GObama!

So far, President-elect Obama is looking pretty good. His finance advisers could have been picked by Mr. McCain. They can hardly do worse than Dirty Hank and the downhill gang.

I really like his foreign policy team. Retired USMC General James Jones is an excellent selection for National Security Advisor. I was so sure he'd pick some lefty civilian pointy head for that job. And Hillary heading up state. If you were Putin, Chavez or even our friend Merkel, how would you like staring that woman down? Scary thought, isn't it? Plus, her foreign policy has never been liberal; it has tended towards cold-eyed realism, and we need more of that.

My argument with the so-called neocons has nothing to do with the left-wing wackadoo charges of nefarious oil-stealing plots and other international buggery. It's simply that they base their trigger-happy foreign policy on pie-in-the-sky fantasies: No, you can't turn a 6th century society with poor toilet habits into a 21st century democracy overnight. And foisting the trappings of liberal democracy upon them is just asserting the conclusion. The neocons have worthy goals, but you can't just ram them through; it takes baby steps.

Speaking of neocons, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan in particular, I'm always suspicious of anyone who has never served in the military but is hot to use military force. We need more speaking softly and less big stick brandishing. I think General Jones will be an advocate of that. Before you dismiss this as squishy pacifist talk, Special Ops advocates have been saying essentially the same thing for years, criticizing our huge troop presence in the CENTCOM AOR as not much more than turning food into excrement.

Robert Kaplan wrote an article last year detailing our many unheralded successes in places like the Phillipines and Colombia. Small, quiet operations are the wave of the future. As someone who has turned food into excrement in the highly kinetic Middle East as well as performed low-key military assistance missions in Latin America, I say the time is ripe.

So to all my conservative friends, I'm asking you to consider keeping your powder dry. This is not a liberal foreign policy team. We should cheer President-elect Obama's picks. Don't worry, there'll be plenty to criticize soon enough.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/25/opinion/op-kaplan25

Chelsea & Monica

Conservative talk radio and its fans are all atwitter at the latest campaign trail minor drama. Chelsea refuses to talk about what it was like in the Clinton household during the Lewenski scandal. News organizations report on it while conservatives snicker.

I have a question for those of you who think this is funny. How would you like someone asking your daughter about your sex life? It’s time for the Clinton haters to grow up. Everyone on the planet knows what happened. There is no political ore left in that mine. Move on. Hillary is a big enough target in her own right: Travel Gate, FBI files found in the Clinton White House, the health care debacle... Get your mind out of the gutter and I'm sure you could think up some more on your own.