The Liberals and Their Shiny Things

Go ahead ask a landed fish. OK, OK, cut me a little slack: I mean assume it were possible to ask a fish a question and get an answer. So, ask a fish about shiny things. As many a fish has discovered, shiny things are not always your friend. They might be hiding hooks.

Shiny things have presaged trouble throughout history--and not just for fish. European explorers and conquerors found they could fool indigenous people into giving up, for example, vast tracts of land with gifts of a few cheap shiny things, e.g., beads and mirrors. I remember in this regard an incident during a cocktail party at a diplomatic residence in Central America. A Latin American Ambassador, who would not have passed a DUI checkpoint sobriety test, loudly and throughout the evening harangued and berated the Spanish Ambassador demanding to know, "When are you going to return the gold you stole from the Americas?" The Spaniard, exasperated, finally lost his professional diplomatic cool and replied, "¡Cuando ustedes nos devuelvan los espejitos! " ("When you return the little mirrors!") A pretty neat and witty put down, and a potent reminder of the danger of taking shiny things in exchange for your birthright: once it's gone, it's most likely gone forever.

American lefties love shiny things. They are so much better for their purposes than dull, boring facts and reality. I wrote before about their obsession with shiny things when it came to Libya. Throughout the execution of Obamista foreign policy we see the obsession with the shiny "new" thing. Unfortunately for America, many times the "new" thing is only new to the ahistorical people who run our foreign policy apparatus. We see the enthrallment with the "Arab Spring," for example. Nothing new  there. The Arab world goes through "Springs" every few decades. Such "Springs" in the past produced beautiful flowers such as Qaddafi, Nasser, the UAR, and the Bathist regimes of Syria and Iraq. Out with the evil corrupt monarchs who favor the West! In with the even more evil and even more corrupt military dictators who favor the USSR and terror! Progress! The shiny new lures of the 1950s and 1960s, of course, proved to have some very large and hideous hooks hidden in them. The Obamistas, of course, are, at best, bored by history, and, at worst, driven by a desire to undermine the position of the United States, Israel, and the West writ large in the region. The latest shiny Arab Spring has brought about a resurgence of Al Qaeda and has lined us up for endless war in the region, with it spreading to Sub-Saharan Africa. The hooks are there, and they are sharp.

We see the Obamistas pursuing the same sort of nonsense in Latin America. We, in effect, have become totally irrelevant to developments in that region, and the region is slipping evermore under the sway of what should be the highly tarnished lures of Castro, Chavez, Morales, Correa, Ortega, and Evita Peron, er, uh, Cristina Kirchner. But for the Obamistas this is all exciting and refreshing to see the Latin Americans strike out on their own paths to the future . . . there will be consequences and, to quote the movie of the name, "There will be blood." Anybody with even a bare understanding of history knows that the current political movements in Latin America are not new at all, but then, we have the Obamistas in charge. Everything is new!

This obsession with the shiny thing, of course, is not limited to foreign policy. We see it in the continued obsession with "climate change," although every day seems to knock a new hole in the "theory." We see with the false "medical care" crisis in the United States which brought us Obamacare. We see it by the bucketful in the phony debate over "gun violence." Yet another shiny thing with which to distract the people from the disastrous "drug war," the collapsing economy, the ballooning deficit, and the hollowing out of the military. The gun grab effort shares with all the other lefty crusades, whether overseas or at home, the drive to expand the power and reach of the government, and to corrupt the nature and status of the United States.

Look at this shiny thing! Pay no attention to the laws and cops whittling away your freedoms at home, and the bureaucrats selling us out abroad.