I'm afraid Prestowitz' ostensible volte-face doesn't look nearly as encouraging when you arrive at his closing lament:  "But what I really regret is the fact that the giants who built the EU are now gone, and the pygmies who have taken their places are all saying 'No' to Europe."

It's never that such grand schemes are fundamentally flawed , you see.  It's poor leadership, or poor messaging, or people who refuse to cooperate, or....

Such thinking is not exclusive to the left, of course.

We've got your plausible deniability right there.  The angels of heaven may not know the day and hour -- but surely they could make an educated guess as to the decade, eh?

Your WWI and Spanish flu, of course, predate the modern state of Israel too; so did WWII, for that matter.  It would now take a mere three days to replace everyone who has died in an earthquake since then; deaths from famine and plague are at historic lows in most of the world, and the global outlook is considerably rosier than it was before Stalin and Mao (60 million dead between them), among other slightly less efficient killers,  left the stage.   

Finding any point of agreement was considerably harder.

That sounds a lot like plausible deniability, when you're obviously giving it your best shot.

In any case, we'd have looked closer to the end, if you were reading signs in the 13th century:  

WWI claimed 15 million lives, in a world of 2 billion.  When Genghis Kahn parlayed his 13th century kingdom into an empire, he killed an estimated 44 million in a world of 400 million (besting even Mao Zedong).  

The bubonic plague killed more than 25 million in 13th century Europe alone (and as many as 200 million world wide, in its centuries' long run).

The single largest earthquake in recorded history occurred in 1201, (dwarfing everything but the Chinese earthquake of 1556). 

The number of peoples now living on the edge of starvation may be disheartening, but most of the world no longer faces the specter of death by famine at all -- unlike the 20,000 people in London, reduced to eating the bark off of trees, who died in 1235.  

I'd say count your blessings, not your days.

I laughed out loud when I first read that.  I actually thought about tweeting him the photo, but I figured there were probably a gazillion tweets ahead of me in his queue.  Wish I'd thought to quote him here myself!

Here's a blast from Obama's past that seems newly apropos, too (complete with his signature syntax):

Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they're not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That's not in my prepared remarks, but it's true.

Next thing you know, they'll be talking about him like Big Bird....

Thanks!  That was my contribution to National Empty Chair Day -- back when it was just wishful thinking.

Execution as a kindness?

Ferguson:

My sense is that there is some viable ground between isolation and nation building, but the abundance of proliferating variables makes constructing any coherent, practicable, interventionist policy a nightmarish proposition.  

Basil Fawlty:

No, I'm confidant that I could lock someone up and throw away the key. It's my impression that Prosecutors regularly, if not frequently, decline to bring a death penalty charge, because it can be much harder to get a guilty verdict than it would otherwise be, if the consequence were imprisonment.

I have always believed in the death penalty, in principle, but I can no longer support it.

I once reported for jury duty in a capital case, and during voir dire the Prosecutor put a hypothetical to me, which went something like this:  

You are the foreman of a jury which has just found this defendant guilty.  When you are presented with the verdict form, will you be able to write out the word "Death" and sign your name?

In a forum like this one, I'd have answered yes in a heartbeat, but it was a far more stunning question in reality.  I wanted to say yes, but I stumbled, because I honestly wasn't sure I could.

I still believe in the righteousness of capital punishment, but how can I possibly ask friends or neighbors or fellow citizens to impose the death penalty, when I am not willing to shoulder that burden myself? 

Fascinating stuff.

The Greek scenario is not going to convey much to "average" American voters.  I'd go with the folks who are suggesting that the specter of California is more likely to hit home.  Sarah Palin sums up nicely:

Obama’s America is today’s California – complete with $100 billion taxpayer funded bullet trains to nowhere; out of control environmental extremists who have destroyed family farms and left some of the most fertile farm land in America fallow in order to protect a three inch fish; permanent high unemployment; government policies hostile to small business job creators; crippling high taxes; an abysmal real estate market; bloated government that wastes taxpayer money; endless budget shortfalls due to massive unfunded liabilities; city after city declaring bankruptcy; and a state government run by, in the words of one Wall Street Journal writer, “a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums.

Where is it, exactly, that you think he should have gone  here?

Although I don't think ruthlessness would be a big seller on the campaign trail, that's what I'm hoping to see in a Romney White House.  His experience at Bain and the Olympics make it clear that he's got the necessary skilz to take a troubled organization in hand, cut out the deadwood, restructure and redirect it.  

We will never make lasting progress in reducing the size of government, without a President who can successfully dismantle huge swathes of the liberal bureaucratic architecture being incrementally cemented into place for decades.  Romney is actually more uniquely qualified to do that job than either Goldwater or Reagan ever were -- if he's got the kind of moxy and will make the kind of commitment which taking on such monumentally difficult, but sine qua non, work will require.

• A domestic GPS locator for all my household goods, including the contents of my so-called filing cabinets -- like a real world command/find function.
• A computer which could be collapsed to fit in my pocket, and then incrementally expanded up to full desktop size, as needed.  Or maybe a keyboard computer which could project a monitor screen onto any flat surface.  
• A rewind button for everything would be nice.

Actually, small congregations, in particular, fear being sued by gay activists for refusing to perform SSMs, if legalized, and being bankrupted in the process.   Given activists' political tactics, those fears were already well founded, even before the government itself proved willing to abrogate the freedom of conscience and religious practice, at the most fundamental levels, with the contraception mandate. 

Doubtlessly true, but it's also a cynically convenient way to justify labeling anyone who opposes gay marriage for any reason at all, a bigot -- which is almost always what's transpiring when that analogy is being made.  

If I, in the year 2012, opposed miscegenation and supported laws against it...

You would bear very little resemblance to the great majority of those who oppose SSM.  If you represented that past, you would never tolerate interracial cohabitation or sexual congress of any ilk.  The acceptance of  civil unions, either socially or legally, would still be inconceivable.

And that told me all I needed to know.

Which was precisely what?  You'd have to have been hiding under a rock to assume that opposition to gay marriage was all sweetness and light.  Such disclaimers seem decidedly disingenuous, especially in light of your subsequent posts.

It sounds to me  like you're just putting a polite gloss on the very charge of bigotry you purport to explain -- and I say that as someone who does, in fact, support same sex marriage.