Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue
It was a big week. Hillary and Obama are in. China’s blowing satellites out of space by missile and perhaps threatening an arms race. I couldn’t be here to cover any of it. I was at my work team’s annual meeting/retreat thing in Atlanta. Our days were mostly scripted from 8:00am to 10:30pm or later with workshops, seminars, meetings, group lunches and dinners, and enforced fun and socializing. Combine that with the jet lag feeling of waking up at 3:00am every day on my body’s time and one night of too much drinking and, well, you get the picture. Here’s my quick take on what I think were the three biggest news stories of the last week.
Clinton: She’s the presumptive front-runner for a reason. She’ll be hard to beat, but she can be beat. I think of myself as a pretty die hard liberal, but Hillary represents some of the worst of what I think about liberals. Hillary is the kind of liberal who thinks she knows best for all of us on damn near everything and is willing to legislate it if she can. I’m the kind of liberal who wants individuals to be free to live their lives how they see fit and believes in using government power to regulate industry, taxes, public spaces, and public spending to do enable them to do so. I won’t vote for her in the primaries, period. If she gets the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I doubt I’ll work for her. In order to win both the nomination and the general election, she’ll have to run a radically different campaign than anything we’ve seen before. I have no doubt she can do that and see some signs already that she is doing it. The money environment just shifted dramatically for the other candidates, too. That was expected, but now it’s here.
Barack Obama is an empty slate for most people. Don’t take that to mean I’m saying he’s an empty suit. I think he’s a smart guy with a lot of charisma. He actually reminds me more of Bill Clinton than any other politician in the Democratic Party. But I think the man-on-the-street exclamations about Obama aren’t backed by any realistic experience with the guy. I think a lot of people are projecting what they want him to be. His brilliant use of rhetoric in public speeches and appearances lends itself to that. I’d also bet there’s a certain level of fake enthusiasm for a black guy by folks who would never actually vote for one.
China can blow satellites out of the sky. The satellites that we use to surveil them, the satellites we’d need to get the pictures of troop and equipment deployment, etc, fly right at the altitude that China has proven itself capable of hitting. We’re not in a new arms race. We’ve been in an arms race with China for years. We were just so far ahead that we weren’t hyping it here. If you look at US policy moves on space during the Bush administration (and possibly further back), you see the clear arrogance of hegemony by our government. I believe that some sort of major showdown between the US and China is inevitable in my lifetime. I don’t know if it’ll be military or economic. I wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome, but I’d put slight odds on the Chinese winning it unless the US foreign policy establishment develops a multi-decade strategy for dealing with China that is as clear and comprehensive as how we managed the cold war. Preferably we do that without as much stumbling and stupidity as we displayed along the way in that one.
February 9th, 2007 at 1:03 am
Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed anti-satellite missiles in the late 1970s, and tested them during the Reagan administration. Although both nations agreed not to continue development after (successful) tests, in the U.S., at least, F-15s were wired to carry the ASAT missile well into the 90s. The superpowers relented on their anti-satellite weapons programs only because they were perceived as a first-strike weapon that, in a Cold War scenario, would likely be used as a prelude to a nuclear attack. That’s unlikely today, even among the nuclear powers, but the possibility of political and economic blackmail, given the reliance on communications and surveillance satellites, is pretty high. There are not that many satellites in the GPS and Glonass constellations, for example, and attacking even commercial satellites would do a lot of damage.
Hillary Clinton is eminently beatable. The modern GOP machine is a lot more sophisticated than the Democrats have been, and they would beat Clinton like a goddamn gong. The Republicans have managed to scare enough people that many of their potential candidates could be beaten by the Dems with a modicum of strategy, but they’d eat Clinton alive. I’m not enthusiastic about her at all — like you, I’m troubled by the judgmental, narrow-minded, and dogmatic nature of her liberalism, which makes me understand why people become libertarians. Her anti-video-game crusade around the time of Katrina still makes me mad.