Audacity
I can't be the only one disturbed by the kinds of stories I'm reading in the paper today.
First we've got the verdict on just what happened to Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. He was poisoned with dioxin, and he's been pretty clear he thinks he knows who did it: his own political opponents...
Then we've got the wonderful stories of Bush Administration espionage incompetence. They've been spying on Mohamed ElBaradei's phone conversations, specifically trying to implicate him in some kind of corruption in his dealings with Iran. As usual, they've found nothing, but they're talking rather casually about this...
Many may wonder why the Bush adminstration is held in such low regard by many not just in the US but abroad, and this is a pretty good example. While this type of spying goes on all the time, they've basically taken a posture of open warfare against...well, pretty much everybody, domestic or foreign, who doesn't say what they want to hear.
These stories are disturbing largely cause they seem to confirm that we've regressed into a slightly more brutish phase around the world, where there's little pretense of anything but the naked exercise of power, in any form.
I don't want to sound naive about these things, because I'm not. I can handle the fact that the world is a nasty place and people do stuff that ranges anywhere from unethical to outright evil. It's the fact that it's SO out in the open recently. Things like the prison torture scandal play into this as well, as it just seems like the world has spiraled into a moral black hole, where power and audacity are the only values.
Power and Audacity in a moral vacuum is not a winning combination for us, any of us, in the long term.
First we've got the verdict on just what happened to Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. He was poisoned with dioxin, and he's been pretty clear he thinks he knows who did it: his own political opponents...
Then we've got the wonderful stories of Bush Administration espionage incompetence. They've been spying on Mohamed ElBaradei's phone conversations, specifically trying to implicate him in some kind of corruption in his dealings with Iran. As usual, they've found nothing, but they're talking rather casually about this...
Many may wonder why the Bush adminstration is held in such low regard by many not just in the US but abroad, and this is a pretty good example. While this type of spying goes on all the time, they've basically taken a posture of open warfare against...well, pretty much everybody, domestic or foreign, who doesn't say what they want to hear.
These stories are disturbing largely cause they seem to confirm that we've regressed into a slightly more brutish phase around the world, where there's little pretense of anything but the naked exercise of power, in any form.
I don't want to sound naive about these things, because I'm not. I can handle the fact that the world is a nasty place and people do stuff that ranges anywhere from unethical to outright evil. It's the fact that it's SO out in the open recently. Things like the prison torture scandal play into this as well, as it just seems like the world has spiraled into a moral black hole, where power and audacity are the only values.
Power and Audacity in a moral vacuum is not a winning combination for us, any of us, in the long term.
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