Verbosities

Alternatively titled, “Things I’ve Learned Over The Last Ten Weeks:”

1) You’d think hamburgers would be about the easiest fucking thing to replicate from country to country, as we all eat cows (save 2B people in India, I suppose), we all have meat grinders, and we all have fire on which to grill or griddle the meat. Alas, they cut their meat patties with bread crumbs here, which makes perfect sense, unless you’re selling the goddamn burger for $12. Which reminds me…

2) Everything here is way fucking expensive. HOLY SHIT WAIT LET ME GET TO #3

3) The bats here are REALLY fucking big. I mean LARGE. Like California Condor big. And, as I have a corner apartment on the 19th floor, I see bats at both dusk and dawn cutting the corner beside my building as they go out for a feed (that’s an Aussie euphemism for a meal). I have two big doors to balconies at this place, neither of which have screens, and I just saw a bat fly as close as possible to my balcony without landing on it or, god for-fucking-bid, flying into my apartment and freaking me right the fuck out. They’re pretty amazing to see from a distance, but I most certainly prefer them at that thing we call “a distance,” to be sure.

2) Everything here is way fucking expensive. Without even bringing up alcohol, let’s just say I’ve budgeted myself at $300/wk in groceries and entertainment, and I’m regularly hitting or exceeding that number with ease. And that doesn’t even count lunches during my work days in the city, either. I had two Manhattans at a bar last night, then came home and ordered a pizza. Grand total? $70. No shit. That’s how you go over $300 a week in groceries and entertainment.

4) I’ve picked up metric fairly quickly, but don’t think I’m going to pick up the accent in whole. There’s this thing that Aussies do with the long “o” sound (especially in the word “so”) that I simply cannot make my mouth replicate. I’m pretty sure I’ll get some rhythms down, definitely some lingo (see #5), and maybe even a slight touch of the accent, but I won’t pick it up in whole.

5) As for things I’ve already built in to my vocabulary: “grab a feed,” “brilliant,” “flick,” and “keen.” I’m sure there are more. “Flick” is the one that bugs me the most. It means “to pass along,” and is unavoidable when it comes to discussing email forwards in the office.

6) One colloquial term I’ve resisted picking up: “squizz.” It means pretty much what you think it does from an onomatopoetic perspective, I’d bet. I have a hard time getting near this one.

7) Also, they use the word “toilet” for “bathroom/restroom.” I find “toilet” to be an ugly word, and have a terribly difficult time saying that out loud.

8) When you rent an apartment here, you’re usually responsible for bringing your own refrigerator and washing machine. Sure, there’s a dishwasher. And often a clothes dryer. But no fridge! Better pick one up!

9) I would have negotiated myself a better relo package, had I known about #8 in advance.

10) Airports in Australia are not at all unpleasant places to spend time. As a matter of fact, I have walked from the ticket counter all the way through the metal detector in the Brisbane airport without breaking stride. It’s really quite amazing how the tyranny of bureaucratic incompetence isn’t rearing its ugly head here in the same way it is in the States. I mean, I think Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson is quite possibly the Baby Jesus’ way of getting our souls accustomed to the concept of purgatory, and this is coming from a guy who has spent over four hours waiting on a connection in Cairns. CAIRNS, PEOPLE.

11) There are three things that make airports in Australia unpleasant. First, there’s a two-hour max on checking in for a flight. The Darwin-Brisbane return flights include a 1AM redeye option, and the Jabiru-Darwin flight drops you at the airport at 6PM. That’s a lot of goddamn time to kill. Second, the airport restaurants and (most importantly) lounges don’t open in Darwin until 1030PM. There’s not enough outbound activity between 1PM and 1030PM, so everything at the gate level upstairs shuts right down. No beers, no lounge, etc. Third, old Asian people are the worst fucking dawdlers on god’s green earth when it comes to traversing the concourse. God forbid there’s a group of them, as they’ll walk six-wide across a walkway and totally prevent anyone from getting around from behind. It’s always older Asians over here. This isn’t me being racist, either. There’s just something genetic with those people that make them inferior to the rest of us or something. Wait, that came out wrong…

