My daughter has the day off so I'm going to quit obsessing about politics and take her shopping.

We just took the dog for a walk and I mentioned to her (my daughter, not the dog) that I had posted a brief note yesterday about her having been gone the past few days, whereupon she asked if I had mentioned that she was in Washington D.C. Fifteen roundabout minutes later, after my pontificating about the sorrows of Washington's dynastic politics (Bush, Clinton, Bush, pause, another Clinton again), she meekly offered: "Gee, all I asked was if you mentioned that I was in Washington."

Hence the wisdom, I think, of knocking off for at least one, unobsessed half-day.

***

A parting word ...

I failed to flee prior to President Obama's address from Brussels, which was a brilliant and to me even captivating speech--perceptive in its broad historical view of progress advanced since the last century's slaughter, bracing in its subtle challenges to Russia's aggression, and intelligently responsive to bellicose neoconservatives.

If there is a new world order--a notion vigorously defended in the Brussels address--then the president sketched it forcefully: diplomacy, sanctions and "pressure" rather than counteraggression, backed by international law and world unity. We should take Russia's Crimean aggression as a grave miscalculation from the world's point of view, but we, which is to say the U.S., should also be measured in our reaction.

If there was a flaw in Obama's address--and there was: our unprovoked aggression in Iraq, worse than Russia's in Crimea--it wasn't of Obama's making. We can thank the lasting scourge of Bush-Cheney for having deeply stained our honor, global standing and "moral authority."

What the Bush administration "accomplished" will take us generations to overcome. President Obama's foreign-policy approach is a start.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

This president just may earn that unsolicited peace prize.