March 1, 2007--Al Redux?
Over coffee this morning a British expat and I were talking about Iraq and how frustrated we are with our respective governments. Of course we spoke in hushed voices since it’s not supposed to be appropriate to speak critically of your country when on foreign soil. Recall the fuss that was made about Bill Clinton helping to organize an anti-Vietnam-war rally while a student at Oxford.
Not that anyone on this tranquil island would care one whit about what either Roger or I might have to say about about anything. All they would require was that if we were foolish enough to talk about politics we should keep our voices down because nobody here wants to even overhear anything about these sorts of aggravating things.
But since he and I have quite a high aggravation threshold, or maybe we’re just masochistic, or perhaps we hadn’t had anything other than coffee, we pressed on.
Not much that either of us had to say was either new or very interesting, basically we wallowed in a lot of grumpiness, except perhaps one thing, well maybe two things.
I wondered why it is that no one who has been involved in getting the world into the mess in Iraq has either been publicly fired or why no one has resigned out of frustration or disagreement with our countries’ policies. Yes, Rumsfeld stepped down, our contemporary way of firing people, but at his announcement and then later on Veterans Day he was lavishly praised by President Bush as the best Secretary of Defense in history. Whatever happened to the idea that someone who screws up so mightily is held accountable and summarily dismissed?
And then why haven’t there been any resignations where the person stepping down calls a press conference to tell the world why he (or she) is no longer willing to go along with his superiors? One might have thought that Colin Powell would have taken this route and by doing so might have earned himself an honored place in history. Now he will be remembered as a “good soldier” who was just following orders.
Roger then said, why is it that when we get into messes we don’t look back over events of the past two or three years to see who was right in their predictions about the consequences and ask them now what they think is likely to occur and what we should do? If they got it right then maybe they might get it right now. Rather, he said, we tend to do just the opposite—we keep those individuals at arms length because by calling on them it might look as if we are acknowledging we did something wrong.
With this is mind it was interesting to read Maureen Dowd’s column, “Al Gore: Ready for the Sequel?” Fresh from his Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, she speculates that with Hillary so “overproduced” and Obama “an unfinished script,” maybe it’s time for an Al Gore rerun. (NY Times column linked below.) He was ahead of his time and was right about the environment; he was right about the war in Iraq, and yes he was even right about the potential power of the Internet, even though he didn’t invent it. So maybe it’s time for him to lose some weight, go on the David Letterman Show, and head for Iowa.
Not that anyone on this tranquil island would care one whit about what either Roger or I might have to say about about anything. All they would require was that if we were foolish enough to talk about politics we should keep our voices down because nobody here wants to even overhear anything about these sorts of aggravating things.
But since he and I have quite a high aggravation threshold, or maybe we’re just masochistic, or perhaps we hadn’t had anything other than coffee, we pressed on.
Not much that either of us had to say was either new or very interesting, basically we wallowed in a lot of grumpiness, except perhaps one thing, well maybe two things.
I wondered why it is that no one who has been involved in getting the world into the mess in Iraq has either been publicly fired or why no one has resigned out of frustration or disagreement with our countries’ policies. Yes, Rumsfeld stepped down, our contemporary way of firing people, but at his announcement and then later on Veterans Day he was lavishly praised by President Bush as the best Secretary of Defense in history. Whatever happened to the idea that someone who screws up so mightily is held accountable and summarily dismissed?
And then why haven’t there been any resignations where the person stepping down calls a press conference to tell the world why he (or she) is no longer willing to go along with his superiors? One might have thought that Colin Powell would have taken this route and by doing so might have earned himself an honored place in history. Now he will be remembered as a “good soldier” who was just following orders.
Roger then said, why is it that when we get into messes we don’t look back over events of the past two or three years to see who was right in their predictions about the consequences and ask them now what they think is likely to occur and what we should do? If they got it right then maybe they might get it right now. Rather, he said, we tend to do just the opposite—we keep those individuals at arms length because by calling on them it might look as if we are acknowledging we did something wrong.
With this is mind it was interesting to read Maureen Dowd’s column, “Al Gore: Ready for the Sequel?” Fresh from his Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, she speculates that with Hillary so “overproduced” and Obama “an unfinished script,” maybe it’s time for an Al Gore rerun. (NY Times column linked below.) He was ahead of his time and was right about the environment; he was right about the war in Iraq, and yes he was even right about the potential power of the Internet, even though he didn’t invent it. So maybe it’s time for him to lose some weight, go on the David Letterman Show, and head for Iowa.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
9:30 AM
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