12) Casual racism here is appalling, but somehow understandable. Now, I don’t mean to excuse racism. Not even a little bit. But know that when I’m talking about the special brand of Aussie racism, I’m talking about the attitude towards the Aboriginal peoples. Here’s the thing… the Aboriginal people are largely invisible. They aren’t working two cubicles over, they aren’t running cash registers at the grocery, they aren’t walking past you wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase on your way to work. If you’re in big cities (or, you know, what passes for big cities in Australia), the only Aboriginal people you’ll encounter are the panhandlers and drunks (that’s drawing a wide sweeping conclusion there, but trust me that it’s more true than it isn’t), which leads city-dwelling Aussies to draw a stereotype that all Aboriginal people are alcoholic beggars who suckle from the teat of welfare funds. Imagine, if you will, the worst things you can imagine hearing a white guy in Topeka say about American Indian people, and multiply that same attitude across 15M Australians. It’s really quite unbelievable.

I used to write good.

No, really.

I mean, not everything linked down the right hand side of the page here was gold, but I just spent a good half hour reading through some of the archives, and I’m pretty pleased with what I used to turn out.

Was easier, back then. I spent a long time trying to figure out who I was, and then another four or five years after my divorce understanding that all I thought I knew was completely wrong. That’s not really what prompted my blog, but that’s what kept it going.

(What prompted the blog was that I had figured out that the Soap Box forum at Maddenmania.com wasn’t really the right outlet for long form riffs that didn’t even tangentially touch on things the forum members there were interested in reading. Yes, this blog – or, rather, the one with the URL which preceded moving to this URL – was born of a video game message board.)

Anyway, therapeutic or not, I needed the space at first, then fed off the community, then found my own success on my own terms, finally finding that I didn’t really need this place anymore. My network of friends became real, other options (NOW IN 140-CHARACTER BITE SIZE MORSELS!) became available, and I walked away from the blog with few regrets.

Except, you know, for the one where I’ve lost my sea legs when it comes to writing.

I used to write good. No, really I did.

No promises, but I feel like talking now, and, as it’s 4AM on a Saturday on the US East Coast, this is where I’m going to talk….

My Derby Bets

$5 each to win on:

Zanjero
Nobiz Like Shobiz
Scat Daddy
Circular Quay
Any Given Saturday

$1 Trifecta Wheels (5 x $8/ea):

Zanjero (or) Hard Spun (or) Scat Daddy (or) Circular Quay (or) Any Given Saturday

atop

(The above, plus) Curlin, Nobiz Like Shobiz, Sam P, Dominican

(In other words, I need a horse from the first list to finish first, with any of “the above, plus” in second)

Total Wagered = $65

Obligatory Kentucky Derby Post

Since I’ve done exactly zero research here, I’m going to make it quick. I believe there’s no standout three-year-old in this crew, so a longshot is going to win today.

I’m probably going to drop some cash on a few exacta boxes with horses at 10-1 and higher. I think Circular Quay is talented, will be sitting there in the 14-1 neighborhood, and is worth a play. Street Sense and Hard Spun are worth a look as well.

Go Go Neocon Super Squad!

“These (policy triumphs), attributable in part to the scalding impact of September 11, are also in part due to the formidable intellectual firepower behind neoconservative foreign policy. A group with the intelligence and rigor of Wolfowitz, Kagan, Kristol, Rice, Perle, and Cheney has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansion.” [Irving Stelzer - The Neocon Reader - 2004]

Does anyone have any Pepto? I’m feeling a little queasy.

Dee 2 Da Cee, Part Uno

So I’ve never really been a fan of writing trip reports (although reading them is always fun), but as infrequently as I get out of town I probably should make an effort to put some things down for posterity.

LES HALLES

(Post-dinner out front of the restaurant)

The entire purpose of the trip started as an excuse to meet up with Matty and Garth for dinner at Tony Bourdain’s outpost of Les Halles in DC. I mean, I love French food. Matty loves French food. Who loses here? As the idea took shape, we managed to get Al and DoubleAs on board, and then went to work on Gracie, which paid off as she booked a cheap-ass flight up from Florida.

As an aside, I got all my links back to attending parties out of the way in that one paragraph. I’m lazy like that.

Anyway, leading up to the dinner on Thursday night, Matty and Al and I were comparing notes on the menu when I saw an entry that got me geeked:

Merguez, aka Moroccan lamb sausage.

