says C.]

It had never occurred to Parliament that any of that was in the least their concern, evidently.

A committee of the bourgeoisie for managing their common affairs, Marx might say.

Best not to know or to ask how poor, miserable, or desperate the proletarian masses actually were, eh?

Let facts like that - good for business, handy for capitalists and their well-off dependents - remain quietly in the dark.

None of that is the proper concern of the state, anyway, is it?

What there is and what there isn't

There is democratic capitalism (capitalism under representative government, actually), as urged and celebrated by Barack Obama.

There is despotic, tyrannical socialism as urged and celebrated by Lenin and his followers.

There is not and never has been or will be democratic socialism.

Socialism under representative government.

That is a political myth.

Not every Dem pundit is all in for the AOC/Bernie agenda

Or for Bernie.

Or for Bernie-supporting women, at least one with a role in the 2016 campaign, running to the media to breathlessly complain Joe Biden touched their hair, shoulders, or arms.

Dana Milbank: Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Donald Trump of the left

I suppose that should be "reemerged", since he was that in 2016, as well.

How to blow the next presidential election and hand it over to Trump — 3 surefire techniques for Democrats who want to lose

1. Keep on calling it Socialism.

2. Kill the candidacy of any male Democrat who gets accused of anything by a woman.

3. Play stupid manipulative games with your own voters.

As for me, I really don't want it to be Bernie, though I prefer him to Trump or indeed any Republican.

This is why.

Bernie hates capitalism. He really is a socialist. He really is not a liberal or a progressive.

Though, being penniless, I am not personally a capitalist, I am a pro-capitalist, anti-socialist progressive.

Bernie hates the Democratic Party.

I am a Democrat, and I do not hate the party.

Bernie thinks any politician who takes money from corporations or rich contributors has been bought by the plutocracy and Wall Street.

I do not, and I am only too glad not every such well-heeled contributor is of a kind with the Kochs.

That is because Bernie hates Wall Street, Corporations, and billionaires.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's protectionist delusions, at heart.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's neo-isolationism, at heart.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's opposition to globalism.

I do not.

Bernie shares Trump's angry hatred for "the rigged system".

I hate that hatred.

Bernie thinks the major parties need to make their nomination processes more democratic because he thinks that will give demagogues like himself a better shot at taking over a party most of whose voters and nearly all of whose elected officials do not share his radicalism.

I oppose making the process more democratic because I think he is right.

(And then there is Trump, he whom no smoke filled room would ever have nominated.)

(On the other hand, Bernie won mostly in caucus states where his young socialist activists could gain control of the process. He lost big to Hillary in primary states where Democratic voters, overwhelmingly not socialists, got to make the choice. So maybe we're both wrong.)

Bernie wants Medicare for All in part to force down salaries for Medical professionals and remuneration for other providers, and partly to enable political control of medical, technical, and pharmaceutical research.

I oppose Medicare for All for those reasons, preferring expansion of Ocare and its subsidies to achieve universal coverage among those not otherwise covered.

Bernie wants to spend lots of federal money to make publicly owned secondary schools tuition free. This for him is a step toward a public monopoly on higher education and research.

I oppose his plan in part for that very reason, and prefer a system of tuition vouchers usable at any secondary school, private or public, secular or religious-affiliated. Heck, even training to be a cleric.

On the other hand, I do support court packing and abolition of the filibuster and the Electoral College.

I support representation of states in the senate proportionate to population.

And some other progressive reforms.

Capitalism with a human face.

Bernie has indeed been a transformative figure.

He has made the Democratic Party more insistent on furthering progressive reforms that are mostly of the sort that have lived in the hearts of progressives since TR's run of 1912, and in the hearts of liberals since the New Deal.

The broad masses of the Democratic Party are in love with his and AOC's agenda, though the bulk of the party's office holders have not yet entirely embraced it.

But he did not, will not, and has not even tried to transform the Democratic Party into a rerun of the old Socialist Party USA.

About that Douthat is wrong.

Bernie Sanders, Socialism’s Reagan?

Bernie Sanders' hero is Gene Debs, the SP candidate of 1912, and not TR and not Wilson.

And despite his dishonest reticence his socialism is the real thing, public or collective ownership of the means of production, and his hatred of capitalism is real, too.

Probably, AOC is the same way, though her heroes are likely more Latin American that his.

