I protest.

Evil and America's place in the world.

Jeanne D'arc at Body and Soul has posted an article containing the entirety of a speech at Rice University by former diplomat John Brady Kiesling entitled American Moral Capital and the Misprojection of U.S. Power. Go read it. Right now. I'll wait.

This is the kind of thing that I wish to hear from the Democrat Presidential candidates. Kiesling lays it all out and never flinches from describing what the United States leadership has done as "lies and hypocrisy." He goes so far as to term them "evil," in fact, and I have to say that despite my dislike of the good/evil dichotomy, I find myself wanting to accept that term.

Kiesling calls on all of us to "stand up to the schoolyard bullies in Washington, not on partisan political terms but to defend threatened national values and interests. We should demand from the American electorate, from the American business community, from the academic world, a foreign policy based on understanding that the world's interests and our interests are inseparable. America's security is enhanced by a clear, strong, and universal system of international law, policed by strong international institutions that we dominate through a generous allocation of our energy, skill, funding, intelligence-gathering capability, and military prowess."

It is up to us to fight the bastards in Washington. It will be easy to defeat them, truth and integrity will always defeat lies and hypocrisy. The only problem is that we need a leader, one who is not too timid to go toe-to-toe with those who would pervert our system of government to serve themselves.