Posts By Author » Rachel Marsden
The escalator of success (next time take the stairs)
18 Jul 2012 
12:01 am
When I was a little kid, there was a game I used to play while out and about with my family. Every time we came upon an escalator, I’d run ahead and charge up it as fast as I could, just so I could then stand at the top and “pull” everyone else up by the moving handrail. When they joined me at the top, I’d proudly claim full responsibility. No one could escape being pawns in my victory if they were on that escalator. It was their own fault …
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Could we have the wars without the manipulation?
11 Jul 2012 12:02 am
Testifying before a Senate committee a few months ago, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lamented that America was “in an information war, and we are losing that war.” This week, she blew a fuse at the “Friends of Syria” meeting in Paris, saying that Russia and China should “pay a price” for not supporting regime change in Syria.
Here’s a thought: How about using the power of truth to get things done rather than cover and manipulation?
Russia and China aren’t following America’s script for one reason: They have major economic …
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The world isn’t buying Europe’s nonsense
27 Jun 2012 12:02 am
As European leaders meet this week in an attempt to once again shoo reality away from the continent’s respirator, countries outside the European Union are making it increasingly clear that they’ll have no role in prolonging the charade.
Cyprus has just asked for a bailout from the EU’s ATM, joining Greece, Ireland, Portugal and, most recently, Spain. So what’s the excuse this time? Apparently Cyprus’ intimate exposure to the Greek economy was more than enough economic Ebola.
So another beggar’s cup starts rattling just in time for yet another summit of European …
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The have-littles and the have-nots
20 Jun 2012 12:01 am
Hey, did you hear the joke about the world leader who had the answer to the global economic crisis? Well, there you go — now you have.
Remember the old days when leaders of developed nations would hold summits to decide how to solve the plight of the world’s poor? Now they ARE the world’s poor. They don’t seem to know it, though. I mean, Greece is fielding a team at the Euro soccer tournament when it should probably be busy with other things — like panhandling.
How on earth did the …
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Tough-love commencement speech highlights deeper problems
13 Jun 2012 12:05 am
The English-teacher son of a Pulitzer Prize winner gave a much-ballyhooed commencement speech recently to students graduating from an American high school that one might categorize as privileged. David McCullough Jr., a teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts and the son of the Pulitzer-winning historian David McCullough, began by comparing the “great forward-looking ceremony” to another kind of ceremony, weddings, before promptly dismissing both as overhyped. It was the first sign that the speech would turn out to be one big reality check.
While to some, McCullough might have come …
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We’re already at war in Syria
6 Jun 2012 12:01 am
What happens when a brutal regime gets replaced by an alternative and largely unknown entity? Exhibit A: Libya.
Shortly after Muammar Gaddafi bumped his head on a bullet, the “rebels” took over and promptly declared Sharia law. It’s a start — I guess. Though a start of what, no one’s really quite sure. This week, a new set of Libyan “rebels” has emerged to replace the old ones, seizing control of Tripoli airport and diverting flights. It’s just like the game Whack-a-Mole: Knock one down, and five more pop up.
They may …
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Romney must find tactical advantage
30 May 2012 12:01 am
Now that it’s a virtual certainty Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee, and all the other candidates have likely dozed off with the rest of us during this preliminary series of political skirmishes, it’s time to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get ready for presidential playoffs. What should be included in Romney’s tactical playbook? Here are a few suggestions:
– The world isn’t the same as it was when President Obama was elected at the outset of the economic crisis. The whiny protesters spilling into the streets …
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Are government’s ‘strategic communications’ coming to American airwaves?
23 May 2012 12:01 am
Did you hear about the new bill that would allow the U.S. government’s official overseas information agency to rebroadcast its content onto American TV and radio? The bipartisan Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 was introduced in Congress last week by Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.), both of whom are presumably dissatisfied with their satellite TV package and think more government-produced content would go down better with an after-work beer.
Not really. As Thornberry explains on his website: “While the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was developed to counter communism …
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Waiting for a European Santa Claus
16 May 2012 12:03 am
While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer Lopez gyrating around in a bodysuit on “American Idol” long enough to bother caring?
Now replace “Greece” with “your bank.” It suddenly matters a little more, doesn’t it? What if your bank couldn’t loan you money, give you a mortgage or allow …
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Why France elected a Socialist president
9 May 2012 12:01 am
France has elected only the second Socialist president in its history — the first being Francois Mitterrand, who spent 14 years in the driver’s seat back when French presidential terms lasted seven years rather than five, and who made a hard-right turn away from economic socialism and toward spending cuts after his first two years in office. The best France can hope for now is that the newly elected Francois Hollande takes a similar plunge into a pothole of pragmatism and douses any budding socialist ideas.
