Daisy Girl

How things change. In 1964 when a TV ad was aired, linking presidential candidate Barry Goldwater with the possibility of nuclear war, it caused devastating harm to his campaign. Has America stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb? Have we begun to see ourselves as the new Roman Empire bringing order to the world through conquest and domination or are we simply cowards too afraid of the scary world of foreigners to give a damn about whether it’s right or wrong to nuke them?

I don’t know, but if we are not so repelled by a Deputy National Security advisor with the unlikely name of J.D. Crouch who not only advocated nuking and invading North Korea back in 1995 but is the “brains” behind Bush’s latest plan to achieve different results in Iraq by doing more of the same thing that has steadily failed for four years, then the cowardice scenario seems credible.

"Diplomacy in Pyongyang without military power is appeasement plain and simple," Crouch wrote, according to Raw Story, in 1995. Perhaps J.D. Crouch thinks of diplomacy in the way that people like Osama bin Laden thinks of diplomacy or perhaps he’s a psychotic nut job with his bowels full of dogma like so many others in the Bush administration. Perhaps like many barbarians and Mafiosi, he feels it’s better to be feared than admired but fails to consider how such people usually wind up.

The Bush administration continues to provide one similarity after another to the one depicted in Dr. Strangelove – and we all know how that movie ended. The trouble is, we’re not in a movie.