Buck Up

I saw a post over at Roger's about how desperate these times are. I am not making light of the mad mullahs, not at all, but people need to get a grip. Whether it is Bolton leaving or Rumsfeld retiring, the world is not coming to an end. I posted this over there and I am putting here too:

I voted for Bush. I am a supporter of regime change in Iran. I still support the mission in Iraq. What happens if Iran gets the bomb? I don't know and neither do you. But considering the fact that the US got the bomb 60 years ago it is amazing more countries like Iran do not already have the bomb today. It is not new technology after all.

I spent most of my childhood waiting to be nuked. I had nightmares about it. One of the reasons the baby boomers were so self centered was that we really did not think the world would still be here when we got old. Surprise..surprise.

No one is saying we should not be concerned, but for heavens sake people need to get some perspective.

60 million people died in WW2, when I was a child we were still being vacinated against diseases like small pox and polio. Natural disasters and plagues and famine claimed far more people than people today can even imagine..

Women in America did not get the right to vote until my grandmother was a young woman and if you told her then that we would be thinking about putting a base on the moon in less than a century she would not have believed it.

The kinds of tragedies that threatened mankind in the past, the black death, world wars, communist revolutions that left tens of millions dead simply do not happen today as a matter of course. Not so long ago, that was just the way the world was.

That is what I meant when I said these are in many ways the best of times. Never have so many had so much, and not just here in the United States, but in places known only for poverty not so long ago. Like India.

Bush is only going to be president for two more years and whether the Republicans won or lost the midterms people like Bolton were not going to be around forever in any event. We need a long term policy.

What I am saying is that conservatives need to stop whining so much. We need to be aware of the problems of nuclear proliferation and the dangers, but we do not need to act as if we might all just as well shoot ourselves and be done with it, because all is lost.

This is going to go on for awhile, it ain't over yet. And after the back stabbing nonsense from much of the right who did nothing but complain about everything from Miers to Dubai to Immigration to Earmarks it is amazing we did not lose more. After all not so long ago luminaries like Noonan were saying the GOP needed to lose. So here it is, this is what losing looks like.

And still they bitch.