Foreign Policy, Made Simple

Da Tech Guy has posted a "Statement of Common Principles" which you may want to check out. My own personal reaction, posted there as a comment:

Hmmm. It's all foreign policy. I don't see anything objectionable here, but I've never been much interested in foreign policy, which is an expert's game and I'm not all into that diplomacy stuff.
So far as I’m concerned, the world can be divided into four categories:

1. U.S.A.
2. Countries that we’re at war with.
3. Countries that we’re not at war with.
4. Countries that are watching from the sidelines and thinking, "Hmmm. Maybe we should jump in on this war against America."

The objective of policy should be for category 1 to whip the living dog$#it out of category 2, and thereby transfer them to category 3, so as to send a message to category 4: “Don’t even think about it, a$$holes."
Peace Through Superior Firepower. Anybody got a better idea?

This is why editors never offer to pay me to write about foreign policy. They always want nuance and insight and crap like that: "Whither Azerbijan?"

My attitude is more like, "Who cares? Canada, France, Azerbijan -- they're all just a bunch of foreigners. Unless you want to send me on an expense-paid trip to Azerbijan, let some geek at Brookings Institute write that stuff." Which sort of rules out foreign policy as an area of professional interest.

This is why four-eyed geeks like David Brooks get all the free trips to Azerbijan, so they can write nuance that bores people to sleep. Foreign policy magazines are the Darvon of journalism. They're boring on purpose. You wouldn't want some deputy undersecretary at the State Department to pick up his favorite foreign policy journal and read the kind of gonzo stuff I might write if the American Entetprise Institute sent me to Azerbijan:

The swimming pool at the Park Hyatt Baku is warm, the whiskey is cheap, the local prostitutes are friendly, and top officials from European NGOs were having themselves a swell old time of it. They had come to Azerbijan for a September conference convened by the United Nations, funded in part by U.S. foreign aid, to combat AIDS and international human trafficking. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken that morning, but when I asked one British official, sitting poolside with a slender 17-year-old Azerbijani call-girl on his lap, what he thought of Mrs. Clinton's speech, he took a sip of his fourth gin-and-tonic and shouted: "Cow!" . . .

No, AEI would never underwrite a "foreign policy" trip that produced such brutal stuff. Anyway, you should check out Da Tech Guy's "Statement of Common Principles."

Frankly, I've never been much of a joiner . . .

Screw Canada!

And kiss my butt, France:

Republicans tend to be far more likely than Democrats to believe "we all should be willing to fight for our country … right or wrong," and to support the use of pre-emptive military force. They are less likely to care what the rest of the world thinks of us.

(Via See-Dubya at Malkin.) My desire to be admired by Swedes is indiscernibly greater than my yearning to be esteemed in Botswana. For popularity in Peru, Poland and Portugal, I care next to nothing. As for Azerbaijan and Albania, I care nothing all. I positively crave the contempt of Croatia, Kazakhstan, and Cote D'Ivoire.

God bless America. What kind of commie peacenik scum cares about the opinions of a bunch of smelly foreigners, anyway??

(This message brought to you by the Republican Grassroots Committee for International Understanding.)

'Minister for Equal Opportunities'

That's Mara Carfagna's title in the Italian cabinet, but surely not all ministers are created equal:

A former showgirl who has become an Italian cabinet minister has admitted that you don't have to be pretty to get ahead in politics, but it helps.
Mara Carfagna, nicknamed Mara La Bella, or Mara the Beautiful, also said she was still shocked over her rapid ascent to the top of Italian politics. The 32-year-old was made the minister for Equal Opportunities last week.
The German tabloid Bild has already dubbed her "The world’s most beautiful cabinet minister" and the internet is buzzing with saucy pictures and videos from her past.

Yeah, trust me -- the picture I used at the top of this post is by no means the most "saucy" photo of Mara La Bella I came across during my Google search.

Although she graduated with a law degree in 2001, she pursued a career as a television showgirl for six years and posed provocatively for several gentlemen’s magazines.
However, in her first interview since her appointment, Miss Carfagna was keen to stress she is a woman of substance.
She told La Stampa newspaper: "Being pretty helps you make relationships quickly, and the political world is a segment of society full of male chauvinists."

Not to mention, they're Italian. Male chauvinists in Italy? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Some stereotypes are true, as you can discover by talking to any American woman who's ever traveled to Italy. American women have a certain look that Italian guys can spot instantly, and because the media has created the worldwide impression that all American women are sluts, female tourists who visit Italy report that they're repeatedly catcalled, leered at, and propositioned.

So it's not exactly surprising that when Italian politicians needed a Minister of Equal Opportunities, they'd pick a 32-year-old hottie. Not that I'm complaining, but I'd hardly call Carfagna a triumph for the feminist cause. (Remember Rush Limbaugh's "Undeniable Truths of Life," No. 24.) Here she is on the cover of an Italian edition of Maxim:

(Hat tip: Hot Air Headlines.)

A sticky wicket

Politicians in India are in an uproar over a professional cricket league's decision to add cheerleaders to the sport:

Sparsely clad cheerleaders are facing a performance ban at Indian Premier League tournament matches in the western port city of Mumbai as the authorities have declared them "crude and vulgar".
"The scantily clad foreign girls' dances are obscene and do not gel with Indian sensibilities, culture and ethos," state home minister Siddharam Mhetre said.
"These are things meant for foreigners and not us. Mothers and daughters watch these matches on television and it does not look nice", he added.

Being an uptight, sexually repressed right-winger, I naturally share the Indian home minister's horror at the idea of "scantily clad" girls engaged in "obscene" dances. However, I suspect that the key word here is "foreign." Let's take a gander at these scantily clad gals, shall we?

Methinks that the Indian politicians are in large measure outraged by the superior hotness of the American hotties, which insults the ethnic pride of caste-conscious subcontinentals. And I suspect the women of India are hurt to see their menfolk lusting for foreign flesh:

In Bangalore beer-addled spectators exhorted the girls to come down and dance with them, screaming in unison to a Bollywood song: "Come to us, come to us, now!"
And in Mumbai, swooning men implored the shimmying girls: "Madam, madam, shake hand, shake hand!"

In other words, the anti-cheerleader sentiment appears to be a sort of nativism, and the outraged politicians are just doing a Pat Buchanan shtick. Sexual protectionism, in other words. (Once E.J. Dionne teaches you how to spot racial undertones, you see undertones everywhere.)