Wednesday Open Thread [6.18.14]

Wednesday Open Thread [6.18.14]

4 Comments
If you had any doubts that Hillary is running, these past few days have put that to bed. She is absolutely masterful in a video inside showing her being humorous and disarming with that costume squirrel the RNC has tracking her. That is how you defuse stalking embeds from other campaigns. You don't attack them, like Christine O'Donnell's thugs. You don't call them "Maccaca" or whatever the hell slur George Allen used back in 2006. You do with Hillary did. Brilliant. Her interview with Fox News yesterday, with was more like a deposition, and her Town Hall with CNN, went very well too. The Fox appearance went so well for Clinton that Fox News Viewers are furious at the network for giving her a softball interview. I suppose they wanted Brett Baier and Greta Van Susteren to impale Hillary with a sword and remove her head a la Ned Stark on live television. But instead she was pressed on Benghazi. And here is the thing about ginning up a tragedy into a scandal and trying to pretend that there was this massive conspiracy and incompetence, if not willful malfeasance at the heart of the Obama Administration where the attack was concerned... it tends to collapse like a house of cards when reality answers fantasy questions. My favorite moment was when Bret Baier feverishly demanded to know where the President was that night, and Hillary answered that he was in the White House, in the Oval Office itself, managing the crisis with his national security team, as this picture, available for two years on the White House Flickr account, demonstrates.

What will be the ultimate price for our moral sloth in Iraq?

4 Comments
In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln offered contemplative reflection on of the war’s larger meaning. For him, the war was God's punishment for the abomination that was slavery.
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
Speaking philosophically about our inhumanity and base willingness to mock the notion of a just God has gone out of style. If "God's will" is invoked today it is by the charlatans and grifters. We rightfully recoil from them, the vermin who use fragments of the gospel to justify all manner of greed and brutality. But what if Lincoln was right? What if God does want the scales of justice to come into balance? (...)