In reading this review of Condoleeza Rice's memoir, I was reminded of the moral bankruptcy of Bush's foreign policy. No wonder the GOP presidential candidates focus on domestic issues - as hard as it must be for Conservatives to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to promote a failed economic ideology, can you imagine trying to bear the mental weight of the disastrous neocon agenda? And as long as it may take the Conservative movement to evolve its take on economics, it's going to take them that much longer to come up with a new set of foreign policy principles - they are very much in the "stove-hot!" phase of that process.
That I could forget speaks to how successful Obama was in turning the page (cue: Seger). And while some felt he turned it too quickly in not prosecuting Bush's henchmen, I like to think in that decision was some consideration for the voters that reelected Bush. As much as I wanted to move on, these people's sense of self-worth demanded that we do so. Do you remember how pained they were in the later years of the Bush administration? I used to get sympathy migranes just talking to those among my friends and colleagues who had the courage to fess up.
At this point you may reasonably conclude that I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to foreign policy, so let me upgrade this post with a smarter offering from a smarter economist, a recent tweet from Richard Thaler: "What exactly is wrong with 'leading from behind'? isn't that what great QBs and point guards do?"
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