Been there, done that (and a little bit about R2P) *UPDATED*

As I said yesterday, part of my blog silence has been that I was very actively engaged in wrapping up my book for e-publishing.  It’s been an amazing amount of work.  Starting last August, I went back and reviewed all 6,500+ of my old posts.  A lot of them are little nothings (“Hey, look at this cool post by someone else!”), but a fair number were substantive.  I copied all the substantive ones into the world’s biggest Word document, and then started reading them all to winnow out wheat from chaff.  After several months, I ended up with 100,000 words worth of posts, which makes for a long book.  I figured, though, that it would be nice to provide bang for the buck.

After the winnowing, came the editing.  As I repeatedly demonstrate here, I’m not the world’s best proofreader, something made worse by the fact that blog posts don’t tend to be carefully cultivated documents in the first place.  They’re responsive to the moment, so I slam them out.  I used Word’s spell and grammar checkers in the first pass (even though they’re deeply flawed), had Don Quixote read things, and then read everything myself five or six times.  Again, very, very time-consuming.

This past weekend I made the final push, which involved getting everything in e-publish ready format.  I’d done most of that already, since I’m a fairly meticulous word processor, but there was still a lot of coding (and un-coding) required to get the book up and out.  Now I wait, since Smashwords, which I chose as my outlet, is processing the material I uploaded.  When I have links, I’ll let you know.  To be honest, you all have been with me every step of the way for this book, as it consists of posts that you guys have read, commented upon, contributed to, etc.  If you buy the book, it will be an act of charity, since you won’t be getting anything you haven’t already gotten before.

It’s that “anything you haven’t already gotten before” factor that’s also slowed my blogging in the last few days.  Although there are new events unfolding (Libya, UN, economy, healthcare debate, etc.), I keep having a feeling of deja vu all over again.  I’ve written before about the Middle East’s theocratic tyrannies, about the UN’s anti-American and anti-Israeli animus, about Obama’s fecklessness and anti-Americanism, and about the disaster that is government spending.  I can write about the latest news, but my conclusions are unchanging:  Obama is a disaster, big government is dangerous, the Middle East is a cesspool of Islamic antisemitism, ObamaCare won’t work and will drive up costs, the UN is a fundamentally evil institution, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I’ll get my groove back and start blogging substantively, I promise, but for the next day or say, it may take me a little while to shake off the deja vu feeling that’s haunting everything I read.

Until then, I’d like to recommend very highly Trevor Loudon’s post about the insanity of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine that Obama used to justify sending American troops into war without even a nod to Congress.

The doctrine, by the way, isn’t a new one.  It’s been around several years.  It was originally framed as a response to such atrocities as Rwanda or the Balkans, where genocide occurred within a nation’s own borders.  The world watched these genocides and dithered.  The question, of course, was “shouldn’t we step in to save these poor people?”  The R2P doctrine says, “yes, we should.”  Except the UN is deciding who gets saved and who doesn’t.  This means two things:  The UN becomes a supranation, superseding all other nations; and the UN decides who is a victim and who isn’t.  You’ll notice that the UN didn’t bother with the R2P doctrine when the Sudanese government was systematically slaughtering first Christians and then black Muslims.  It didn’t step in when Iran was murdering its own citizens.  For reasons as yet unclear to me, the UN doesn’t like Qaddafi, so he suddenly gets bombed under R2P.  I’m not saying he’s not a foul little guy, but his depredations don’t affect most of the world.

What’s very clear is that R2P, with Obama’s guiding hand, will inevitably be used to justify a UN attack against Israel.  After all, 90% of the UN’s efforts are to protect the poor, simple, innocent, peaceful Palestinians from evil, aggressive, genocidal Israel murder.  It’s a situation ripe for the R2P doctrine.  Bush and Bolton would have stopped that.  Obama and Powers will say “bring it on.”

Also, it turns out that Tom, a Watcher’s Council member, is also a musician and musical parodist.  Check this one out.

UPDATE:  The inevitable — a call to wage war against Israel based upon R2P principles — has begun.