When Attorney General Janet Reno deployed federal law enforcement agencies to Waco, Texas to arrest the Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, one of the the tactics used was to constantly blast loud music 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Eventually, men, women and children died from a brutal attack by their own countrymen. And, except for a few Republican lawmakers, the GOP and Democrat senators and congressmen displayed no outrage. And Senator John McCain was among those who remained silent. However, in the new millennium McCain has become the protector of imprisoned terrorists and enemy combatants and fights for their constitution rights.

John McCain’s first-place showing in the New Hampshire primary did not impress many conservatives including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

During a Fox News Channel interview, the man known to friend and enemy alike as “The Hammer” criticized McCain in an interview Wednesday with FOX News.

“There’s nothing redeeming about John McCain,” DeLay said.

The Texas Republican went on to say that McCain “betrays conservative principles.”

When asked on which issues McCain was not a conservative, DeLay did not mince words. He said: “[T]here’s tons of them” and then he listed the Senator McCain’s positions on the environment, immigration, the International Criminal Court, his support for affirmative action and taxes. He also called McCain a “hypocrite” when it came to lobbyists.

“[McCain] appealed once again to independents,” DeLay claimed. “He’s not going to go much further than New Hampshire,” he predicted.

Tom DeLay also took a shot McCain’s favorable press coverage. He described the Arizona senator as a “darling of the media.”

In closing DeLay said “I don’t think there’s a schism in the party. The party doesn’t exist. It’s rebuilding.”

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he’s a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org).  Kouri also serves as political advisor for Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Michael Moriarty. 

He’s former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed “Crack City” by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations.  He’s also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.   Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He’s a news writer for TheConservativeVoice.Com and PHXnews.com.  He’s also a columnist for AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he’s syndicated by AXcessNews.Com.   He’s appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc.  His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com. Kouri’s own website is located at http://jimkouri.us
   

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and social activism, when the aim is to enlarge government control, is inescapably traveling the road to political tyranny.

In The Social Gospel Has Found its Savior I wrote:

Regrettably, well meaning Christian ministers like Rick Warren are supporting Mr.  Gore’s junk scientism and the power of man over the earth, rather than sticking to faith in the one True God as Creator and Regulator of the cosmos.

Rick Warren emailed me a nice message saying that he does not agree with the social gospel, acknowledging that it is simply atheistic socialism mimicking Christianity.

Nonetheless, mixing religion with purely secular and highly speculative activism like Al Gore’s campaign is hard to distinguish from the early 20th century’s social gospel.

While we must strive to be a Christian nation, ministers should scrupulously stay out of politics and confine themselves to saving individual souls. Jesus commanded us to go out and preach the gospel, not go out and organize political action committees.

What Al Gore, along with Rick Warren and his fellow preachers, propose is collectivism on a grand scale. No sane political society is willingly going to bomb itself economically back into the stone age to “save” the planet. Intellectual cadres will have to be empowered, with their armies of bureaucrats, to produce millions of regulations implementing Kyoto, and they must have means of enforcing those regulations, hence the origin of Gestapos and KGBs.

In a sketch that fits Al Gore remarkably well, Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life has to be under such collectivism:

The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…

All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

ALLIANCE DEFENSE FUND NEWS RELEASE
January 10, 2008 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT ADF MEDIA RELATIONS: (480) 444-0020

In May 2007, in response to an ADF lawsuit filed on behalf of Good News Presbyterian Church, the town of Gilbert agreed to a preliminary injunction prohibiting it from enforcing its sign code against the church, which required church signs to be smaller in size, fewer in number, and displayed for much less time than similar non-religious signs (www.telladf.org/news/story.aspx?cid=4117). On Tuesday, the town passed an amended code, which continues to treat religious signs far less favorably than similar commercial and noncommercial signs.

A copy of the amended complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, Phoenix Division, in Reed v. Town of Gilbert can be read at www.telladf.org/UserDocs/ReedAmendedComplaint.pdf.

As an education reformer, I read about education every day. I read about ways to hold institutions of higher learning accountable for their education curriculum, I read about how important it is to have highly qualified teachers, and I read how students not receiving an equitable education should be afforded the right to attend private schools or charter schools with the tax dollars set aside for public education. While all of these are noble ideas, none of them address the real problem with education.

The real problem is that nowhere is it written in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that there is freedom of education. Unlike religion, which received protection from the faction of the majority by the Bill of Rights which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” nowhere is education specifically addressed in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Yet, today, we have in place a Department of Education funded by the taxpayers’ money and a public education system funded by the taxpayers’ money.

