Hello everybody, I'm back (not that many of you stuck around for my ten-month hiatus !

I've been way too busy with school and my personal life to even consider writing anything for Modern Counterculture. It's a shame, but that's life, No? Anyway, from here on out, I aim to keep my comments short but sweet. So anyway, onto the world and its never-ending problems:

I have a love hate relationship with conservatism. I'm love the movement but hate the leaders.

Take Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Michael Savage, etc. These folks – whom I once liked quite a bit in fact – have put so much effort into their partisan attacks, that their own ideology has become completely incoherent. More specifically, they have no idea what the hell they're talking about. To head off my impending diatrabe, I'm going to content myself with two examples for now: nuclear weapons and nuclear policy.

Just the other day, Palin came on the Fox News Channel to say this:

No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today. It's kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, 'Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.'

Michael Savage, in a similar vein, wrote an subtle little satire called "Obama the Destroyer." Mr. Savage clearly doesn't know that it's rude to shout:

HE STARTED DESTROYING OUR MILITARY BY SIGNING AN INSANE NUCLEAR TREATY WITH RUSSIA.

THIS TREATY, THE WORK OF THE MENTALLY DISORDERED LEFT, WILL MEAN A 30% REDUCTION IN OUR NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND A STEEP REDUCTION IN OUR SUBMARINES AND STRATEGIC BOMBERS. [The Capital Letters are Savage's Touch, not mine]

Now, your feelings on nuclear disarmament aside, you aught to know one thing: Ronald Reagan was the biggest proponent of nuclear disarmament that our county has ever had. EVER. Even while the USSR was still alive and well, he went into private meetings with Gorbachev and came within a hair of agreeing to disarm ALL nuclear weapons in the US and Russian arsenal. Forever. How's that for radical? His "Star Wars" program eventually became a sticking point that sunk the deal, but he still walked away from an agreement to get rid of half of the US nuclear arseanal. When the START I disarmament treaty was finally signed, the US scrapped 365 of its B-52s, keeping less than 100 bombers! Thousands of nuclear weapons were removed from service. Guess what? So were thousands of nuclear weapons abroad in Russia and former Soviet Republics.

You see folks, the sad fact of nuclear weapons is that they're probably more trouble than they're worth. Trying to solve foreign relations with nuclear weapons is like picking up a sledge hammer to crack a hard boiled egg. If you use them first, you inevitably kill millions of civilians without warning, looking a little bit like the Nazi's Blitzkrieg on steroids. If you use them to respond to an attack, you're really "defending" a smoking crater. Certain applications can cause nasty fallout over thousands of square kilometers.

Perhaps the biggest problem, from a real conservative's point of view, is that they almost force the US to intervene globally. Nuclear conflicts threaten to grow quickly. With ICBMS and other missile delivery vehicles, even small, weak countries can acquire these very powerful weapons and use them to blackmail or, God forbid, attack other nations around the globe. We can't have that, so we need to constantly intervene to stop this from happening. Now, I'm not saying that getting rid of nuclear weapons ourselves will mean that no one else ever develops them, but it gives other countries less of an incentive to do so.

Most previous nuclear proliferation has been driven by one country reacting to another's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Britain sought it because it felt marginalized by growing US power. The USSR sought it because our nuclear weapons threatened their agenda. China got nuclear weapons to counter US and Russian nuclear power. India sought them to counter China's arsenal. Pakistan sought them to neutralize India's arsenal. Iran arguably wants them to counter Israel's own not-so-secret nuclear arsenal. Getting rid of nuclear weapons, or at least cutting the arsenal down to a still potent ~1000 warheads, only improves our national security. Is being able to destroy Russia four times instead of only one or two times really that important to national security? I dearly hope that you'll agree it isn't. 

Reagan Realized this. He saw Nuclear Weapons as amoral, and wanted to get rid of them. In his quest for this, he came up with a great solution that we aught to pursue today: missile defense. If we disarm the biggest nuclear powers, but retain a missile shield, we can guard against rogue states while avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.

So before Palin and friends open their mouths to condemn Obama's move as unprecedented, they aught to crack open a book and see just how useful nuclear weapons actually are. I I'll even recommend a few of my own:

1. Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Paul Lettow
2. The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
3. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

They can argue that it's a bad idea, but to act as if its some great break from the foreign policy of liberal and conservative presidents is just… well… dumb. I'm not the kind of guy who demands that you're an expert on everything before you open your mouth, but if you're a nationally known and respected pundit, you damn well better know something about what you're talking about. 

 I expect the Democrats to disappoint. I look for no solace from leftists, but I hold those folks who claim to represent me and other conservatives to a high standard. They're not  making the grade, and I'm not going to let them off the hook.