Let's Stop the Debate

Other than the affairs of Tiger Woods, and maybe the hair-styles of Kate Gosselin, nothing gets Americans more hot under the collar than National Defense. It's a dogma as old as the parties themselves: Republicans are who you want on your side during a fight. Hell, everyone knows the Democrats are the pussies who talk about global warming and have tiny-balls that only serve subsidize health care for the poor. It's true! Democrats don't want us to keep score in t-ball. Democrats want to eliminate the embarrassment and sheer physical damage of getting put out in dodge-ball. In fact, Democrats would be happy if we all sat around a campfire making S'mores (if you have to ask what a S'more is...stop reading. You're killing me Smalls.) and singing Jack Johnson songs. The fires were stoked to hell-ish proportions this week as President Obama signed a treaty with Russia to limit both countries' nuclear arsenal. The treaty included a devastating 33% cut to our nuclear weapons cache, bringing us to pansy-loving level of 1550 weapons. Or just enough to destroy the Earth several times over. Sarah Palin, as usual, is totally correct when she said, "no administration in America's history, I think, would ever have considered such a step." So when I read the following quotes I knew they could only be the radical ramblings of our socialist left-wing President:

“We must never stop our efforts to reduce the weapons of war.”

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”

“It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons”

"I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."

Ah yes! Those pie-in-the-sky, idealistic, or as Rudy Giuliani put it, "a dream of the left for 60 years", gaffes demonstrate the lack of a realistic understanding of world affairs by President Reagan. Wait?! What!?! President Ronald Reagan? The man who conservatives regard as the founder of their movement?

A man so important that even Rush Limbaugh said, "If conservatism is dead, and if the Reagan era is dead, then I assume that this means the Declaration of Independence is dead as well, that the era of the Declaration has come and gone." Was Sarah Palin wrong? Have other, and not just any other, administrations considered and even put into practice such absurd steps?

I don't say these things simply to poop in the punchbowl of conservatives, my real problem is with the consistent effort by conservatives to avoid a debate at all. President Obama moved to limit our potential use of nuclear weapons as well this week by declaring that we wouldn't use a nuke to blow the hell out of anyone who attacked us with something other than a nuke, provided they were a complying country within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In those cases, we would simply blow the hell out of them with some other method, or as Defense Secretary Gates put it, "a conventional military response." It is important to note that Iran and North Korea, two of the three primary 'evil-doers', are not in compliance with the non-proliferation treaty. Therefore, they still get to stare down the proverbial gun-barrel of our nuclear shotgun for the foreseeable future.

The reaction of such conservative stalwarts as Michelle Bachman, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin would make you believe that President Obama banged Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev in the broom closet of the oval office. By the way, there's no evidence that he did.

Anyway, these types of rants and raves serve two purposes: cloud and hide real debate, and scare the living shit out of every American. The real question is, though, when will conservatives stop trying to simply scare initiatives out of Washington, and start trying to govern the nation with some good ideas of their own? And by that, I mean good ideas other than "no".