I am convinced that James Madison, who fought tooth and nail against using public money for religion, would have felt the same way about education. How can I be so certain about this? No one, especially James Madison, wanted the state to support a single system of religious beliefs. Furthermore, against majority opinion, James Madison fought against a general assessment tax which would have given “individual citizen[s] the option of designating his taxes to any one of a number of denominations.”

James Madison refused to yield to, “What many Virginians wanted, in common with citizens in other states,” which, “was to avail themselves of what petitioners to the General Assembly repeatedly called the “Public utility” of religion, by which they meant its capacity to promote the general welfare of society.” Ibid The prevailing notion in the 1780s was that religion promoted, “happiness, prosperity, peace, order, security and safety.” The public utility of religion purported that civil society could not exist without the aid of religion. Life, liberty and property” was impossible without religion.

James Madison was very concerned about the ability of factions using their power to take away individual rights. In Federalist #10 he reveals his lack of confidence that moral or religious motives can control injustice and violence perpetrated by majorities. He doesn’t believe we can rely on the social value of religion to ensure we do what is right. Rather, he believes, “that multiple healthy sects were necessary in any polity to prevent a dominant brand of believers from oppressing or even cutting the throats of its competitors.”

In Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, he advocates John Locke’s idea, “that any government embrace of religion violated the fundamental natural right to freedom of conscience which had been reserved by individual citizens when they left the state of nature to enter civil society.” Furthermore, “by denying the new federal government power in matters of religion, they deprived it of the authority to interfere with the peoples’ faith and thus protected the freedom of religion.”
Had there been written in the Bill of Rights that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of a system of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, we probably would have an education system that works. Instead, we have a system that demands it is the only one that deserves government tax dollars. It is a system that has used its power to trample on the individual right to learn about what the individuals who make up a community value; instead the teachers union and textbook manufacturers dictate what will and will not be taught in school. Students who do not have the economic capacity to leave failing schools, or whose families need to live in a particular area, are not given the choice of learning what is important to them.

There are no agreed on standards for education. There is no proof that a Board certified teacher can do better than a home schooling parent in educating our children. There is nothing that says that a vocational education won’t serve one particular student better than the Socratic Method. And certainly, there is nothing in the Bill of Rights that says there should be the establishment of a public school system. Had there been, this notion would have been incorporated with the other rights, had a system been established at all.

Madison, by squelching the notion of “Public Utility” of religion in Virginia, pretty much squelched all the states from putting in place such a system of taxation. Still, as Madison predicted, religion is alive and well in this nation, with no help from the taxpayers. Charitable contributions are large and given by individuals to those they deem worthy of their hard earned money, with no help from the government. Why, then, do we insist on funding a system of public education in this country which successfully works as a majority faction to trample on the individual rights of a large number of people making up this nation?

Related Reading:

Hutson, James, James Madison and the Social Utility of Religion: Risks vs. Rewards
(2001) Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/loc/madison/hutson-paper.html
Nancy Salvato is the President and Director of Education and the Constitutional Literacy Program for Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan 501 (C) (3) research and educational project whose mission is to re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country, specifically the threats of aggressive Islamofascism and the American Fifth Column. She serves as the Assistant Provost for the American College of Education and as a Senior Editor for The New Media Journal. She is also a staff writer, for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets, and a frequent contributing writer to The World & I educational magazine.

As the primary season finally gets started the issue of Barack Obama’s religion takes the stage once again. While there are some aspects of his religious affiliations that cause legitimate concern, the contention that he is a danger because he practiced Islam as a child, under the guidance of his father and then his step-father, is being overblown for what it is not and ignored for what it is.

The notion that Barack Obama is a closeted Islamist is akin to a black helicopter theory. He has established that he is a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. While there are many questions surrounding the bigotry of this congregation’s controversial pastor and the afro-centricity of the church’s tenets, the fact remains the church is not a mosque and the pastor is not an Imam or cleric.But, as Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes points out in his recent article, Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam, Barack Obama did in fact practice Islam as a child. True, most of us, as children, are guided by our parents in the ways of religion, taking up the faiths of our mothers and fathers, but a choice later in life to deviate from their religious beliefs does not nullify the fact that we once attended the churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. sanctioned by our parents. To this extent, Barack Obama did practice Islam and was subjected to the fundamental tenets of the ideology.This fundamental truth is important for at least a few different reasons. Fundamentalist Islamists, radical Islamists, Wahhabists

