Her name is Samantha Powers and she is brilliant. Why is she brilliant? Because ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the others say she is. But why I ask? Because she won a Pulitzer. Obama won a Nobel peace prize before he was President and what exactly did that mean? He won it because the radicals and lefties in the world wanted him too. We have a real radical as our ambassador to the U.N. Why is she a radical? Because I say she is. Look if people in positions of power can make words mean anything they want them to mean why can’t I? If I am told by those in high places that my insurance rates will go down under the Health reform act when I can see that they will go up by $7000 then words mean what we want them to mean. No more – no less. Therefore I have decided that if anyone from any of the major networks tells me that someone is “brilliant and bright” I will declare them to be stupid and dull. Those that the major networks claim to be rather slow and stupid are to be brilliant and bright. I think history will show me to be right. We have a president that was supposed to be a “rock star” constitutional lawyer who never, it seems to me, has read the constitution. If he has, he read it like Clinton read the Bible – looking for loopholes. We have a brilliant president who called an Army corps a “corpse”. He is brilliantly stupefied if his teleprompter doesn’t work. I wonder how he spells “potato”. Anyway it is a good thing that he is a community organizer because he sure has a lot of communities to organize.
I am told all the time that I should not bring politics into this blog. I would love not to but the fact is that the government is more and more interfering in what used to be the purview of the church. The church is more and more marginalized and government run morality is taking over where the 10 commandments used to in the heart and the head.
Churches are about mercy and grace. Governments are about power and the protection of citizens. Governments are supposed to punish the evil and reward the good so that we can live quiet and peaceable lives in all Godliness. Churches are about humanitarian aid and mercy. Governments should be about strategic interests. So let’s look at a pronunciamento by our bright and brilliant U.N. ambassador shall we. This is the kind of thing that makes the left swoon.
“When confronting most crises, whether historic or contemporary, aid agencies generally muddle along on a case-by-case basis. They weigh insufficient information, extrapolate somewhat blindly about long-term pros and cons, and reluctantly arrive at decisions meant to do the most good and the least harm.” Samantha Power
Wow! Pulitzer material if there ever was any. This is the “femme fatale” of the humanitarian assistance world. This is the women that called Hilary Clinton a “monster”. Her idea seems to be, if you can sort through the brilliance and get down to what simple folks like I can understand; is that American foreign policy has historically “refused to take risks” for humanitarian ends. She chides American leaders for declining to “invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital” necessary to prevent massacres. U.S. officials, she complains, consistently “play up the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of any proposed intervention.”
OK. Got it. I guess the Berlin airlift, and the billions spent in Biafra, Bangladesh, and I could go down the alphabet until we tabulate the billions in US foreign humanitarian aid were accidents, but I get the point. She is changing the definition of a humanitarian crisis. It’s only a crisis if there is a massacre component. Starving millions to death is OK, just don’t use a military component. Now I understand why nary a peep was heard when 100,000 people were shot and blown up and concussed to death in Syria, but these brilliant folk went a little nuts when poison gas was used. I say a little nuts because it looks like the Russians will carry the water on this one. They will take over and destroy the chemical weapons that they said never existed in their client State, who has promised to turn over the weapons that they said never existed to pay the penalty for a crime against humanity that they say they never committed. Back to those pesky things called words again.
Perhaps historically American foreign policy was about strategic interests. Lately we seem to be unwilling to admit that America has strategic interests. Poison gas is a red line but……..
If I can add one more thing. Maybe, American leaders understand that we have spent trillions of dollars on a war on poverty since 1964 at home and there are more Americans in poverty according to the same government that ever before. Maybe more of our leaders should play up the futility of Government run humanitarian aid overseas when we can’t get it right at home. But no. We have a brilliant humanitarian interventionist taking the place of those nasty military interventionists. I’m sure nothing can go wrong here.
Let’s let the churches do humanitarian aid. We can muddle along on a case by case basis, weigh insufficient information, extrapolate blindly about long term pros and cons and arrive at decisions meant to do the most good and the least harm with the best of them. The difference is that we will be doing what we are meant to do as church. In the mean time let’s all pray that some day, some way, we get the government to do what it is supposed to do as government.
I am sorry but really – one more thing. It will be interesting to see if any of the brilliant and the bright in this administration will call the folks that attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi “terrorists”.