Somewhere in my past, maybe twelve years gone by, I had dinner at a Moroccan joint in mid-Michigan (so you know it’s authentic!), and had some sort of peppery Moroccan lamb sausage that was just out-of-this-world. Since that dinner, I hadn’t seen anything on a menu that looked remotely close, but I had always remembered that meal as a standout. So, I suppose you could say I’ve been searching for the Moroccan lamb sausage going on fifteen years.

Found it.

The Merguez is a grilled link that features a sort-of chili paste as an ingredient. The paste’s flavor might be akin to maybe a blend of roasted chipotle and something with a more deep and earthy flavor. Since I’m not a chili expert, I could be way off, but you get the idea. Anyway, Matty and I split a plate ordered as an appetizer (it was a dinner, not an app), and just fell over ourselves enjoying it. They served it with frites (fries, to you heathens) and a side of Moroccan sundried tomato paste for dipping. Fucking wonderful stuff.

In keeping with fat kid tradition, I ordered a second appetizer as well. Warm goat cheese on toasted baguette croutins. Dang. The meal was a sirloin grilled and bathed in a red wine peppercorn glaze/sauce, the wine a Cotes d’Rhone, and the coffee served in its own French press.

Dang.

BEGINIMUS INTERRUPTUS

I gotta sidetrack the DC stuff for a second, bear with me. So today, just now, I was speaking on the phone with my boss. He knows I went to the Playboy Mansion last year, and kids me about getting an invite (in that semi-serious sort of way) every once in awhile. Anyway, he brings it up in our phone call, and I told him this year’s party came and went, but that I had a cool VIP moment this weekend.

I told him about getting a tour of the capitol and how cool it was for a political junkie to be able to have a few private moments in the Speaker’s office.

Innocuous enough, I suppose. I mean, even the hardest core Republicans you know would be geeked out about a private tour like this one, even if the office you toured belonged to someone with a differing ideology.

So my boss thought that was cool, and starts talking about how it depresses him that his kids will probably never get to tour the White House under our current climate, and how every time he takes his shoes off at the airport, he sighs to himself and mutters, “We lose again!”

Okay…

And then he starts talking about the war, and how you can’t fight someone who actively wants to blow himself up anyway. I offer that it’s difficult to fight an enemy that’s not wearing uniforms and marching at you in battalions, and he agrees, jumping back to the “blow himself up” point, eventually saying that 9/11 and the World Trade Center was one thing, but once “these guys” start blowing themselves up in shopping malls and movie theatres in mid-America, that “it’ll be all over.”

He went further than that, actually. Kept on that line of thought for awhile, exploring what will happen if “the inner-Archie Bunker in all of us” has a reason to turn ugly. I suppose in the interest of, uh, privacy or decorum or Googling the archives or something I’ll just say that although he didn’t really wander anywhere I haven’t heard someone go before, it wasn’t a discussion in which I thought participation was in my best interest.

I mean, where do I start? Neoconservative foreign policy? The consequences of the likely neverending “Great War on Terror” on the rule of law as seen through John Yoo’s unitary executive theory? Geopolitical aggression to ensure access to foreign oil? The Rushdoony Dominionists craving crusades for the new century?

Holy hell, that was just NOT a conversation I wanted to have any part of – at least not with the guy who writes my performance review twice a year.

ENDUS INTERRUPTUS

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

So in the Kevin Bacon game, I suppose I’m one link away from the most powerful woman in the country who does not host a talk show. I’ve known Jon for about ten years (I’d guess), mostly through our six or seven year reign as co-commissioners of a fantasy football league. All that time, he’s been working his way up through various offices in the House of Representatives to his current spot, which is as a foreign policy advisor to Nancy Pelosi. He had always offered to meet up if I got down to DC, and possibly get a tour of the Capitol.

I emailed him prior to the visit, and he was generous enough to offer us an hour on Saturday for that tour.

I can’t begin to tell you how cool it is to be in that building, let alone be traveling in a small pack of three stepping past velvet ropes and restricted access signs to all areas of the building.

(The hall outside the Speaker’s Office – with velvet rope)

Well, not all areas, I suppose. We could only peer in at the floor of the House, as it was locked up, and there was plenty of office space we didn’t get to see, but the big thrill was the tour of the Speaker’s office. It was Saturday around noon, and it was Jon and Gracie and I in an empty suite behind velvet ropes in an area well off the route of tour guides showing the building.

