Reassessing

I don’t know if Cain is going to drop out of the race or not.  He now says he is “reassessing,” which sounds to my cynical ears a whole lot like “I’ll just let everybody speculate on whether I’m in or out rather than on whether I was giving Ginger White some of my special stuffing, and in a week

Foreign Policy for Dummies (no, really)

or two there will be some other major scandal because, between Perry, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann and Romney one of them is bound to do something unbelievably stupid and then I can announce that I’m staying in and my people  will spin it as perseverance and I’ll actually get a bounce in the polls.”

Personally,  I hope he stays in, just for the laughs.

One other indicator that  he’s in it for the long haul, though, is that he just came out with a major foreign policy  list.   It’s a list  of different countries,  which ones he  considers allies, which ones he considers  enemies, and which ones  are somewhere in between.  I’m not quite sure about the distinction between rival (Russia) and competitor (China), but there  weren’t too many surprises.  Israel, of course, is a strong ally.  I don’t get why right wingers  are so bent out of shape about Venezuela,  it’s not as if Hugo Chavez is planning to launch an invasion of Florida or anything, but I’m not surprised.  The funniest one on the list was “Libya: needs clarity”  Way to cover your ass, Hermie.

On the one hand, I give him credit.  It’s more than any of the other candidates have come up with.  On the other hand, it’s incredibly  shallow, sort of a foreign policy version of 999.   The basic information he gives about each country could have been lifted from Wikipedia and his policy positions are not new, or particularly intelligent.

Standard Republican stuff.  We need to mess with Iran and Venezuela  more.  Move some big ships in closer to North Korean waters.  Obama’s too nice to everybody.

This is the thing Republicans really, really hate about Obama.  He hasn’t started any wars.  How can American possibly be a strong and great nation if we aren’t busy bombing the hell out of somebody?