You just know it's only a matter of time before we start seeing the horrible grimaces of Liz and Dick on every TV channel, in response to the nuke news. Right?
Or, hey, I could be wrong. I suppose it's conceivable that Liz and Dick will see this the way The Wall Street Journal does:
U.S. Keeps First-Strike Strategy
Obama Narrows the Range of Possible Targets in New National Nuclear-Weapons Policy
The Obama administration will release a new national nuclear-weapons strategy Tuesday that makes only modest changes to U.S. nuclear forces, leaving intact the longstanding U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons first, even against non-nuclear nations....
Or the way The Washington Post does:
Obama to take middle course in new nuclear policy
... President Obama on Tuesday will unveil a policy that constrains the weapons' role but appears more cautious than what many supporters had hoped, with the president opting for a middle course in many key areas.
Under the new policy, the administration will foreswear the use of the deadly weapons against nonnuclear countries, officials said, in contrast to previous administrations, which indicated they might use nuclear arms against nonnuclear states in retaliation for a biological or chemical attack.
But Obama included a major caveat: The countries must be in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations under international treaties. That loophole would mean Iran would remain on the potential target list....
Or, um, they could take the stance of Matt Drudge, whose headline yesterday was NO NUKES: EVEN IN SELF-DEFENSE!, and whose current headline is IS OBAMA DISARMING AMERICA? (a headline that's echoed in the right blogosphere with such heads as "President Weirdo Goes Anti-Nuke," "NObama's "Nuclear
Hmmm. Let me guess which stance the Cheneys will choose.
Liz may have to make her multiple TV appearances from New Orleans, where she'll be speaking at the annual convention of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, alongside Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Andrew Breitbart, Tony Perkins, and the rest of the usual gang.
Funny thing: I often see Palin's name associated with the tea party movement, and Hannity is a big tea cheerleader, but when something like this happens -- even though Obama's nuclear changes don't seem in any way radical, so I'm not sure what's actually happened that's so cataclysmic -- I notice that the big fans of the supposedly checkbook-issue-obsessed teabag movement revert to old-school Bush/Cheneyism. Palin, I'm sure, is hoping even now that one of Bill Kristol's interns is going to come through with a really pithy star-spangled denunciation of this decision that she can slap up on her Facebook page ASAP, to go along with her previous forays into foreign policy. And Hannity last night brought on Fox News Democrats Douglas Schoen and Pat Caddell to both defend the tea partiers and denounce the Obama nuclear policy as dangerous.
I think before too long the focus of the tea party movement is going to be on everything the GOP has always focused on -- tax cuts/gutting social programs/gutting regulation plus codpiece foreign posturing plus televangelist religiosity. The mainstream press can push as many semi-hipsterish teabaggers as it wants to the fore in feature stories, but this is an old-fashioned Republican movement, so I think the transition is inevitable. It's impossible to keep these issues in separate compartments because, for the right, it's all part of the same Eastern elitist America-hating rootless-cosmopolitan egghead wussiness. (So is everything Obama does, including ceremonial first-pitch throwing; contrast -- as one righty blogger said, in all seriousness, while posting the video of George W. Bush's ceremonial pitch at the 2001 World Series, "That is what I call leadership." No, really.)
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