This is the Speaker’s actual office, which sits between an office that sits two staffers through doors on one side, and a conference room on the the other. Jon and I are talking at her desk, which is actually pitifully small, featuring a chair that doesn’t slide under, no drawers and no computer. Jon’s holding a book (on China, his area of expertise) that he found on a pile on her desk (interestingly enough, with The Bible on top), about which he remarked “I’ve been looking for this, before he swiped it.

Right off her desk!

I’d assume most of the Speaker’s time in her office is spent on the couch or in one of the chairs reading or writing, as that desk of hers isn’t the type of table you’re going to want to spend eight hours hunched over. All around the office were pictures of her family, her grandchildren, a young Ms. Pelosi with JFK, and various trinkets and gifts – gavels, naturally. Tip O’Neill’s family passed one of his to her, with a nice inscription wishing her success in her role. There was also a tall vase in the corner of the room with huge and fragrant lillies.

As mentioned, through one of the doors in her office lies her conference room, in which I’m sure a great many important people have sat. First thing I noticed walking through the door was an enormous painting on one of the walls, which I thought was the same one as from the cover of the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, Team of Rivals. I think I was wrong, but it was Lincoln and (presumably) his cabinet. Jon rapped his knuckles against the painting and said, “It’s a fake. It was Hastert’s.” Between the desk, this “painting,” and another fake in the hallway of her suite, Jon said they’ve been trying to get a nicer desk and real paintings up, but the Speaker just hadn’t had time to get the curators of the building up with their catalog.

The balcony view was dramatic, and you can see a picture of Jon and I talking out there a couple of posts below. Just for perspective’s sake, where we were was just below center of this picture. If you look at the flag, then the balcony just below that’s blocked in by those columns – that’s the Speaker’s private balcony. Tour groups ain’t getting out there, and we got to spend a good ten minutes soaking in the view.

It might surprise you to know that I don’t generally try to talk politics with Jon, aside from the rare non-fantasy football related emails I kick his way. I took a little advantage of it this time though, asking him where he planned on going from this point of his career (wasn’t sure, liked what he was doing and who he was working for), who he thought the nominees would be in 2008 (wasn’t sure, but sure it wasn’t going to be Hillary), and what the morale around the office was like on those days when the “Gotcha!” political non-stories surrounded the Speaker’s office (the “bigger airplane” story was something they weren’t prepared for, simply because they didn’t make the request [House Sgt-at-Arms did, for security reasons], but they knew what they were getting into with the Syria trip and weren’t ill-prepared for the spin.).

All in all, it was a really terrific tour, and both Gracie and I were total geeks in the wake of it.

More later…

Neocon Foreign Policy

It came up in conversation today, so I thought I’d pull a little clip to hopefully explain a little better what Neoconservative foreign policy entails. Emphasis added:

Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns…

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-a-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination…

Suddenly, after two decades during which “imperial decline” and “imperial overstretch” were the academic and journalistic watchwords, the United States emerged as uniquely powerful… With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it or the world will discover them for you.

The older, traditional elements in the Republican Party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published. [Irving Kristol - The Neoconservative Persuasion - AEI, August 2003]

Distilling this down, Irving Kristol is saying that the United States, as a uniquely strong military and ideological power, has the responsibility to find ways to use it to ensure the survival and proliferation of this ideology, mainly through using our military strength as a means of persuasion. Well, that and as of 2003 the president was “doing a heckuva job, Bushie.”

“Neocon” isn’t a meaningless label. It is a philosophy. More on this later, but I gotta get a DC post written up too, don’t I?

My Two Favorite Pics From DC

The picture above was taken on our Saturday afternoon tour of the Speaker of the House’s office on her private balcony. I’ll have more later, but thanks to Gracie for taking and posting these terrific pics.

Thursday Morning Reading

I’m headed out of town for the weekend, but wanted to offer this brilliant post for your perusal while I’m gone. It’s not about politics, it’s about the social order and the culture of manhood that lead the Columbine shooters and Cho Seung-Hui to do what they did. Coming from someone who could have been Klebold or Harris, were it not for being both far less armed and far less crazy, this blogger beautifully articulates how these kids fall into a caste system, and how the tunnel-vision that pollutes a high schooler’s ability to look to the future keeps these kids on the outside looking in.

Oh No He Didn’t

Giuliani warns of ‘new 9/11′ if Dems win – The Politico

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

“If any Republican is elected president – and I think obviously I would be the best at this – we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said.

