250px-ADM_Fallon_Portrait.jpgIn case you missed it, there was a critical moment yesterday in our national debate about foreign policy. Sen. Obama exposed the empty rhetoric of the neocons, and simultaneously, caught St. McCain in a nice little trap:

"I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet.” He went on to argue that Iran spends “one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen.”

To a non-crazy person, all of this is objectively true, and St. McCain was forced to concede that in fact, Iran was no superpower (though he's still lying about Obama's position). Naturally, McCain's concession didn't stop the chicken littles from squawking "Chamberlain!" all day.

But it turns out that the dovish hippie communist jihad-lover Admiral William J. "Fox" Fallon, until recently Bush's Centom Chief, agrees with Obama on all counts.

"This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Munich! 1938! What course of action do you recommend, Admiral Chamberlain?


"Tehran's feeling pretty cocky right now because they've been able to inflict pain on us in Iraq and Afghanistan." So the trick, in Fallon's mind, is "to try to figure out what it is they really want and then, maybe -- not that we're going to play Santa Claus here or the Good Humor Man -- but the fact is that everyone needs something in this world, and so most countries that are functional and are contributing to the world have found a way to trade off their strengths for other strengths to help them out."

Try to figure out what they want?! Appeaser! How can you say that, Admiral, when Iran, is like, the USSR on Nazi steroids -- the biggest threat to us in the history of threats!?

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

Game. Set. Match.

Look, we have a real choice in this election. We can continue to be led a bunch of hysterical, fear-mongering drama queens who wet the bed every time someone screams "Allahu Akbar," or we can flush these neocons out of our political system, once and for all.