The Anchoress has two posts you must read:
The first one pertains to this: US-Russian Arms Negotiators “Under the Gun,” Might Temporarily Bypass Senate Ratification for Treaty
With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a “provisional basis” until the Senate ratifies the treaty.
You mean, the same way the spendulus and the cap-and-tax were pushed without time to read them?
Wasn’t the law of the land that, if you bypass Senate ratification, it’s not a treaty?
The second post from The Anchoress pertains to this article from last year by Andrew McCarthy. Today he also wrote,
So now, nearly six months into the Obama presidency, the mainstream media has finally done a bit of the candidate background reporting it declined to do during the campaign — other than in Wasilla — and whaddya know? The New York Times unearthed a 1983 article called, “Breaking the War Mentality,” that Columbia student Barack Obama wrote for a campus newspaper. The article shows that Obama dreaded American “militarism” and its “military-industrial interests,” while effusing enthusiasm for the dangerously delusional nuclear-freeze movement.
One statement stands out in the “Breaking the war mentality” article Obama wrote in 1983:
By being intransigent, Reagan is playing directly into Russia’s hands.
Allow me to digress from a moment but as you know, for the past eight days I’ve been posting on Honduras, the small Central American country, the only country in our hemisphere so far that has attempted to reject a power grab by a Chávez stooge: the US actively canvassed the Honduran government not to remove Zelaya, who had even had his unlawful ballots printed in Venezuela, and the US insists that Zelaya be reinstated as president of Honduras.
Raul Castro, Mel Zelaya and Hugo Chávez
Perhaps that’s the reasoning (“let’s not be intransigent“) behind the Obama administration’s current policy towards Hugo Chávez. By being flexible and accomodating and seeking out Hugo across the crowded room, Obama probably believes that Chávez will come around. After all, Chávez, like his friend Zelaya, once was democratically elected, and does not qualify, to use Obama’s term, as one of the “countless American puppet dictators today.” That way the administration is not intransigent with Chávez. The question remains, Is being one of Chávez’s puppet dictators, then, preferable, as long as we’re not intransigent with Chávez and his cronies? Because by not being intransigent with Hugo we won’t be heading towards the “old solutions of more weapons and again more weapons” that young Obama dismissed in 1983?
How did history turn out, in Ronald Reagan’s case?
Read both posts by the Anchoress and both of McCarthy’s articles. The bottom line comes down to this:
Meanwhile, Obama in Russia and the balance of power is the story. With his nation in difficult straits, and his own administration incoherent, Obama, who Ed Morrissey calls “the reverse Reagan” goes gladhanding, and the next week will be interesting to watch.
Interesting, yes. Disastrous, possibly.
But don’t worry. Michelle Obama brings her superstar glamour to Moscow, at least according to The Guardian. Perhaps The Guardian will check out Victor Davis Hanson’s A Thug’s Primer and put up a fashion show.
An un-intransigent fashion show, that is.
(special thanks to Larwyn for the link)