On the Republican side, I am not sure there is any candidate that will ever rise to the top. The election is not a shoo-in for the democrats. Even so the Republicans have one candidate that could out-worsen G. W. Bush. Giulani's rhetoric is beyond comprehention. His speeches only succeed in making Bush's orations sound fresh.
Guiliani's concepts on foreign policy are founded deep in nothing. His platitudes are often well used and tend to bore me:
We are at the dawn of a new era in global affairs, when old ideas have to be rethought and new ideas have to be devised to meet new challenges ...
The United States must not rest until the al Qaeda network is destroyed and its leaders, from Osama bin Laden on down, are killed or captured ...
We must seek common ground without turning a blind eye to our differences with [China and Russia] ...
It is clear that we need to do a better job of explaining America's message and mission to the rest of the world, not by imposing our ideas on others but by appealing to their enlightened self-interest ...
America will win the war of ideas ...
We must learn from our past if we want to win the peace as well as the war ...
It is better to give people a hand up than a handout.
Most of his sayings on international affairs are fresh from a Henry Kissinger "op-ed".
Reading Giuliani and imagining that he might somehow become president chills me with a profound sense of dispair. Fortunately, there is comic relief. At one of many points where he attempts to display his erudition and expertise, he notes the "cultural exchanges" that allegedly brought about the end of the Soviet empire. The example he cites is pianist Van Cliburn's concerts in Moscow, which "hastened change."
Van Cliburn played Moscow in 1958. The Soviet Union fell in 1989. If change were any hastier, the Berlin Wall would still be intact.
I encourage you not to give Guiliani a second look. We do have the potential to have something worse than Bush.
No comments:
Post a Comment