, believe, among other things, that :▪ When one is born of Muslim parents they are Muslim

This brings up a very serious question with regard to a major limitation should Barack Obama make it to the White House. In this age of conflict between Western Civilization and radical Islam, when the United States must have the most potent of leaders on the world stage, can a Muslim apostate achieve credibility within the Islamic world?Over the next several decades it is going to be paramount that the United States – and the West – have a working relationship with the Muslim world, both ideological and governmental. The President of the United States must be appreciated for his status and be accepted as credible when proposing or agreeing to treaties and accords. Should Barack Obama become President of the United States, his credibility in the Islamic world would be subject to the severity of each individual leader’s fundamentalist conviction.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading exporter of fundamentalist Sunni Islam – Wahhabism – would most assuredly view Obama as an apostate and, therefore, an infidel of the worst order. Because Saudi Arabia is considered – for reasons unknown to this writer – an ally in the global war against radical Islam, Obama’s apostasy presents a problem as to whether agreements between the two nations can be considered ingenuous. When you entertain the Wahhabist ideological tenet of taqiyya, the possibility of insincere agreements entered into by the Saudis, meant to empower a strategic advantage over the United States and the West, becomes more of a problem.The issue of Obama’s apostasy is also valid for the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and especially Iran, and the plethora of countries in Indonesia and Africa who either see their government’s mired in conflict with radical Islam or adhering to the tenets of Islamic dogma.

Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1F297C14-C64D-41B1-AEBB-E0325C823CD8 Understanding the Wahhabist Infiltration of America
http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/fsalvato/2007/print/11022007.htm Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam: Basics Project

http://www.basicsproject.org/educational_cd_series.htm#Understanding_the_Threat_of_Radical_Islam Al Taqiyya: Basics Project
http://www.basicsproject.org/terrorism/ideology/al_taqiyya.htm
Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for Basics Project a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, Basics Project, partnered in producing the first ever national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism. He also serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel and is the host of the NMJ Radio show broadcast global on NetTalkWorld global talk radio and broadcast live on BlogTalk Radio. He is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, syndicated on over 25 stations nationally and on The Captain’s America Radio Show catering to the US Armed Forces around the world, as well as an occasional guests on radio programs across the country. His opinion-editorials are syndicated nationally and he is occasionally quoted in The Federalist. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at newmediajournal@comcast.net.

Tonight on the Fox News Channel debates, Mitt Romney again played the traditional “Reagan” marriage card. He said that a strong economy equals strong families. Unfortunately, this is only half the equation — the half representing the possibility that strong families could exist.

Like the rest of the Republican lineup, Romney refuses to work on the other half of the equation – the most important piece that Republicans failed to handle in the 1996 welfare reforms – reducing illegitimacy and improving marriage rates and retention. Today, much of the largest line item in the federal budget – nearly $700-billion in H.H.S. expenditures – is misused destroying marriage and then trying to clean up the mess.

It has not worked for forty years. We know that it will never work because our record expenditures parallel today’s miserable social statistics. Illegitimacy is at record levels, as is “shacking up”. Divorce is down, but only because marriage rates are also down.

Reagan felt that American families were strong and were the envy of the world. The rest of the world did not see it that way then, and still heartily disagrees. In Reagan’s day, we had nearly the highest divorce and illegitimacy rates on the planet. The same holds true today.

The Republican lineup is basically ignorant – except Mr. Huckabee – who is aware of the problem but to date has offered no conservative change he would seek to improve the problem (nationalized health care, child support, and welfare are strongly anti-marriage welfare-state policies that do not count as solutions).

Last week David Broder correctly pointed out the engine driving Mike Huckabee’s meteoric rise:

“Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has … A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.”

Robert Rector also illuminated the policy problem in “Poor Politics” this past August:

“If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three quarters of the nation’s impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty. Yet, although work and marriage are reliable ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to encourage work and marriage, the nation’s remaining poverty could be reduced.”

This past Monday, Rush Limbaugh also read the tea leaves sinking in a rather cold pot correctly:

“A lot of people might just sit out — which would give the election to Hillary or Obama, which in turn could do such damage to the country that by 2012, that that will bring about the new Reagan, that the new Reagan’s not possible in this scenario. I don’t know about this “new Reagan” business. But his point is that somebody far more conservative than we have on the roster now would surface in 2012 as opposed to now.”

