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Bully Pulpit

The term "bully pulpit" stems from President Theodore Roosevelt's reference to the White House as a "bully pulpit," meaning a terrific platform from which to persuasively advocate an agenda. Roosevelt often used the word "bully" as an adjective meaning superb/wonderful. The Bully Pulpit features news, reasoned discourse, opinion and some humor.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Ex-Sen. Bob Graham: Iran Strikes Could Spark World War III

After Sept. 11, 2001, while the Bush administration, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle and others were warning of the grave threat posed by Saddam Hussein and Iraq, one senator was warning that the real threat to America lay with Iran.

The Iranian-supported terrorist group Hezbollah "is a much more immediate threat to the security of the United States of America, in my judgment, than Saddam Hussein," Sen. Bob Graham declared in July 2002.

And within weeks of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Graham said: "Iran has a larger warehouse of chemical and biological weapons and is closer to gaining nuclear weapons capability than Iraq."


Kenneth R. Timmerman

From the article:


All those [Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas] were clearly greater threats to the U.S. than Iraq, but we decided to not only spend our resources on Iraq but pay the price on ignoring the greater threats, and that price is now being paid.


I agreed with Graham at the time and still do, although his demgoguery on it negated being taken seriously. He is still demgoging in the article. Some politicians never seem to learn anything.


Our failure since the early 1970s, when we had the first oil shock, to take any serious steps to reduce our dependence has contributed to our potential of being held hostage by not only Iran, but ... Venezuela [where Hugo Chavez has turned] from an annoyance to a very serious challenge in our own hemisphere.

There's a long list of things we should be doing, but high on that list is developing alternative sustainable sources of energy to reduce our use of energy.


This started off so well. However, he went off into a ditch with, "...developing alternative sustainable sources of energy to reduce our use of energy." What the heck does that mean? That almost sounds like a Bushism.

1 Comments:

Blogger Analyst_for_Life said...

Graham forgot that we already had WWIII (from about 1950 on), and won it, about 14 or so years ago. Note that "USSR" does not appear on current maps, and has been gone for about 14 years.

He also seems to be unaware that WWIV is already under way, opening hostilities having begun as early as 1993 (if you count the FIRST attack on the World Trade Center, followed a few years later by the Oklahoma City bombing), or 9/11/01 if you were asleep during most of the 1990's. Or even 1991 if you count Gulf War I as the opening scene of this new multi-act tragedy. Perhaps future historians will mark the breakup of Yugoslavia and the US intervention of the mid-1990's as one of the more bizarre scenes of the opening act, with US bombers helping to make the region safer for Islamofascist gun runners, drug dealers, and white slavers in Kosovo. Yes, the Serbs were pretty nasty too. Maybe their communal memory of life under the Ottomans made them a bit less sanguine about the possibility of coexisting with Islamists fired up with visions of the restored Khalifate. Maybe their history made them a bit too itchy with the trigger fingers. Time will tell who was too itchy, and who was too clueless.

Yes, I know this is all a bit murky, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_IV
and
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm

Still, Graham is mostly "out to lunch", as are the bulk of the "centrist parties" nomenklatura, who (at least publicly) still don't seem to get it. Hopefully they are not quite that dense behind their public masks, but it's probably not the wise way to bet.

Saturday, April 29, 2006 6:49:00 PM  

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