I strongly suspect that other countries do a better job of managing their internal affairs than we could. Maybe we should consider just get on with their lives and stop trying to be the interfering old biddy.

I remember ranting about the government to an instructor who taught me C programming back in the early-mid 90s (I've been ranting about the government for even longer than that). Many of the topics of my rant(s) were similar to and/or the same as what you have been writing about (but not really about the MSM). At some point in our discussion I said something along the lines of "The American people need to get rid of this government and elect one that will do what they want them to do." (Even in my 40s I could be pretty naive) He looked at me with a little smile and said, "Oh, I don't know, Jeff, I think the American people have the government they want."

Well, that pretty much shut me up. After all, we had elected the bozos I was ranting about and we have continued to elect them. I could go on about the barriers to entry into the electoral process and the problems associated with the constitutional structure of our government (created in the late 18th century) vis-a-vis the activities and functions it currently fulfills (which were never envisioned by our founding fathers), but I won't. I will only say that every so often I have a Monty Python and the Holy Grail moment: "Having a scimitar chucked at you by some watery bint is not a basis for supreme executive authority."

The punch line to this article is this:

and begin working seriously to persuade Pakistan and other regional states that they can serve their interests best by working with us

This requires a couple of missing things. First and foremost, it requires that the US knows and understands what "their interests" actually are. And we don't. We only know what our imperialist interests are and what their interests have to be to support our interests. That is why "persuasion" is necessary.

The next missing bit is a lack of confluence between the interests of the nations in the region and American interests. Indeed, most of the unwashed masses in these countries have no desire to support American interests. This explains the folly of "democratization". If the governments of the region had to answer to an electorate, nothing the US wants would see the light of day. Fortunately, none of these countries are real democracies so we can "persuade" (read coerce, threaten, suborn) the leaders of these countries to do what we want them to do. This works in the short term but not in the long term.

The next missing bit is our behavior as an imperialist power as opposed to behaving like just another sovereign nation. We're good at coercion, not so good at persuasion. We will occasionally address some of the country's needs but (a) a need and a want are two different things, (b) there are generally odious strings attached, and (c) we usually think that they need military hardware when, in fact, only the dictator needs military hardware and then usually to repress the masses.

So while I agree that both the Democrats and the Shrubbites are clueless, the prescription offered isn't an improvement.

Where would we be without feminine oversight? Immature, selfish, and generally out of control.

If I were you, I'd pull out your predigested can of stereotypes and skip the slanted adjectives. Men do deal with our emotions differently than females do but that doesn't mean that we're "disconnected" from our emotions. It means we're male and we relate to many things, including emotions differently than females. And, in a newsflash, men doing things differently than women doesn't make us abnormal, it makes us male.

This sounds like a Foxtrot cartoon from the '96 campaign. The Foxtrot family is bemoaning the all consuming election coverage and somebody on the TV is saying "...and this is what Clinton economics means to your cat."

And I wish people would stop referring to these people as Evangelical Christians. Evangelical maybe, but not Christians. I have it on good authority (Mark, Luke, and John) that Jesus did say Clothe and feed the poor; comfort the sick and imprisoned. He didn't say take your parishioner's donations and build palatial estates, and drive fine and expensive cars, and go jetting off on expensive vacations, nor did he tell us to find new and inventive ways to put people in jail. He did tell us to turn the other cheek to our enemies. He didn't say unleash a military assault on thine enemies every time they piss you off.