All the same, the AOC/Bernie agenda is not about abolishing capitalism in America, and though it is very widely popular among Democrats those same Democrats are no more interested in the abolition of capitalism than Howard Schultz or Michael Bloomberg.

But despite the dishonesty of Bernie and of many of his supporters, most Americans already know what socialism really is, and the further we get into the campaign the more the Republicans will gladly inform those who don't yet actually get it.

And the more Americans who get it, the more unpopular with actual voters the word "socialism" will be.

So what we Democrats need is a Democratic nominee who embraces the AOC/Bernie agenda without embracing either socialism or "socialism".

Because what Democrats and a whole lot of other people actually want is not socialism but capitalism with a human face.

Of course, if Bernie is the nominee I will absolutely vote for him.

But I would rather someone else carried our water.

Someone who knows better than to honestly campaign for that agenda while campaigning to dishonestly rehabilitate socialism by lying about both it and "socialism".

That is a mug's game and does no good while playing into the hands of lying Republicans who always tell the same lies Trump and the White House and even Douthat are already telling.

The last thing we need is a f-ing political revolution

Too old, too white, and rhetorically and ideologically way too far left.

But his actual agenda isn't anywhere near that far left.

A politician who publicly embraced capitalism and explained the agenda is about making it work better for everyone rather than only for capitalists would scare the plutes less, and less easily fall prey to scare tactics and what is basically red baiting.

In Chicago, Sanders signals his intent to reach black voters

They always pick Venezuela

A nation ruined by incompetent loons and American economic warfare, both.

They never point to Canada, right next door, as an example of how things go for a country with, basically, a Medicare for All system.

Unless they want to point out that Canadians often come to big city hospitals in the US with top national care for very special doctoring.

Just as do people from Wyoming, the Dakotas, or Nebraska, I imagine.

Must be their socialism screws up health care.

Wait. What?

How they spend the money no longer taken by the IRS, thanks to the GOP

They so know how to spend it much better than the crummy government would.

Dan Snyder, the American billionaire owner of the Washington National Football League (NFL) team, is taking delivery of a new superyacht, complete with the world’s first floating private Imax movie theatre – at an additional $3m (£2.3m) cost.

. . . .

“He wanted an Imax, that was his main request,” Jan-Bart Verkuyl, the chief executive of Feadship’s Royal Van Lent shipyard, told the Guardian this week. 

Verkuyl refused to identify the owner, describing him only as a “US billionaire”. 

The Guardian has since established, via several sources, that the buyers of the yacht, which is understood to have cost more than $100m, are Snyder, 54, and his wife Tanya. 

A spokesperson for Snyder declined to comment.

I am sick of this bullshit radicalism and its hateful message

Clips of Warren being interviewed by Rachel Maddow show her echoing both Trump and Bernie at their angry anti-American worst.

The system is rigged, the system is fundamentally corrupt, blah, blah, blah.

I do not want the Democratic Party to go that way.

I do not want it to run against the American government, the American political system, the American economic system, and the American classe politique in 2020, as Trump pretty much did in 2016.

MSNBC is totally full of shit about so much, these days.

The latest?

Democratic primaries are about Democrats falling in love with someone.

And that someone can only be from the further left of the party, hopefully not white and not male and not more than 45 years old.

These loons are like the loons of Fox, they are further out toward the extremes than the bulk of their own party's voters.

They are hot for people who say outright they hate capitalism (that is the corrupt and rigged system they whine about) and prefer socialism.

Imagine how far they are from the American center.

One of their hosts just laughed in the face of a guest who said that Mitt Romney's public attacks on Trump make so little political sense that they are likely genuine acts of conscience.

She inadequately apologized for laughing at him only to laugh again at the very idea that Romney might have spoken from conscience.

Why is Ari Melber growing a beard?

Right now a bunch of "progressive" women on MSNBC are crediting for the emancipation and rise of women only earlier generations of women.

Rather as though black leaders celebrating the emancipation of the slaves totally overlooked the roles of Lincoln, the almost entirely white Union army, and the almost entirely white Republicans of the time.

It was, after all, a generation of men who adopted an amendment to the constitution to give women the vote.

A new face.

A very interesting photo essay.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old who is now a new face for the Democratic Party

Some scoop.

Who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Wikipedia

She is much further left than me and I probably would have preferred Crowley.

Too, much further to the left, I think, than most Democratic voters.

But if she had politics similar to his I would much prefer her to him.

Yes, Democrats need to be younger and more conspicuously diverse.

