Thursday, June 04, 2009

It has been twenty years since the revolutions of 1989 ended in the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Tienamen Square. Sure, the Berlin Wall might have fallen a few months later, but the limits of the revolution were set. it is not unlike the pushback that happened after the tide of revolution that started in America reached the shores of Europe.

While the New World Order that George H. W. Bush promised in the wake of 1989 never happened, the world was indeed forever changed. But not how things were expected to change. The lack of the Soviet Union was a destabilizing force for two reasons: 1) countries imploded from Europe to Africa to Asia, allowing for civil wars, genocides, fundamentalism, tyrants, and terrorism; and 2) America's dominance turned to arrogance, culminating in George W. Bush's folly of opting to invade Iraq because he could.

The world will change again, but when?

Monday, June 01, 2009

I used to think the phrase "culture wars" was a phrase by the Pat Buchanan's of the world to rile up a portion of the American populous. But it appears that a smaller subset of that group took it literally and are at war with those they disagree with.

If you haven't heard, a doctor in Kansas who performed abortions despite being aggressively targeted by radical anti-abortion groups, the former attorney general and talking heads for decades was murdered on Sunday at his church.

The instigators, like Bill O'Reilly, refuse to apologize for demonizing the doctor and others like him. Is it really any surprise that one of their followers took it too far? Even if their conscience is clear, their hands remain dirty.