Sometimes I just like to play with the html. Sometimes, things are just too good to keep to myself. Sometimes, I just like to share.
It's an odd world out there. Enjoy.
Think we have a problem with incendiary rhetoric? At FP's Passport, Joshua Keating reports:
Paraguay VP: I'll shoot the president if he tries to run again:
"Paraguay's vice president [left] is urging his boss not to seek re-election in the most forceful way: He says he'll personally shoot Fernando Lugo [center] down if he tries it."
There's nothing I can add to this.
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Stephen Walt is one of my favorites. Here are his top ten reasons our foreign policy debate is so impoverished and the policy itself so often that quagmire someone once mentioned:
A realistic foreign policy seeks to deal with the world as it is, shorn of political illusions. Realists emphasize that even close allies often have conflicting interests, that cooperation between states is difficult to achieve or sustain, and that the conduct of nations is frequently shaped by some combination of fear, greed and stupidity.
Wishful Thinking.
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If anyone here cared about US foreign policy, this might spark a little meta madness, however, I'm certain I can post the most incendiary anti-Obama meta-fail stories in any of my diaries in the serene confidence that it'll go completely unremarked.
Over at World Politics Review, Nikolas Gvosdev wonders how we can Reconcile the New Obama Doctrine With the Old
The original Obama Doctrine was on display in the position that Vice President Joe Biden defended during the 2009 review of strategy in Afghanistan: the downshifting of the mission away from counterinsurgency and nation-building to a much smaller and mobile force designed to strike al-Qaida targets. Biden's preferred approach ultimately lost out to a more muscular troop surge.
Part of the problem is us, the electorate. The white house takes its orders from congress, which is full of the most amazing group of panderers who haven't any clue at all. None. That goes for both sides of the aisle. It is buck-passing throughout, and very few are calling them on it.
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Is this "Be Kind to Dictators Week?" Robert Mugabe attends, in spite of an EU travel ban, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has arrived in Rome for the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II:
An EU travel ban forbids him from visiting member states but the Vatican, where the ceremony will take place, is a sovereign state and not in the EU.
Mr Mugabe, a Roman Catholic, has been allowed to transit through Italy.
Despite the travel ban, Mr Mugabe went to Rome for the funeral of John Paul II in 2005 and for UN food agency conferences in 2008 and 2009.
The sanction on Mr Mugabe was imposed in 2002 over human rights abuses.
Seriously, we ought to stage a get together for Lukashenko (or here), Wen Jintao, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il, Moammar Gadhafi, High-stick Putin or our very own Dubya.
Can you say Partaayyyyy? We could send them all to Fukushima or Chernobyl. Or maybe we should dress 'em up in tights and shove them in a cage.
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I do this until it stops being fun. However, let's close on a lighter note.
Bill Maher on France: