Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Debating Republicans tonight?

You say you need a foreign policy hook? Well, are you man enough (Carly...Carly) to go full Epstein tonight?
Moral relativism is a poor substitute for presidential leadership. The entire matter would have taken on a very different tone if the President had used his platform to deliver a decidedly different message about the Crusades and the Inquisition: One of the great capacities in Western civilization is to learn from its mistakes so that the errors, and there were many, are corrected. But there is no such impulse among the terrorists of ISIS, whose fierce fundamentalism snuff out the civil society, so prized in the West, that makes moral self-correction possible. Against people like this, persuasion is of no value, so force must be used. Obama’s ill-chosen words contained no ringing endorsement of the moral chasm that separates us from our opponents.

And so the inevitable happens: There is a mass exodus of refugees followed by human tragedy. Right now, the European migrant crisis has resulted in impossible strains on the simple physical capacity of various nations, hard-strapped by their own weak economic position, to provide food, shelter and elementary sanitation for the tens of thousands of refugees that have been driven from their homes. Public health officials and private charities struggle to keep up with the endless demands for services. Thousands more are surely on their way.
That's libertarian legal expert Richard Epstein's verdict on Barack Obama's (and Hillary Clinton's too, btw) world view. He, Obama, created the current refugee crisis with which our NATO allies are having to deal, in his, Epstein's, not at all humble opinion.
Right now, the President is looking like a tragically weak game theorist. He thinks that he can achieve successful outcomes in international affairs by using all carrots and no sticks. It won’t work against enemies who are prepared to use both. Unless he rethinks his self-imposed limits on the use of force, the bill for his mismanagement will come due, and everyone will pay the price—during his term and beyond.
Many years ago another, even more famously libertarian intellectual with U of Chicago roots, wrote that more evil has been done in the world by poor logicians than by evil actors intentionally doing their evil worst. Barack Obama is merely the most recent example of a poor logician. Tonight, at the Reagan Library, would be the perfect time for someone to articulate that.

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