The Top 40

I like Fred Reed a lot, and he certainly has, from what I can learn, a solid basis of experience upon which to draw when he writes about matters military or strategic. Two quibbles:

1) The first paragraph of the column you linked ends thusly--"One does not let children play with chain saws. (From all of this I exempt Ron Paul, who appears to be sane.)" Hmm. Ron Paul could be sane.

2) Fred cautions, properly, not to glibly jump into war with the Iranians. That's fine, but we're already at war with the Iranians, we've been at war with the Iranians for three decades if one pays attention to Iranian statements and actions, so perhaps what's left at this point is to determine how hard we're going to fight back. Maybe I'm wrong, and if I'm wrong, that's a good thing. I don't believe I'm wrong.

Anyway, good for you for not merely providing tons of enjoyable original content, but linking to Fred Reed. I need to go catch up with his columns, so I appreciate the link.

Well, I think Fred is interesting but at the same time I know he is not utterly sane. Posting here does not, necessarily, mean complete agreement.... or even, at times, partial agreement.

It only means that I find it "interesting."

It’s called the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they’re the experts a president goes to regarding making an informed decision on all things military.

Using Fred’s logic there is nor has there ever been, anyone ever qualified to be president. He’d have to be an expert on…everything.

Hence the Secretary of Labor, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Transportation, State…Attorney General

Pure nonsense.

@Mike James: Pet peeve: the word "thusly". "Thus" is already an adverb and as such does not require the "-ly" suffix.

Sure, "thusly" sounds all intellectual and stuff, but grammatically it makes about as much sense as "thereforely".

NOTE: I sometimes fail to identify irony. If you were using "thusly" ironically, please ignore this message.

I don't think Abraham Lincoln was especially familiar with his era's technological and doctrinal equivalents, but he had a lot of basic strategic sense, which would be the one thing I would hope for from a modern candidate. On the other hand, Lincoln found himself shackled to "experts" the likes of McClellan, and thousands died until he found Grant.

Obviously a President can't be expected to be a substantive expert on every field he presides over. They do, unfortunately, tend to be very knowledgeable about campaigning and pandering.

I'd be glad to have a President who understood basic truths like "if you subsidize something, you drive up its overall cost, and disincentivize improvement of it." That's the basic appeal of Ron Paul to me.

While Paul may not be the steely-eyed foreign policy hawk I'd prefer, I'm afraid that we've become so hobbled and handicapped by our commitments and constraints and "allies" in that arena that I see real value in the idea of taking a "superpower sabbatical" for a few years to remind the rest of the world what we have to offer in that regard. A lot of things would deteriorate globally. I don't believe that our situation would be irredeemably compromised, or that what we lost would ultimately been savable anyway -- under any of the prospective Commanders in Chief.