Russia warns of response to US missile shield:

Russia says its response to the further development of a U.S. missile shield in Poland will go beyond diplomacy.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying the U.S. missile shield plans are clearly aimed at weakening Russia.

The U.S. says the missile defense system is aimed at protecting the U.S. and Europe from future attacks from states like Iran.

The United States and Poland signed a deal Wednesday to place a U.S. missile defense base just 115 miles from Russia’s westernmost fringe.

“Beyond diplomacy”? What do you think that means? An airstrike to take out the anti-missile installation? If that happened, what should we do then?

This would not be an attack on a little Eastern European country like Georgia; it would be an attack on us. Is this threat enough to make you want to withdraw our installation, even though we have just signed an agreement with Poland, in the hopes of avoiding war? And please, don’t accuse any one here of wanting war. No one here wants Russia to do this. Is it war-mongering to go to war if attacked?

We need to think through these things, since wars often come upon a nation by surprise.

A bunch of college presidents want to lower the drinking age. One can make that case, but why would college presidents make it? Drinking and underage drinking are huge problems on college campuses, part of the climate of debauchery that rules at most of our institutions of higher education. These presidents are saying that if the legal drinking age were lowed to 18, that would somehow help them deal with binge drinking. That is hugely naive. College students tend to drink, not so much to make the heart glad, but precisely in order to get drunk. Later, they might develop a more mature use of alcohol, but 18 year olds at fraternity parties will not.

The latest Reuters/Zogby poll now has McCain leading Obama by 5 percentage points, reversing Obama’s recent lead by more than that margin just a few days ago.

As I’ve said to Obama supporters and now say to McCain supporters, these polls mean little. Once the conventions are held, then they will mean more. But the only opinions that count are those that happen to be dominant on election day.

What strikes me, though, is the utter volatility of American opinion. It can careen wildly from week to week. A single faux pas or a clever zinger can seemingly sway an election. That’s a climate ripe for demagoguery and thus, potentially, tyranny.

Certainly the day to day persuasion of the electorate is what a campaign is all about. It looks like Obama is no longer inevitable and McCain has gained momentum. (By the way, note the bias in the linked article, which gives excuses for Obama and tries to refute McCain’s debating points.) I worry, though, on another level, that we have lost some of the old virtues of citizenship that took self-government more seriously.