No, working on getting potassium"iodide" pills for the world.

Well, you could help give a good start if you'd define what you mean by "the left." Nearly all the rhetoric I hear and read from 'your side' these days assumes that all Democrats are 'on the left' at best, and more likely courting socialism or already in bed with Stalinism.

With people like Ben Nelson and Barack Obama in my party, I find that a very confusing rant theme because I actually believe in social democratic ideals such as public education, policing, health care, firefighter services, mass transit, and military assets under civilian authority. The leadership of my party pays more lip service than policy follow-through to those ideals, hence our nation's deplorable public health situation and decaying infrastructure.

This is why political parties suck; they lead to an us versus them mentality. When one party takes a position the other will oppose it as a matter of course. Benjamin Franklin was right.

Public education is not a 'social democratic ideal' - it was and is a 'representative republic' ideal.  Do you know anyone who is against policing, healthcare and fire departments?  Where we might disagree, honorably to be sure, is on how to finance and implement those components of civilized society.  While I'm also in favor of flush toilets, I don't think you should be required to pay for mine, though it is quite reasonable for us to share the cost of sewage treatment.

As an aside, I enjoy reading someone disdainfully dismiss arguments not made.  Good entertainment.

And, speaking of our 'deplorable public health situation'... link

Those are not mutually exclusive, and if you are talking in terms of the Tea Party-captured part of the dear old GOP, it is not an ideal but an evil, or at best an excessive drain on the public treasury.

Most certainly. A healthy democracy is nothing but the results of ongoing arguments such as this. As a Duchamp-loving new son of the Old South in the U.S., I deeply cherish having a toilet to call my own. The thing is, we depend on far more than commodious plumbing to enjoy our luxurious 'middle class' lifestyles.

Free market zealots refuse to admit that those boundaries are fundamentally a matter of ongoing debate in a healthy democratic polity. I don't know if you're a free market zealot, but I'm not an anti-market zealot. I don't expect to pay for your personal toilet, nor for anyone to pay for mine. But, I do expect whatever taxes I manage to pay to help provide for public toilets in many locations; they're good for private dignity and public health.

How about this info from Gen. Wesley Clark, a retired Army general and NATO’s former supreme allied commander in Europe

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/gen-wesley-clark-has-rules-for-us-interventions-libya-doesnt-meet-them/2011/03/09/ABu5jrQ_story.html

 He summarizes

Given these rules, what is the wisest course of action in Libya? To me, it seems we have no clear basis for action. Whatever resources we dedicate for a no-fly zone would probably be too little, too late. We would once again be committing our military to force regime change in a Muslim land, even though we can’t quite bring ourselves to say it. So let’s recognize that the basic requirements for successful intervention simply don’t exist, at least not yet: We don’t have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya’s politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome. We should have learned these lessons from our long history of intervention. We don’t need Libya to offer us a refresher course in past mistakes.

Even 'free market zealots' shit like the rest of us and recognize the benefits of communal solutions to certain problems.  The tension comes from the incremental, but relentless, push to define more and more activities and functions as 'problems' requiring communal/governmental 'solutions'.

What frustrates me is the simplistic notion, perpetuated ad nauseum by much of what passes for the press here, that the 'correct' position, on virtually any issue, is somewhere in the 'middle' between 'right' and 'left', a view that is completely devoid of consideration of principle.  Some of the more important things we tussle over in a representative republic are all or none propositions - you can't be 'slightly' pregnant; sometimes the 'opposing' views are quite incompatible and not subject to the kind of forced 'compromise' the press is so fond of.

At least Clark is consistent.  But you know what they say about a broken clock.

You make me wish I knew a three-part analog to the pot-kettle metaphor. Tall order, that. Worst sort of problem for a peace-loving citizen who values a civic-minded officer corps. Maybe not all that easy for conflict-loving citizens, either.

Aristotle. If a goverment does not work, then the people it rules will change it on its own.

In this case, the clock is not broken; rather some people cannot tell time.

Why are we asking generals for advice, anyway? They're there to carry out the governments orders, not tell us what to do... I suppose if he's retired that eliminates some of the massive conflict-of-interest, but I'd still take the advice of an actual policy analyst over his any day.

EDIT: He also seems to think that if those conditions at the bottom were met, everything would go just fine. I doubt it. More guns didn't seem to be of much help before, in Afghanistan or Iraq, so I don't see why they should here, either.

Ah, but who?  There's the rub.

It's quite true that the nanny state progressives have long been the engine of interventionism.  However, wartime spending, if it can be called that, has dick to do with our financial status.  See page 29.

As you can see, spending under Bush 43 never exceeded levels during the 80's, despite a rapidly expanding entitlement cost.  This includes the budgets passed by the democratic congress that took over in 06.  It's fuckward that's busting the treasury with a 10% of GDP deficit spending level, what we had under Bush was just the same irresponsible norm we've been running since the nanny staters took over congress.  We've had a grand total of one responsible speakers in the last half-century, and all he got for his troubles was the boot.  Tossed from his position in disgrace over improprieties they all engage in regularly as a matter of course, all for having the audacity to make them pass a balanced budget like they said they would.  An accomplishment that held a whole three years before they took the budget levels back above sustainable spending levels.

Actually, Bush 43 is the closest thing we've had to an anti-war president.  You forget that he was an isolationist.  Take 9/11 out of the history books and he'd never have set things in motion, it was a wake-up call, if perhaps not entirely to reality as he seems to have overshot the mark.  Carter on the other hand was just plain stupid.  We were simply saved from his bungling because he lost the election over one them.  The rest of his indiscretions in an attempt to shape the world to his farcical views without making open actions managed to slip under the radar because he didn't get US personnel killed in a visible fashion as he did trying that absurd rescue attempt.  War by proxy is still war.  Reagan continued the policies, oddly enough, but it was Carter that began arming the Mujaheddin.  He frequently chose less than reputable sides in third world conflicts.

Collectivists will always fall prey to a need to intervene in other individuals problems, individualists are rarely moved so greatly as to force others to act for another in a situation of their own making.  You say we haven't had a left wing since Reagan, but he was really just a moderate.  The fiscal conservative with a constructionist mindset disappeared from government in this country nearly a century back.  Both parties have been a progressive play pen in the interim.  What we really have is no right wing, just a horrid mixture of social conservatives that think with something other than their brains screwing up law enforcement and creating drug lords in foreign countries, and fiscal liberals that want their hands in the cookie jar appealing to that need for moral control over others.

Agreed.  Just one of the reasons we have civilian authority over the military - the military's job is execute the mission, not to determine the policy objective.  Without question, however, their experience can valuably inform the civilian decision-making process of arriving at an objective.  Much as I disagree with Clark's politics, his perspective on the military aspects of something like the Libya situation should not be rejected out of hand, but taken into consideration with that big grain of salt (potential conflict of interest or blinkered view).

And policy analysts do not have a conflict of intrest? If it is like with economist then they are to support a position and were indoctrinated in what ever the prevaling ideology was when they were being educated (and it was based on politics rather than what is proven to be 'best' or even work).