Obama Squandering America's Precious Supply of Enemies. (BARELY Qualifies as Satire.)
The latest Borowitz snark from the New Yorker barely qualifies as satire.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/obama-squandering-americas-precious-supply-of-enemies
“Our adversarial relationships with Cuba and Iran took years of frostiness and saber-rattling to maintain,” Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of the Washington-based Institute for Infinite Conflict, said. “Thanks to the President, decades of well-crafted hostility have been thrown out the window.”
Funny...but accurate. GOP politicians, and their plutocrat-funded "think tanks" and media outlets have toiled for decades to carefully cultivate perpetual enemies that they can run against during elections. Nixon famously said "people respond to fear, not to love. They don't teach you that in Sunday School, but it's true." And every election for a century has been run on FEAR.
Obama diffusing these fear bombs will likely leave the GOP with no more neocon fear cards to play in their hand. All they'll be left with are the 'culture wars' as wedge issues. By normalizing relations with Cuba, that takes Florida out of play as a Presidential election swing state; with both parties competing for the favor of a handful of cranky Cuban expats in Miami. THAT issue will no longer wag the dog. Now Iran....
Let's not kid ourselves. When Kim exploded his "hydrogen" bomb the other day, he was basically stamping his feet, and bawling "MEEE TOOO! What about MEE! I want some of that diplomatic attention TOO!" And we all know there is no hydrogen bomb. Kim basically took all the uranium he had left, and blew it off, creating a pathetic little 5 kiloton explosion just to get attention. Obama has said he won't negotiate unilaterally with Korea until they halt their nuclear program....and Kim wasting the last of his uranium in a hissy fit to get attention proves that Obama's plan IS WORKING. And it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Obama swings a nuclear arms treaty with North Korea before he leaves office.
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Technically, wars always work better when the enemy is an amorphous blob of ideas, rather than a solid human being.
We can use aircraft carriers to catch drug dealer kingpins, can't we??? Sure we can.
(Did you ever see that superb British comedy show 'Spitting Image?' In about 1989 they did a skit where George HW Bush was concerned that, with the Soviet Union collapsing, America needs a new enemy. So, he declared war on broccoli. They had bombers dropping napalm on fields of broccoli. They were hauling vegetables up before a select committee and asking them "are you now, or have you ever been a spear of broccoli?"
