Congressmen Cabled

Interference in the other side's internal affairs? Within the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States? Imagine! With allies like America, who needs enemies? By no means only the British experience, although certainly that. More to the present point, Cable's targets' own party seems to agree with him, preparing to nominate Mitt Romney in order to plug the gap until 2016 and David Petraeus, a serving member of the Obama Administration. By, I say again, their own party, the right-wing nutters are just going to be told to like it or lump it.

Romney is probably not going to win, and he is not really supposed to in the Grand Old Party's Grand Plan. But a President who literally believed that America was the Promised Land would be both a poignant and an amusing last hurrah. Did those Tea Party banners and placards say "Made In China"? They should have done, and they might as well have done. Both this budget carry on and the fortieth anniversary of Nixon's War on Drugs call to mind that there was once a Republican Party of Nixon's suspension of the draft, his détente with China, and the ending of the Vietnam War by him and by Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee.

That was the Republican Party of Nixon's belief in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime, and who now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the Haredi Jews.

The Nixon and Ford Administrations still stand in stark and welcome contrast to the pioneering monetarism and the Cold War sabre-rattling of the Carter Administration.