Congratulations, Presidents Clinton and Obama!
Each gets credit for a year of this splendid news.
President Bush must get credit for the other eight:
So, the year 2009 has been a dismal one for the international regime of nuclear arms control. Or has it? asks Joshua Pollack, who writes for the Web site ArmsControlWonk.com.
“One way to look at it a little differently is not that the regime is cracking or that the regime is failing, but that the regime has succeeded in retarding the pace of proliferation and continues to do so, but isn’t going to catch everything,” he says.
Since the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, the past decade has seen the fewest nuclear tests of any comparable period, notes Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Stimson Center in Washington.
“Never before have there been so few nuclear tests as in this past decade. This is a norm. It can still be broken. But the country that breaks the norm does not gain points. It loses standing,” he says.
Who said NPR was good for nothing? All right, I did. But sometimes even an ideologically blind liberal stumbles upon the truth.
President Bush resisted limits on nuclear testing when he came into office, earning the contempt and opprobrium of the intelligentsia, but the Texas gunslinger had no intention of firing off random radioactive rounds. He just wouldn’t leave American national security to worthless treaties and untrustworthy allies or foes.
So, yet again, boys and girls, let us say what is getting to be hackneyed from over use: Bush was right.
PS: The wonks and specialists are useless, all of them, even when they reluctantly credit President Bush. There is no credible argument—none—that we were less safe under the policies of Reagan and Bush than we are under the pusillanimity of President Obama.
Carol said,
January 1, 2010 @ 9:18 am
When are you going to learn? There was no Bush. There was 8 years that simply weren’t. Tyrants were cowed or outright defeated and terrorism was held at bay between 2002 and 2009, but there was no Bush.
Carol said,
January 1, 2010 @ 9:59 am
I forgot one point: if the events of 2009 weren’t (the non-existent) Bush’s fault, they were Israel’s fault.
Bloodthirsty Liberal said,
January 1, 2010 @ 10:56 am
Using your logic, Carol, Israel doesn’t exist, either. As with Bush, we can blame things on it—and do so habitually—but it’s really just a microbe or a cancer or an entity, not a real place (that turns 62 this year—and still looking fine!).