From today's Boston Globe

No more refuge for the politically sane, it seems. I want the 90's back, when there was no Cold War and there was no War on Terror and all we had to bitch about was the president's sex life.

No more refuge for the politically sane, it seems.

You misspelled "in denial" as "sane."

there was no War on Terror

*cough* U.S.S. Cole... *cough* Black Hawk Down... *cough* First WTC attack... *cough* Islamofascists starting to make allies in war-torn Bosnia...

But, hey, keep telling yourself that Clinton "gave" us peace and prosperity for eight years, and Bush "caused" the dot.com bust.

I love it dearly when people think I'm a liberal. It gives me something to laugh about.

I don't expect politics to get markedly better, but in some respects the world has gotten significantly more dangerous over the past 10 years (a rant about that later), and it would be helpful if the Democrats addressed the problem rather than just assuming that if the US was nice enough, it would all go away. Having only Republican solutions is not a particularly good situation.

More importantly, the Democrats have gotten dangerously out of step with, well, not the country, but with about 55% of it, which is enough to keep them frozen out of power. (Sorta like the Republicans in 1964.) For the first time, it seems that the Democrats are institutionally recognizing that. (Slick Willy recognized it personally, but it only got him elected and didn't stop the steady erosion of Democratic power elsewhere.) Exactly what they will (or should) advocate, I'm not sure, but if they continue to make the same pitch in the same way, they're gonna go down the drain.

So, um, unless you were being completely facetious, what are you, that you can actually believe such erroneous things about the 1990s?

"A blind felon could get a job as a night watchman."

Of course, the Islamo-freaks were already trying to kill us then, but we didn't know that yet. The real problem with the War on Terror is not that they're a serious threat at the moment -- we could easily eat 3,000 dead and $6 billion in property losses each year and not notice it, as long as we could keep the story out of the papers -- but the risk that they'll get their hands on NBC weapons of some sort, and be able to kill 100,000 in a strike rather than a few thousand. Ensuring that there are no "loose" NBC weapons on the market is damned hard, and pretty much means buttoning down every nation-state that possesses them. Ironically, the tightly-controlled viciously anti-American regimes like Iran aren't the problem, but more the perennially miscalculating Saddam Hussein, or cash-strapped N. Korea.

(NBC = "nuclear, biological, chemical")

Fortunately the War on Terror is a pretty narrow-bore thing. The Cold War cost at least 2% of GDP, but the Iraq War is down around 1% (and will presumably get cheaper as the Iraqis orgainze a government and get the bandits under control themselves). We no longer have armies of millions staring at each other across the Fulda Gap, with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads to be launched on 15 minutes' notice. We re-visit the Bad Things of previous generations, but in a new and better way.

But may we live so long that we can look nostalgically back on the '00s, when was unknown, and we can commiserate that the Kids These Days are inheriting a fucked-up world.

Don't forget that the end of the Cold War patron/client system let the demon of the Balkan Wars out of its bottle. Some hundreds of thousands of people were killed in that little Holocaust Lite.

Sure they do....

Until they get in the White House, then it's bend over and grab the ankles time.

Squee-squee-squee-squee!!!