Putin and the Pundits

The Man is Reptilian You Must Admit That 

The other night I watched some pundit on Charlie Rose or The News Hour or some such declaiming how Vladimir Putin had "seized the initiative" in Syria and is "making us look impotent and adrift" and how Russian "prestige" in the middle East is soaring and American "influence" is waning, set adrift by a President of the United States who "looks weak."

Whenever I hear the words "prestige" or "honor" my antennae go up and lights go off in my brain and I think of my father's words.

My father was sitting at the dinner table telling my mother about a meeting where a physician was talking about something to do with Medicare. This doctor had been at a university hospital but left his position to work for the government. It was the early days of Medicare and the program was growing and these federal employees, my father among them, were trying to figure out how to steer the program in the right direction. After the meeting my father asked the doctor why he would quit doing medicine to sit around meetings in dreary government offices and pull a federal employee's salary. The doctor had some explanation which you might expect--he wanted to do more good for more people, something which sounded noble like that. 

But my father persisted: "But you're a physician. You know things. These guys here, these bureaucrats, these government workers, these sociologists, economists, none of them know anything."
"Oh," the doctor replied. "I don't know about that."
"Well, I sure as Hell do," my father replied. "They just make stuff up they want to believe and then they invent numbers to support it. Sometimes they get help from the numbers fabricators but none of it comes close to science."

I always think of that when I hear the "pundit" on TV inveigh against the drift of American foreign policy and how we are losing our leadership role. As if America ever did or could ever have a "leadership role" among the Syrians who are trying to kill each other.

As if some white bread guy sitting at the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation really knows how America "looks" to some Syrian with a grenade launcher in his hands. As if we should care how we "look" to some ISIS maniac. 

We got into Vietnam because of fear, fear that we'd "look" weak to the Commies. Fear that if we didn't fight them in Hanoi, we'd have to fight them in the streets of San Francisco. 

How do these bozo's get on the airwaves? 

PS: It was Maud who first pointed out the resemblance Putin bears to a lizard. Since then, her observation apparently went viral enough that his visage is routinely displayed with his spiritual kin.