As far as the substance and value of today’s U.S. political network TV commentary shows go, Fareed Zakaria is the best at giving viewers actual information versus just opinion. Take a look at his biography and sample his show. You’ll learn something.
Listening this morning to one of the world’s renowned diplomats (his name is irrelevant to this rant) itemize what the U.S. and the E.U. need to do to reverse the course of global discourse during the past four years got my acerbic juices boiling
What we need, he explained, with a straight face, was “Truth, Trust, and Transparency”
I’m going to elaborate on each. It’s common to hear “I don’t want to belabor the point”. Well, I’m about to belabor all three.
This diplomat was an old guy (o.k., elderly gentleman) who should have known better than to even suggest that these 3T’s will ever come about.
Right now, just getting back to 2016’s level is a heavy lift.
Looking at each of the 3T’s separately, let’s start with
Truth:
Take facebook (doesn’t qualify for capitalization), please! And I’ll throw in twitter at no extra charge. I tried using both, briefly. I don’t get it —- Never will. Imagine how many photos of someone’s meal are floating around right now in cyberspace. Why do I want to look at somebody’s food? I don’t. Stop sending them! That’s the silly side of facebook. The sinister side is the constant avalanche of hateful, cruel lies —- the defamation of character which goes unchecked. twitter is the worst of the 2. The last thing civilization needed was a way for ignorance and cruelty to spread faster than a heartbeat.
“Trust”.
C;mon!!!. Trust the politicians??? Trust the diplomats?
Trust any one of these nations’ intelligence organizations? Reagan straightened out this issue for us long ago with his sarcasm;
“Trust but, verify” or, “I’m with the government. I’m here to help”. Check your history. Trust at the international level doesn’t exist.
Transparency???
Transparency is anathema to bureaucrats and politicians.
Digression alert: It is with great joy that I find a use for the word “anathema”. Is this not one of the most awkward sounding and difficult-to-spell words? Try using it in conversation just to see if the listener, who, you can bet, doesn’t know that it means, asks you “What the hell is anathema?”
All nations gather intelligence, attempt to keep secrets, kill other nations’ spies for a reason. Each of them is up to no good in many ways so they all want to know what the other is up to. Pretty simple, right? You can wind up on trial, fighting for your life, for being too transparent.
There! All done. Just wasted 2 hours trying to explain the obvious.
It is obvious, isn’t it?
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