Feel The American Pride

Yesterday 100 nations, including Afghanistan, signed a treaty banning the grisly practice of cluster bombs, which have the tendency to kill innocent civilians who step on the unexploded ordnance. The United States didn't join the other signatories. It would hurt security, you see, to not have the option of killing civilians by deploying thousands of bombs scattered over an area that mainly hit civilians. Or at least, that's the best answer anyone could get out of Dana Perino:

THOMAS: Is the President going to sign the anti-cluster bomb treaty? Apparently this is –

PERINO: Right, this is a treaty that was passed out of the U.N. Security Council several months ago. We said then that, no, we would not be signing on to it. And so I think that the signing is actually — we did not participate in the passage of it, and therefore we’re not going to sign it either.

THOMAS: Why not?

PERINO: What I have forgotten is all the reasons why, and so I’ll get it for you. (Laughter.)

We're the greatest country the Earth has ever known, of course, so we don't need to explain why we'll continue to cause humanitarian catastrophes.

Hey, President-elect Obama? Want to show the world that it's a new dawn for American foreign policy? Sign the ban on this barbaric weapon.