Perverting democracy for politics

[Urbane Guerrilla]

HM, bleeding money from one set of totalitarians in order to overthrow another set of totalitarians hardly amounts to criminality. To call it so shows just what's wrong with your kind of thinking -- it's so morally confused it prefers to do favors for despots rather than work to their destruction and/or removal and their replacement by democracies, which are better behaved as history shows. Since when has "being nice to despots, that maybe they won't hurt us" ever brought success, peace, or indeed anything worth having? When you pay the Danegeld, do you get rid of the Dane? Republican Presidents, incidentally, are as far from despots as you're likely to get, at least in this day and age. Republican Presidents have this habit of crossing despots up, sometimes in the grand manner: Bush took down two despotisms in the same year, Reagan walked out of the Rejkjavik summit rather than accept Gorbachev's con-job, leaving Gorby to instead actually try and do something on his nation's own resources which were inadequate to keep the Soviet system and structure intact and effectual in foreign policy -- the Republican record in the past twenty-five years, if not the past fifty, is really rather reassuring. The Democrats -- well, they disappoint. They've not taken down a despotism since Truman. They've started wars, and haven't won a one of them, they prescribe socialist nostrums to fix things they say are broken, or they get kicked around by Soviets who assert themselves in foreign policy, leaving the likes of Jimmy Carter wondering what happened.

Some of this is no doubt due to this being the nuclear age: certain styles of warmaking have indeed fallen out of fashion. The Republican Presidents, however, seem better at succeeding at these constrained wars than the Democratic ones.