The larger Republican base is just as worked up about these problems as they were in 1992 – but perhaps more serious about it and less patient listening to muffin-mouthed pontifications about the “importance of marriage” lacking any policy change to effect it. The conservative base does not want national health care. The base does not want Republicans building a bigger welfare state. We don’t want effusive “change” that does not have any specific policies attached to it.

It now seems that nearly everyone except the lineup of Republican candidates is aware that we not only expect, but demand that our candidates adopt a true “Marriage Values” agenda, one that speaks to what most voters need and want, policies to reform out-of-control social spending so that it predominantly expects and rewards marital responsibility and provides the tools that they need to work through the common marital stress-points and problems that are a normal part of marriage and aging. I predict that the first Republican who runs on a true “Marriage Values” policy agenda will overwhelmingly win the presidency – if not in 2008 – in 2012 or 2016.

————————————————-

David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network, and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition

On the one hand, I can’t rightly blame Hillary Clinton for her mini-breakdown in New Hampshire. For almost as long as she’s been a candidate for president, Senator Clinton has gone substantively unchallenged and remained a dominant frontrunner, cherished by her party and throngs of strangers everywhere she spoke.

Then came Iowa and the shellacking at the hands of Barack Obama. Clinton’s carefully scripted off-the-cuff remarks and meticulously crafted distortions of current events didn’t appear to be helping anymore; every tried and true campaign stratagem seemed to become a perfect disaster, and when the fear of failure got to be too much, perhaps it occurred to her that the New Hampshire primary was coming precariously close to mirroring her own marriage: Someone younger and better looking was standing in the way of what she wanted, and there was nothing she could do about it. When it finally got to be too much, she broke down a little. And it saved her campaign.

On the other hand, skepticism should always be the fallback position when it comes to the Clintons. Likely that Senator Clinton doesn’t open her eyes in the morning without first wondering how it might impact her poll numbers. There is no earthly reason to believe that a woman who hasn’t displayed a spontaneous reaction in fifteen years suddenly found her emotional center – one day before the New Hampshire primary, which she was primed to lose badly – and decided to show everyone, as a means of conveying her resolute earnestness.

Had (then) First Lady Clinton, in the midst of explaining how a right-wing conspiracy was responsible for her husband’s serial infidelity, so much as batted an eye, or paused to blink, or wiped a phantom tear from her eye, perhaps one could reflect upon that display and take the New Hampshire stage show seriously. As it was, her bulldoggedness kept her from anything other than a forward assault, and our knowing how Mrs. Clinton later reacted to Bill’s further dalliances (minus the conspiracy jive, add lamp throwing), it becomes even harder to believe Candidate Clinton is prone to choking up when reflecting upon the country’s potential.

Not convinced? Then take into account Senator Clinton’s batting practice at the expense of Access Hollywood last Sunday, wherein Maria Menounos subjected the senator to such hard-hitting questions as: “Do you have, like, regular woman problems?” “You’re alone on a Saturday, you don’t have any work to do: What do you do?” and, “Do you watch any reality shows?”

Of particular interest to Clinton skeptics, this gem: “Everyone is talking about Saturday’s debate. And you were criticized for getting angry; more people say angry and defensive. And it seems as though when a male candidate gets upset or voices their opinion, it’s okay. And now we’re seeing a female up there for the first time in a long time, and, and … or, ever. Are you – it seems like it’s not okay for a female. Do you – how do you express your emotions without tuning people out?”

This should have come as a shock to Senator Clinton, who not long ago took great pains to establish the fact she wasn’t being attacked because she’s a woman, but because she was ahead. “Well, I am passionate about what I believe,” Clinton replied, “and I am passionate about this country and what we need to do to change what is happening. And I know that you don’t get change by hoping for it, or demanding it. You get change by working hard to bring people together. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. And I want people to know that about me, and to know that I’m a fighter. You know, you can’t be a president who just says, ‘Oh, send me to the White House and everything will be wonderful.’ That’s not the way the world works. You want to be able to count on somebody to make the changes that they said that they will bring about.”

(For those of you keeping score, that’s “change” four times in one paragraph. And by the way, those of you taking such incalculable delight in President Bush’s problems with the language ought do yourselves the favor of attempting to diagram a few of the above sentences, and enjoy some giggles.)

