The world is in trouble. Melting polar ice caps flooding down from the extremes while in the Middle East wild fires that threaten to spread ever outward. Whoever is the next President of the United States, more than any other man or woman on the planet, will have the power to stem the tides, to put out the fires.
Unless the Democrats manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory the next American President will be named either Barack, John or Hilary.
As exciting and as capable as I feel each of them is, none of them are addressing the single most important issue that would make us measurably safer from terrorism in the long term; the one issue with the power to start "draining the swamp" of radical Islamic terrorists.
As long as we do nothing to coax Israel and its neighbors into coming to some sort of accord our children and our children's children will live in an ever-more dangerous world.
In the short term law enforcement and intelligence seems to be doing a fantastic job aggressively going after terrorist cells. I thank them. However in the long run theirs are but fingers in a leaky dyke.
While most of us Americans think of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an intractable, ever-depressing feud that has little if anything to do with us, the Arab world sees it as their absolute number one injustice and the U.S. as even more culpable than Israel because of our vast resources.
So if a candidate claims to be serious about protecting my kids and me you would think that re-starting the Arab-Israeli peace process in a determined and dedicated way would be near the top of each of their lists.
Obama and Edwards do not mention it at all on their websites. Clinton is even worse, parroting this pablum, "Hillary has steadfastly fought for Israel's right to exist peacefully and to defend its people against terrorism. She has condemned Hamas's rise to power. She has spoken out against the problem of anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks and condemned Iran's conference on the Holocaust."
Are those platitudes what pass as policy these days?
Since Ms. Clinton mentions nothing about a two-state solution or even a hint at even a desire for one, one can only assume that she will just continue with the reckless policies of the Bush administration; those same non-policies that continue to endanger the lives of each and every one of us.
Look, I realize that all politicians are terrified of the NRA, the anti-Castro Cubans and AIPAC but we are talking about the fate of not just Israel and its neighbors but the planet here. Anyone who wants me to seriously consider voting for them needs to show me that they have the guts to fix the things that urgently need to be fixed.
We are a pro-Israel nation and proudly so. They are as much our cousin as Great Britain. Our fates are intertwined. That means that we are an active partner in the peace process, not an unwilling passenger in a rickety car barreling down a mine-strewn road.
If the Democrats don't get it it won't matter which of them wins the big desk.