Wow. What balls on this guy.

I get so goddamn irritated with disinformation like this. Here’s what I believe. I believe that you are not a serious or responsible human being if you believe any of the following things:

1) That “terrorists” are hoping and praying for a Democratic presidential administration, because they are somehow effectively neutered if we have a Republican in office.

2) That, in this day and age, “National Security/Defense” means the same things that it did under Reagan and for decades prior, and that only one party cares enough to protect you.

3) That we’re all so goddamn weak and ineffective a people that the mere thought of another skyscraper tumbling or a suicide bomber in a Beverly Hills Starbucks means we’re craving a Daddy-State where we should turn over our rights to politicians, law enforcement and the intelligence community in an effort to make sure our neighbor, his neighbor and the guy down the street aren’t plotting to do something scary and dangerous.

If you believe any of the above, you are not a serious or responsible citizen of this society. Hell, channelling an old trope here, if you believe #3, you just might be a fascist.

“But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?” Giuliani said. “If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

“I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

He added: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”

The solution, then, is to not “cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, (and) interrogation?” Really? I don’t trust our politicians to stand on reasonable principles when it comes to taking money from the drug or tobacco lobby, so why should I trust them to stand on reasonable and noble principles when it comes to domestic surveillance?

Remember, we had an administration a couple of decades ago whose views on the unitary executive theory were well known:

Nixon insisted that when “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude” was involved, a President could readily use otherwise illegal acts, including burglaries (he preferred the euphemism “warrantless entries”), wiretaps, mail openings, and IRS and FBI harassment against any “violence-prone” dissenters. But if this was so vital to national security, why not ask Congress to make such acts legal? “In theory,” said Nixon, “this would be perfect, but in practice, it won’t work.” It would alert the targeted dissenters, he said, and raise a public outcry.

Frost kept probing for Nixon’s view of the limits on presidential power. If burglary is all right, why not murder? “Ah, there are degrees, ah, there are nuances, ah, ah, which are difficult to explain,” replied Nixon. He said that it might have been better to kill Hitler before he could order the murder of millions of Jews. Frost reminded Nixon that domestic dissidents were hardly comparable to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Nixon finally agreed that only “the President’s judgment” determined what was legal under this Nixonian doctrine of presidential supremacy.

Nixon explained that because a President is accountable to both Congress and the voters, he cannot “run amok in this country and get away with it.” Nixon paraphrased a Civil War statement by Abraham Lincoln: “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation.” Said Nixon: “Now that’s the kind of action I’m referring to.” Again, Frost refused to equate preserving the Union in the 1860s with deterring dissent in the 1970s.

Tragic Way. Insisted Nixon: “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Viet Nam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was President.” And he added a personal aside: “Nobody can know what it means for a President to be sitting in that White House working late at night and to have hundreds of thousands of demonstrators charging through the streets.” Not even earplugs, he said, could have blocked the noise. ["Not Even Earplugs Could Help" - Time Magazine, May 30, 1977 - Emphasis Added]

Our politicians are not purebred noble public servants, except for maybe Henry Waxman. They are not drooling power-hungry savages either, but somewhere on that spectrum lies the truth. Do you really think Nixon was the last “bad” guy we’re going to have occupying the office? Do you really think that the Bush administration’s unitary executive theory is a great deal different from what Nixon is illustrating above? True, Nixon was apparently going after Vietnam protesters, but Bush wouldn’t dream of quelling dissent himself, would he?

Look, it’s not Bush I’m really worried about here. It’s the next guy, and the guy after that, regardless of party affiliation. It is unacceptable for a President to engage in unitary executive theories that include non-FISA reviewed domestic surveillance, even if you want to believe Bush is “only” going after “the bad guys.” What happens if his domestic surveillance theories get challenged at the Supreme Court, and what if they’re upheld? You’re willing to put the future of all our freedom from a power mad executive branch that gets elected 40 years from now on the line because you’re scared of brown people with bombs?

Let me say this simply… If somehow it becomes acceptable for domestic surveillance to occur without oversight, that power will be abused.