France is deeply in debt, …
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Lame attempts to shut off Afghan heroin spigot have been futile
2 May 2012 12:02 am
A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, “Active Endeavour And Drug Trafficking,” proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour, a maritime operation launched a month after the September 11th attacks with the mission of “monitoring shipping to help detect, deter and protect against terrorist activity.”
My first thought was that perhaps this information was being …
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The truth about France’s ‘far-right’ electoral surge
25 Apr 2012 12:02 am
Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That’s what an outsider looking at the country’s first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée.
The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn’t the story, though. The most striking news is the 17.9 percent score by Marine Le Pen’s National Front party. …
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The ‘Pretty Woman’ strategy for political victory
19 Apr 2012 12:02 am
There’s a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where the kindhearted hooker played by Julia Roberts asks her client, portrayed by Richard Gere: “Who do you want me to be?” Regardless of who she might really be, she realizes that it’s far less attractive than a tabula rasa onto which her client can project his own desires, and around which she can then build a tailor-made palatable persona. It’s essentially the same principle that dating-and-mating books recommend adopting when suggesting that women retain an air of mystery at the outset …
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The GSA scandal and throwback civil service culture
11 Apr 2012 12:01 am
By now you’ve likely heard about the infamous Las Vegas convention bash during which federal civil servants at the General Services Administration indulged in various frivolities to the tune of $823,000 of your money. That conference featured, among other things, a hired professional clown — which is like Picasso hiring some guy from out of the Yellow Pages to paint a mural.
As with political sex scandals, nothing vaults a fiscal scandal into the headlines faster than photographic or video evidence. The GSA spendthrifts didn’t even have the good sense to …
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Romney’s Russia remarks and the dangers of dumbed down
4 Apr 2012 12:01 am
Last week, Mitt Romney described Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” prompting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to respond: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards instead of being realistic about where we agree, where we don’t agree.”
While Romney’s basic sentiment is correct, Clinton is also right in suggesting that Romney’s characterization of Russia is both dated and diplomatically unproductive. Not to mention that it makes for awkward dealings later when you inevitably have to sit down across the table from someone like Vladimir Putin and ask …
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Terrorist hijacks French elections
28 Mar 2012 12:02 am
In France, an Islamic terrorist has likely hijacked the agenda for the remainder of the French presidential race. That terrorist is 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a Franco-Algerian from Toulouse who was fatally riddled with bullets by French forces last week after a 30-hour standoff and took the television remotes of an entire nation with him.
Because of Merah, an election fought on economic grounds has become dominated almost exclusively by national security. The extreme nationalist National Front party has used the incident to leverage its support of stricter immigration policy. Center-right French …
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First World problems
21 Mar 2012 12:01 am
After being bombarded with news of Third World problems for so long, I figured it was time to give a bit of equal time to First World suffering. Every so often I reach a boiling point with modern Western culture and feel the need to rant — so I’m going to bleed it out through my fingertips, as Ernest Hemingway used to say of writing, before my brain explodes from the pressure.
– After years of not owning a television, I finally broke down and bought one in November, thinking that …
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Sarkozy’s cry for help
14 Mar 2012 12:02 am
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected five years ago by promising to modernize France’s societal infrastructure and bring it more into line with America’s: less government reliance, more freedom in life and work. It was a tall order, but his mandate was overwhelming, with a six-percentage-point win over Socialist rival Segolene Royal. Sarkozy was full of vigor and free-market, limited-government ideas imported directly from across the Atlantic.
But then something got in the way: France. It’s a case of ambition being unable to surmount the overwhelming power of entrenched history.
The battle …
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Russia re-Putined
7 Mar 2012 12:02 am
So Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just been re-presidented for at least another six years, during which we can all watch his newly tucked eyes migrate back to where they used to be. And as surely as a pound dog comes with fleas, this election came with “irregularities” — cloaked in “democracy,” as Russian powers like to do it.
For instance, there were 200,000 webcams to monitor the polling stations, but all fed directly into the Kremlin. There were also candidates other than Putin. See if you can name one. …
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New WikiLeaks stash: a frightening view of government intelligence
29 Feb 2012 12:01 am
As promised in December, WikiLeaks has begun to release a stash of documents related to the modus operandi of the “private intelligence” sector, using Texas-based Stratfor as a case study. Claiming to have hacked Stratfor’s system to obtain millions of private emails, WikiLeaks has just released the first batch — and what it suggests about the American intelligence community makes me feel as secure as day-old pizza in a frat house.
The CIA has long used private intelligence firms for “black ops,” allowing for plausible deniability in the event that an …
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McCain: ‘I Would Call it a Cover Up’
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