The Kicker
About Being Distracted…
By Liz Cox Barrett Wed 7 May 2008 12:05 PMLuckily, my quest for ever more juicy campaign minutiae brought me to Time’s Swampland blog just now where I found — yes, minutiae (Last night? On Clinton’s campaign plane? Before anyone knew for sure the outcome in Indiana? Clinton’s campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe “came back to talk to the press with a glass of red wine in his hand” and declared victory!) but I also found a post from Jay Carney linking to this sobering op-ed from yesterday’s Washington Post (I’ll let Carney give you the nutshell below, but you should read the op-ed as well).
Blogs Carney:
I managed to wean my focus away from the presidential campaign just long enough yesterday to read an outstanding op-ed by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post about how the next great international crisis and war could well ignite over…..Abkhazia.
“Ab-wha’?” you ask.
And that’s Applebaum’s point exactly. We’re so consumed with our domestic election — and, to the extent we’re focusing overseas at all, with Iraq — that we’re paying scant attention to important, and potentially dangerous, developments around the world.…Let’s hope we all get away with it.
Watching The Place for Politics — or any of the cable channels, really — it is all too easy to forget there is anything else going on at all. (Myanmar? Lemme see…I can tell you that Laura Bush held a press conference the other day on Myanmar. Yup, the First Lady! She took questions from White House reporters and everything!)
CJR
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