I even put that in future tense for you conservatives who don’t want to believe this abuse could maybe be occurring now. Does that help? If you’re polarized paralyzed by partisan politics due to the rhetorical gamesmanship and sound bite propaganda that keeps you from critically looking at what might become of this society fifty years down the road while on our current path, how ’bout I just remind you that someday a Democrat will be elected President again? And someday we’ll have a Democrat President and Democrat Congress (like how I didn’t say “Democratic?” I did that just for my conservative friends) governing together, and someday maybe there will be unscrupulous people attempting to secure fifty years of single-party rule by crushing dissenting opinion.

Maybe someday you won’t share the politics and values of the people who are abusing the system. Democrats aren’t immune from being power-hungry Beltway whores either… except for maybe Henry Waxman.

The Bill of Rights is at risk, and I’m less willing to lose these guaranteed freedoms than I am to lose my own life to a dirty bomb attack. But let’s shift focus to the other part of this, and that’s the old trope about “National Security/Defense.”

Twenty-five years ago, at the height of the Cold War, it made sense for us to ramp up the military-industrial complex. We needed more bombs and better missles and a bigger fighting force that was better equipped than our enemy. Proliferation was how we “won” against the Soviets. We outspent them and drove them to bread lines. Republicans wanted to spend huge sums of money in this effort, Democrats, while still recognizing the need to do so, wanted to apply much of that money elsewhere.

Twenty-five years ago, the framing of Republicans as “strong” on defense, and Democrats as “weak” was a hyperbole rooted in fact.

That’s the way it was handled back then. “National Security/Defense” means something different today. There is not a single candidate on either side of the Presidential campaign who would tell you they want to open our borders and let “terrorists” blow up Manhattan. Whether or not we stay mired in a war in the Middle East is beyond the point – “National Security/Defense” to Americans today means being safe at home from attack. While we will never achieve total insularity and safety, it is unreasonable to project a total lack of safety (and terrorist slumber party) on the Democratic platform. It is unfair and unreasonable, and serious, responsible people don’t tell lies and know them when they see them being told.

I want so badly for a Democrat running for President to come out and tell the truth on this issue. I want a Dem to step up and say that “National Security/Defense” is his top priority, but these contractors suckling at the teat of the war machine are going to take a backseat to the construction, training and implementation of an agile and effective network of intelligence able to focus our efforts as a worldwide watchdog, not as a brute force global policeman. It’s time the rest of the world learned how to stand up and face extremism, and we will do everything we can to provide the intelligence necessary to succeed where this administration has failed – that is in understanding, observing, infiltrating and dismantling global terror groups where they live.

We will protect our homeland through immigration control, port security, and by fighting terror groups by being smart enough to know where all the heads of the hydra are so that we may cut them off at the same time. We are already stronger than our enemy and better equipped. A missle defense shield protects us from no one that’s a threat to us now, so it must take a backseat. New bombers, new tanks, new weaponry can and will be developed, but intelligence has been our gap, and we will turn that gap a unique position of irrefutable world dominance. The world will depend on America for what we know and how we can help them strategize to mitigate their exposure to the risks of an uncertain world.

This is how we fight “terror.” It’s not through no-bid contracts to Boeing and billions to Halliburton. We are going to focus on making the world a safer place by shining the light on everywhere freedom is in danger. It is up to the rest of the world to collaborate on solving these problems, as we are standing up to protect our borders and our cities, and we expect the leaders of the world to do the same.

That’s how you frame “national security” in this day and age. No sane, rational, serious or responsible person thinks we can beat al-Qaeda by bulking up the military machine. It’s about agility and knowledge, all while respecting the freedoms guaranteed to Americans by the Bill of Rights. We support our troops by making sure they know what they’re doing, who they’re fighting, and becoming surgical in our precision when planning attacks. We will not commit to leaving tens of thousands in the middle of a civil war, we will make sure you’re smart enough to understand your own threats and address them on your own.

This is how I want to see “National Security/Defense” framed. We want to be safe at home, we’re technologically savvy, it was bad intelligence (well, um, cherry-picked hyperbolized and inaccurate intelligence – how about that?) that got us into this mess, let’s make sure it never happens again.

Regardless, I’m tired of seeing this tired “strong/weak on defense” trope being trotted out again. It’s a different world, and we need our leaders to start telling the truth on these issues. Americans deserve better than what we’re getting at present, and you deserve better than rhetoric, sound bites and talking points to make up your mind on who it is you’re going to vote for.

Think critically, think long-range, and don’t let Giuliani spoon feed you this stuff without turning your nose up in disgust.