Review: A Time to Fight–Reclaiming a Fair and Just America

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Unusual, Thoughtful–Ideal as McCain's Vice President, June 17, 2008

Jim Webb

The next President is going to have to tear down the US military, resurrect the atrophied civilian instruments of national power, and recreate the U.S. government in a manner that allows us to eliminate the debt and the deficit while waging peace and successfully nailing isolated organized crime, corporate corruption, and individual terrorists.

This means that a Democrat need not apply (less Senator Sam Nunn as either Vice President or Secretary-General for National Security, overseeing Defense, State, and Justice). As I put this book down I was thinking to myself, estranged Republican that I am: “this guy is too good to be a Democrat (or a Republican!).” I stand with Senator Hagel who is calling for a new party and an end to the two-party spoils system How about Bloomberg-Webb? Or Bloomberg-Powell with Nunn at Defense, Hagel at State, and Webb as Chief of Staff?

I take away one star because despite the candor and the reflective tone, the surprising but welcome comments against both the military-industrial complex and the prison complex (most of which is based on marijuana and is used to create slaves for the corporations running the prisons), the author did not offer a strategic framework.

He mentions Tony Zinni with favor, and he does a good job of suggesting that many generals did in fact try to talk the civilian leadership out of the elective occupation on attack, but I for one do not buy the latter. What they should have done was had Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz arrested and turned over to Congress, and told Dick Cheney to go fly a kite.

It is my personal view that the Democratic and Republican parties are dead. A new political demographic is emerging in America, one that demands multiple parties, an end to winner take all control of either the Executive or any half of Congress, and an end to “party line” treason.

Jim Webb is not a Democrat. He is, as Ike so famously said in answer to Marshall's question, an American. It is just possible we may have found a leader for a new era, an era that demands the leader engage all of us in conversation, and not lead so much as facilitate and nurture. See the images I load above.

Right now, Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, and Jim Webb are people I respect, and I hope they, rather than the staff pukes that do not read and have never operated overseas, have the necessary influence to draw our new map of the world. Combine them with Joe Nye, Tony Zinni, and a handful of others who have not sold their soul to the beltway bandits, and we just might have what it takes to fight smart.

This is not a political book. This is more akin to public philosophy aloud.