Michael Jackson TalkRadio Content

couple seated at the breakfast table with newspapers in hand. He says "Four score and seven..." She interrupts "Obama's speech?" "No". he responds "No, it's the number of presidential candidates". It's a full 20 months until the presidential elections. Ready or not, campaign '08 has arrived. Thank you Jeff Stahler of the Columbus Dispatch. That would still be ample time for an Al Gore or a Newt Gingrich to jump in.
Here's a troubling development which is likely to become more and more of an issue with future campaigns. The two eventual nominees may need to raise fully one billion dollars between them. After Watergate the option of public funding was established. This could end up being the first election since then without public funds. More and more wasted time is going to be spent raising the enormous donations necessary to successfully finance a campaign. Interesting thought expressed in The Christian Science Monitor; "Many Americans are probably not ready to think about a presidential election that is 20 months away. A person could graduate, start a job, or get married in that time. A country could end, or start, a war. Is there really much to say at this early stage?".
Over the past couple of months, as the condition in Iraq has worsened, the Bush administration has considerably altered, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, its Middle East strategy. Seymour Hersh, one of the best connected and most reliable of journalists in the country, poses a question in the current issue of The New Yorker; "Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" Horrible thought if accurate, and based on his research, it would appear to be so. As some inside the White House have let it be learned, their new strategy has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, as Hersh points out, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. The policy shift has brought the Israelis and the Saudis into a new strategic alliance; largely because both countries see the growing threat of Iran. The March 5th edition of the New Yorker goes into considerable informative detail about this and the Bush Administration's reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress.
Last week the nation's obituaries included the author/historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He was 89. When he was asked whether individuals or abstract forces played the larger role in shaping history, he would pose a speculative scenario (reported by Newsweek). In the early 1930s Winston Churchill and FDR both nearly died. Churchill was struck by a car on a New York street in December 1931 and FDR was almost shot to death in Miami in 1933. Schlesinger would say that had either or both men been killed, what would have happened had there been no Churchill to stand alone against Hitler and no Roosevelt to maneuver a largely isolationist America into the fight against Nazism?: Our world would be a vastly different one without those individuals.; More later..Much more.