I get all political on you

Last night I was at the library and saw a flyer about a talk on the U.S. and its role in international affairs with (former?) US Envoy to the UN Commission on Human Rights, Richard Williamson, and Doug Cassel, head of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University.  Since it was starting in fifteen minutes, I decided to attend and hopefully learn something, having finally concluded that perhaps I shouldn't get all my news from The Daily Show.

I wasn't very impressed.  It was all about how the U.S. should be more multilateral in its approach to international affairs.  Williamson and Cassel disagreed about the war, big surprise, and the future of the U.S.  Cassel said the U.S. will decline as a world power, sort of like how the British Empire declined.  Williamson said multilateralism is preferred, but isn't always possible, and told a story of how the Sudanese ambassador cut a deal with the Irish ambassador who was head of the commission and thus the UN adopted a watered-down version of a resolution that did not condemn the situation in Sudan strongly enough.  Should we have gone along with that, simply because it was multilateral?  he asked. 

Someone from the audience asked: what is the root cause of terrorism and how do we fight it?  Williamson said something about fighting a radical fundamentalist sect of Islam.  Someone else from the audience stood up and said his grandfather was in the IRA and no one thought they were fighting radical fundamentalist Catholicism, so it's more than just religious issues.  I don't remember Williamson's answer, since it was kind of hazy, and then I had to leave because my parking meter was about to expire. 

I didn't learn as much as I wanted, and I guess I'm still hazy myself on the question of why the world seems like it's going to hell in a handbasket, so if you want to offer up your (reasonable) geopolitical answers, feel free.  Unreasonable would be something like this (start reading at the paragraph Hey boys and girls)

I turned on the TV this morning and heard Alan Keyes saying that Jesus wouldn't vote for Barak Obama.  Good God, what an asinine statement.  Go back to Maryland.  Say, does each Person of the Trinity get their own vote, or just one vote for all three?*

*I think I've made that joke before, or at least read it somewhere else, but it still amuses me...