A Fore-gotten Elite

By Kleinheider Posted on May 14, 2008 at 6:09 pm

Scott McConnell thinks maybe it would have been better on America had George Bush not given up golf during the War On Terror:

Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a pretty strong correlation between presidential time spent on the golf course and superior chief executive judgment, a metric which would rightly rank Dwight Eisenhower first among post-war presidents.

There’s also a more complicated sociological point to be made here: that the WASP establishment which ran the country’s foreign policy rather decently in the years after World War II has been nudged from the central halls of power, and one is now more likely to find its scions working on their handicaps or plotting elaborate middle age man getaways to this historic courses of Scotland than clawing their way up the ranks of the foreign affairs intelligentsia.

This tidal retreat from public life hasn’t necessarily been a good thing.

SEE ALSO: Joe Powell

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Tags: Geroge Bush, golf, War on Terror  

More Violence To Come In Afghanistan

By Kleinheider Posted on April 24, 2008 at 10:34 am

That’s what military leaders such as Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser are saying:

“This year won’t be different,” he says. “I would predict that we will see some level of increasing incidences of violence just as there has been every year and they may well reach a higher level than they did in 2007.”

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Tags: Afghanistan, Blowback, no rest for the wicked, War on Terror  

The Sudden Impact Of A Wide Net

By Kleinheider Posted on April 22, 2008 at 2:31 pm

“When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you’re sure to find some of them.”

~ Daryl Zero in The Zero Effect (1998)

Joe Powell has a big problem with “Operation Sudden Impact” a three-state, 50-agency project initiative design to ferret out terrorists an American soil:

If law enforcement stops every car and driver, searches every business and home, they will likely find some kind of violation of something somewhere … but that’s playing a game of blind luck and not ‘enhancing security efforts’.

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Tags: civil liberties, Operation Sudden Impact, Tennessee, War on Terror