The Opinionated Bastard

A friend of mine sent me a link to this piece of dreck:

film on Google

It's stuff like this that makes me hate the left.

sigh

In 1920, Woodrow Wilson became the first President to leave the US during his term of office when he got on a ship to travel to Yalta to negotiate with Lloyd George and Clemenceau to negotiate the end of WWI. When he arrived he was deathly ill. As a consequence, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to easily frustrate Wilson's attempt to implement his 14 points: they conducted most of the negotiations in French, which Wilson didn't speak.

Knowing what we know now, what probably what happened is that either Wilson had a stroke (there was some evidence of personality change), or some waiter didn't wash his hands before serving the President of the United States his tuna sandwich. Of the two, I prefer the latter theory, mostly because of the irony. “lávese las manos”

The end result of that “peace conference” was the breakup of the Ottoman empire, and the creation of what we now call “the Middle East”. That peace treaty was so awful that Congress refused to ratify it; presumably we are still at war with the Kaiser.

My story is true. This film is not. The idiot branch of the left wants to believe that there was this giant conspiracy between all these various factions of the US Political machine? That Clinton and Bush worked together somehow to create 9/11?

Give me a fucking break. How about if I just believe that the government is mostly incompetent? That's a much simpler theory, and I see evidence of that every day. Never put down to evil what you can put down to incompetence; incompetence is much more common.

Recently, I had to debunk similar nonsense. In that case, I'm supposed to trust the mechanical engineering expertise of a Professor of Theology over well, actual mechanical engineers.

It's like talking to Chomskyites. College students read Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics, and take his historical pronouncements as gospel.

Look, by all means read Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent as an analysis of the media and how the government manipulates it is brilliant. As a professor of linguistics, Chomsky is unparalleled. But take his history with a grain of salt. Go read his sources if you want the true history of what's going on, and read the historians that don't agree with his sources as well. If historians don't always agree about history, don't take Chomsky's word for anything: he's trying to prove a point, so he discards anything that conflicts with his thesis. Manufacturing Consent is itself a piece of the propaganda it purports to analyze.

Propaganda is not reality though. The great theme of America has not been the creation of an empire. We frankly don't want or need an empire. The great goal of American foreign policy has actually been the promotion of democracy worldwide. Sure, there have been moments where we've moved against that grain: in wartime, cold or hot, short-term tactics may triumph over long term strategy. The triumph of America on the world stage is not due to any particular magic other then the fact that Americans work pretty hard, and we stayed out of WWI and WWII until the last possible moment. It's really as simple as that; realistically before the end of WWII, America was a non-entity on the world stage. We didn't create colonialism. Perhaps we propped it up a bit after 1945 to prevent a complete power vacuum across most of the world, but only just.

But let's look back on the history since 1945 shall we?

1. We defeated Germany and Japan in WWII, neither of them easy tasks.
2. We defeated Communism in a long, “Cold” War.
3. We've been successfully bringing Eastern European countries over to democratic ideals. (Not completely done yet! Look at Belorussia)
4. We've been successfully bringing more and more countries over to democracy. (Check out Freedom House for details.

You know, that's not such a bad record. Even the Vietnamese now thank us for keeping the Chinese out of their country...

But according to the idiot left, we're all evil, warmongering greedy assholes bent on stealing the worlds resources. Well guys, that's called mechantilism, and it was debunked in 1776 (ironic date that) when Adam Smith founded modern economics, with the publication of the Wealth of Nations. If we want the oil of the Middle East, all we have to do is buy it. What we actually want is peace in the Middle East, and that's not such a bad goal is it?