Socialism and terror

Thoroughgoing socialism is deeply contrary to the egoism of everybody who would have to staff it and run it, possibly including the highest political or other officials.

At best, it serves the egoism of the lower orders, and even that not necessarily, and not for long, better than progressive capitalism.

Hence, it cannot survive without terror.

Rule by terror under a savage, remorseless, and relentless dictatorship of an ideologically convinced party fully committed to just that.

And not indefinitely with such terror.

Hence its collapse in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Hence its abandonment in China.

It is incompatible with any form of free government.

Costaguano

Mrs Gould is considerably less sanguine about the political significance of "material interests" after the successful secession of the Sulaco region.

The Lighthouse, Nostromo, chapter 11.

An authoritarian move in an authoritarian state

China Moves to Let Xi Stay in Power by Abolishing Term Limit

China’s Communist Party has cleared the way for President Xi Jinping to stay in power, perhaps indefinitely, by announcing on Sunday that it wants to abolish the two-term limit on the presidency — a dramatic move that would mark the country’s biggest political change in decades.

The party leadership “proposed to remove the expression that the president and vice president of the People’s Republic of China ‘shall serve no more than two consecutive terms’ from the country’s Constitution,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported.

With each term set at five years, the Constitution currently limits Mr. Xi, who became president in 2013, to 10 years in office. 

But the announcement appears to be the strongest signal yet that Mr. Xi, 64, intends to hold onto power longer than any Chinese leader in at least a generation.

“I think this is without a doubt the clearest confirmation we’ve had yet that Xi Jinping plans to stay in power much longer than we thought,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese politics in Beijing who works for the Conference Board, which provides research for companies. 

“We should expect Xi Jinping to be the dominant political force in China for the next decade.”

The announcement also confirmed that Mr. Xi has amassed enough power to rewrite the rules that had constrained his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, both of whom stepped down after two terms. 

Those rules were aimed at preventing the reappearance of the cult of personality that had surrounded the People’s Republic’s founding father, Mao Zedong.

When Communism passes

What will happen to the ordinary people of Cuba?

Who does not think they will be worse off, fleeced by plutocrats served by frauds, liars, and demagogues?

Maybe the people are too stupid for democracy.

Or even republicanism.

Biden defends "the liberal world order"

What's that?

Global democratic capitalism, the very thing O and Hillary publicly trumpeted and Bernie could barely think of without a curse.

Biden hammers Trump in scathing speech

“I really feel incredibly strongly that the women and men sitting before me, who have been the intellectual backbone of the foreign policy establishment in this country for decades, have to start to speak out,” he said. 

“President Obama and I have been very quiet and respectful, giving the administration time, but some of these roots are being sunk too deeply. I believe it’s time to challenge some of the dangerous assumptions that are attempting to replace that liberal world order.”

Biden, who spent four decades serving in high public office, was receiving the Zbigniew Brzezinski annual prize at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank. 

The auditorium was packed, with many people standing, and hushed as he offered a damning verdict on the Trump presidency.

Acknowledging that many Americans feel left behind by globalisation, he said: “The appeal to populism and nationalism is a siren song, a way for charlatans to aggrandise their power, raise themselves up, break down those mechanisms that were designed, whether in our constitution or internationally, to limit the abuse of power, and destabilise the world.

“It’s not alarmist. We’re walking down a very dark path that isolates the United States on the world stage and, as a consequence, endangers – not strengthens – endangers American interests and the American people.”

. . . .

“Among the many problems plaguing this administration’s foreign policy: ideological incoherence, inconsistent and confusing messaging, erratic decision-making, unwillingness or inability to solve problems caused by understaffing. When’s the last time, in the state department, you can stand on the seventh floor and yell and hear an echo?”

. . . .

Both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past had worked to uphold the liberal international order, he continued. 

“The president’s vision, in contrast, is grounded in a disturbing admiration for autocrats and an apparent faith that the world will mistake bluster and bullying for strength.”


He derided Trump’s recent appearance at the UN, where the president emphasized national sovereignty and self-interest. 

“To stand in the well of the general assembly, and wave the flag of narrow nationalism, while warning of a future vulnerable to ‘decay, dominion and defeat’ marks a dangerous revision of political small-mindedness that led the world to consume itself in two world wars in the last century, and it abandons America’s hard-won position as the indispensable nation, as a leader that inspires more than fear.”

Go read it.

Good stuff.