Spot on analysis. I just have not been able to latch on to the whole war/anti-war poetry meme. Although I must guiltily confess, I did make a submission to the against the war side (under an assumed name, of course, in jest). I keep trying to assume a perspective of what this will look like 20 years down the road. If we do nothing, where will we be? If we do something, what sort of commitments will it entail?

Anyway, my wife and I dropped 24 from our viewing rotation after last season (Anybody get amnesia, yet?). You're kind of making me wish we hadn't.

Couldn't agree more with your commentary on the pro-war "poetry" published by the WSJ Best/Web. I am a scholarship-winning poet (of little note) and pro-Saddam removal, but "trite" is the nicest thing I can say about those "verses".

The amnesia thing turned me off last season too. I started watching again this season and I have not regreted it.

I've had just about enough America-bashing, both domestic and foreign. I differ with the President on some social and economic issues, but as far as our foreign policy is concerned, I stand behind him one hundred percent. If one looks thoughtfully at history, its very real weight can be felt, and I think that can be very useful when we as a nation are embroiled in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. I can remember my father expressing some very similar outrage during the last days and aftermath of the confict in Vietnam. Not regarding his support for or opposition to the conflict, but about the reflex anti-Americanism of some of history's most fortunate men, thickening the fog of war and tearing the nation apart. Love it or leave it, he would say, referring to the Marxist and revisionist 'hippies' who expressed as great a hatred for America as the people of just about any other nation on Earth. It seems that we've come full circle now, winning the Cold War, leaving the Far East to sink or swim (for all intents and purposes), returning in the Clinton years to the isolationism we knew in the few years before World War II and,(after 9/11) fighting a new kind of social war within our own borders over freedom and safety, compounded by bureaucratic incompetence and pettiness.
For all of the left-wing extremists warning of a Vietnam-style quagmire that will supposedly destroy us if we don't veer from our current path, none of them seem to have pulled their heads out of each others asses and stopped babbling long enough to see the actual lessons that we apparently didn't learn from World War II. Ironically, it should be even more plain than it was in the fifties, having emerged as the world's sole superpower. If we don't deal with these problems, who will? These people have totally missed the point. Preemtive action certainly isn't the only foreign policy choice we have, but it is the one that makes the most sense, at least as far as the Middle East is concerned. We've been using sanctions and resolutions (which the UN has barely pretended to enforce, by the way) to try and deal with the problems in the Middle East for decades, and it has been an abject failure in every conceiveable way. Somebody told me once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior while expecting a different outcome. I think that someone should point this out to Barbra Streisand and Kofi Annan, and oh, how I wish it could be me.
Korea has emerged once again as an enemy, this time more dangerous than before. The Middle East has replaced the Soviet Union as the band of oppressive and belligerent states threatening the hope of global peace, freedom and prosperity, but most of these states are theocracies that advocate and reward martyrdom. I gotta hand it to 'em - it has been a spectacular success. Am I seeing this the wrong way? Have I missed some point that for whatever reason I'm unable to see, or am I just outgrowing the idealism of my youth? I still feel like an idealist, but if what the far-left is spouting is idealism, count me out. I don't think the human race can afford the luxury of trying to shame each other into some utopian pipe dream. I think we have to view the way of the world for what it really is, and not, as liberal apologists demand, the way we wish it were. Edmund Burke said that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." We give billions in aid to nations whose citizens burn our flag in their streets every single day, and I am proud as hell to be an American. Freedom and security both have a price, and there have always been enough Americans willing to pay it in all kinds of different ways in order to ensure -as JFK put it - the success of liberty. That particular inaugural address seems to become more relevant with every day that passes, as does Lincoln's State of the Union given in 1862 during the Civil War. I think that the more ignorant of the anti-war crowd would be doing themselves and their posterity on the nation's college campuses a great service by reading these two speeches and doing some thoughtful introspection before they impulsively decry the nation whose constitution is the source of all that they have, all that they are and all that they could become.

I think that nearly all of us can agree that the world is a dangerous place and rapidly becoming more so. Einstein elaborated on Burke's admonition about the triumph of evil:

"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

Love it or leave it indeed.

Powerful screed Chili and basically right on. I can probably do without the "love it or leave it" because of its connotations from the past, but I certainly agree with your analysis of history. I too still think of myself as an idealist, just not a stupid, suicidal one.

Yeah, I know. It is a bit Archie Bunker-ish, that. It's just that I heard the expression at such a young and impressionable age that it almost always pops into my head when I hear Americans bashing the US and calling it an evil empire. My father meant it as a challenge to those people to "go right ahead, but don't come crying to me when you find that the grass isn't greener on the other side." He was of the opinion that all these people really needed was a good reality check. Alec Baldwin is a good, high profile example of this. He keeps threatening to leave the country. Well, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, buddy. I honestly belive that the only reason he hasn't made good on his 'threat' is that he fears his huge but fragile ego will be destoyed when there aren't a throng of people at JFK holding onto his leg and begging him not to go. What an idiot.