How does Obama get 'Mad Bomber' cred?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Thoughts on a scary Monday night...

Our strategic posture is built on the willingness of our presidents to destroy half the world out of spite. In game theory that role is the 'mad bomber,' a potentially irrational actor who cannot be out-maneuvered because he is not bound by rational risk-reward considerations.

Sadly, there is no alternative to that set-up. Nobody asked God to make Uranium a naturally occurring element on Earth, but she did.

Americans who couldn't begin to describe the particulars of the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction still intuit it... they vote rather reliably for irresponsible hot-heads. They don't want to be defended to the limits of reason. They want to be defended to BEYOND the limits of reason. All my life I have marvelled that voters keep picking ill-tempered reactive presidents. But maybe they do it subconciously-on-purpose. (It drove people crazy that Michael Dukakis answered the 'if Kitty was raped' question rationally. They wanted to see some irrationality.)

Don't tell anyone, but I am not fit to be president. If the whole Russian nuclear arsenal was in the air headed our way I would not retaliate. Why kill extra hundreds of millions and turn a nuclear autumn into a nuclear winter just to maintain the credibility of a nation that won't exist in half an hour?

Carter was a man of peace, but steeped in the cold war. I could barely imagine him destroying 500 million people to prove a no-longer-relevant point. Clinton was borderline. Obama... I cannot quite imagine Obama blowing up the world as the last act in a futile drama.

But it is essential to world peace that every intelligence agency in the world believe he would. It's a puzzle. How do you pick a sane president when the job requires the perception of a touch of madness?

And how do you convince voters that you would destroy the world merely to avenge them, with no rational objective?

Maybe Obama needs to go postal on a reporter or something.

[anonymous171]

1. Then they'd say he was "too dangerous for America"