The skeptic says: Something in the question about emotion finally underscored for the Clinton campaign the senator’s lack of reputation for pointless feelgoodism when compared to Senator Obama; when you’re a liberal, pointless feelgoodism matters. Worse having come to worse, it was decided that Clinton should break down slightly on Monday, lest the voters forget that Clinton is more than aware of what it means to undertake the solemn task of being president.

If it weren’t so brilliant, it would make the skeptic sick to his stomach.

Moisés Naím who is also editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine wants to pretend that he and his ilk love America in a Washington Post op ed. But, after reading his newest editorial, titled “A Hunger For America” where he denounces the U.S.A.’s “incompetence, recklessness and ignorance,” one can only come to the conclusion that he only loves it when America does what foreigners want her to do. In other words, he doesn’t love America at all, he only loves the interests and desires of others and using the power and money of America to their ends instead of our own. More ridiculously, he seems to pine for an America of the past, saying “the word wants America back,” proving that his real problem is just more of the kind of boring Bush Derangement Syndrome so endemic in the MSM.

Even Naím’s initial premise is flawed.

For the next several years, world politics will be reshaped by a strong yearning for American leadership. This trend will be as unexpected as it is inevitable: unexpected given the powerful anti-American sentiments around the globe, and inevitable given the vacuums that only the United States can fill.

Despite the game face of anti-Americanism out among the world of nations, there has not really been any slackening of want for America’s favor on the part of foreigners — though Naím does make that clear a little later in the piece. Further, since before the U.S.S.R. fell, the U.S. has been filling those “vacuums” the whole time. His initial paragraph makes it seem that the U.S. has been sitting idly on the sidelines since 2000. Yet, then he goes on to decry what we have done with the second paragraph of his piece making it clear that it hasn’t been the U.S.A.’s lack of involvement in the world that people will hunger for, but a change of the sort of involvement that he doesn’t like. His is a desire for U.S. involvement that he hopes will change in 2008.

This renewed international appetite for U.S. leadership will not merely result from the election of a new president, though having a new occupant in the White House will certainly help. Almost a decade of U.S. disengagement and distraction have allowed international and regional problems to swell. Often, the only nation that has the will and means to act effectively is the United States.

Notice how he pins this “return” to U.S. involvement in the world to a new president’s entrance into the White House. It isn’t that we’ve stood by doing nothing, it’s just that he doesn’t like what we have been doing. He obviously pines for the Clinton years of a foreign policy that was far more mollification for what others want than the strongly America focused policy under Bush.

Then Naím goes on to clearly make his case that he wants an America that does everyone else’s bidding, eschewing her own, as well as a U.S. that foots the bills for every little podunk nation on the globe.

Of course, the America that the world wants back is not the one that preemptively invades potential enemies, bullies allies or disdains international law. The demand is for an America that rallies other nations prone to sitting on the fence while international crises are boiling out of control; for a superpower that comes up with innovative initiatives to tackle the great challenges of the day, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and violent Islamist fundamentalism. The demand is for an America that enforces the rules that facilitate international commerce and works effectively to stabilize an accident-prone global economy. Naturally, the world also wants a superpower willing to foot the bill with a largess that no other nation can match.

While pretending he is pleading for the good America to come “back,” he reveals his absurd desire for the US to do all the things he wants her to do by taking a pair of UN-like pliers and pulling all her teeth, and then have us pay for it all. If it is so obvious that this is what a great nation should do, though, I wonder why none of the rest of the world is stepping up to that self-destructive plate? Further, I wonder why Naím doesn’t wonder why no one else is bending over backwards to destroy their own interests to be the kind of “leader” he wants us to be?

No, what is obvious is that Naím sees the U.S.A. as a giant world-wide welfare program for foreigners footed by the taxpayers of the U.S.

To that I say, no thanks, Mr. Naím.

Naím further imagines that the U.S. is a nation that requires foreign governments to exhibit “subservience to the whims of a giant with more power than brains and whose legitimacy is undermined by regular displays of incompetence, recklessness and ignorance.”

Yes, we can see how much he loves us, eh?

It all comes down to Naím’s desire that we give everyone more money, naturally. Once again, Mr. Naím, no thanks.

Our foreign policy should first and foremost benefit the U.S., not every one else. And if there’s nothing in it for us, why should we bother with it? Of course, Naím will tell us why. We should bother with it so his OWN country (and that of every other one out there) won’t have to pay the bills themselves.

If that is the good America he pines for then, again, no thanks, Mr. Naím. No thanks indeed.