COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

America’s neocons, masters of chaos, instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East, protected by the usual crowd of “Israel uber alles” chatterers and the Aipac paid flack in the US Conga Line

Springtime for Neocons

Perhaps no one has inadvertently done more to revive the fortunes of the neocons and liberal hawks than President Obama.

IN MAY 1968, Richard Hofstadter published an essay about the Vietnam War in the New York Times Magazine. It was called “Uncle Sam Has Cried ‘Uncle!’ Before.” Hofstadter had earned fame for works such as The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life that upended traditional interpretations of American history. The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian was also a colleague and close friend of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Daniel Bell at Columbia University. It was a moment when the voice of the New York intellectuals carried, even as the paladins of the New Left assaulted everything that they cherished.

In the Times, Hofstadter now offered a characteristically revisionist (and insightful) reflection about American foreign policy:
The American people, like their leaders, have very little familiarity with losing national enterprises. Although they have been uncommonly uneasy about the war in Vietnam almost from the beginning, they are equally uneasy with the idea of national failure, and an American “defeat” seems to many of them unthinkable and absurd.

But it wasn’t. Contrary to popular mythology, Hofstadter argued, the United States had never enjoyed a smooth rise to global dominance. Instead, pretty much like any other nation, it had experienced periodic setbacks and defeats.
Hofstadter thus pointed out that in 1794 George Washington had signed the deeply unpopular Jay’s Treaty, which preserved the peace between Great Britain and the United States at the cost of numerous concessions. The United States also paid ransom to the Barbary states (in 1795 alone it handed over almost one million dollars to the dey of Algiers to rescue 115 sailors). Then there was the War of 1812. American bungling throughout the conflict was overshadowed by Andrew Jackson’s spectacular victory at New Orleans, which created the impression of overwhelming U.S. military power even though it wasn’t even necessary to fight (slow communications meant that neither the British nor Americans knew that a peace deal had already been reached). Battling Mexico and Native Americans, Hofstadter wrote, further fostered a complacent belief in American invincibility. So did World War I, which the United States entered late in the day. World War II propelled the United States to global power, but the Korean War proved an unpopular and intractable conflict that Dwight Eisenhower pledged to end upon entering the Oval Office. Now Hofstadter said that prolonging the Vietnam War would, in the words of his biographer David S. Brown, “almost certainly bring about a reaction from the Right” to avenge the failure of liberal elites in Southeast Asia.

What Hofstadter did not anticipate, however, is that perhaps the most fervent response to defeat in Vietnam would come from a militant faction within the liberal movement, the one that came to be known as neoconservatism. It was a neologism coined as a term of derision by Michael Harrington, but it would ultimately be embraced by its adherents. The desire to restore a perceived American dominance—to repudiate the “Vietnam syndrome”—helped lead to the birth of the neocons. Former critics of the war, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, came to champion it retrospectively as an essential crusade against Soviet aggression. This remarkable turnabout prompted Theodore Draper to warn presciently in the New Republic in March 1982 that Podhoretz’s self-serving tract Why We Were In Vietnam “represents a trend of selective moralistic zealotry which, if permitted to spread, will give both anti-Communism and neoconservatism a bad name.” But spread it did—so virulently that many neocons, including Podhoretz, assailed a succession of presidents ranging from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter to even Ronald Reagan for failing to take a harder line against the Kremlin. With blind bellicosity serving as their personal index of patriotism, no president could live up to the standards that the neocons wished to impose.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, came a course reversal, at least when it came to Reagan. Now the once-saturnine neocons were jubilant, and claimed all the credit for the demise of the Warsaw Pact. But triumphalism required more triumphs, and by 2003, when the neocons and liberal hawks championed the Iraq War as the final blow to the Vietnam syndrome, they were unable to produce them. Instead, it was back to the future: Iraq, like Vietnam, turned into a debacle for the euphoric promoters of democracy and liberty in a distant land.

OR SO it seemed. Today, the neocons and liberal hawks are once more on the march. Writing in Politico, for example, Michael Hirsh observed that former vice president Dick Cheney’s “advice is actively solicited by many Republicans in Congress, perhaps more than it has been in years.” Perhaps no one has inadvertently done more to revive the fortunes of the neocons and liberal hawks than President Obama.

To listen to Obama’s critics—and with his poll numbers reaching subterranean lows, who isn’t one?—the trouble with his foreign policy is that it has represented an inexorable process of retrenchment. Smitten by his own lofty rhetoric about the end of great-power conflict and a new era of peace, Obama has steadily pulled back from the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at once alienating our allies and emboldening our foes. It began with his maladroit attempts to foist a peace process upon Israel that quickly descended into open warfare between him and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then came his tour of the Middle East, where he delivered a major speech in Cairo in June 2009 called “A New Beginning,” which proved to be none at all. In Iraq and Afghanistan, he accepted arbitrary timelines for withdrawal rather than seeing both missions through to completion. And in Ukraine, his negligent approach prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to embark upon revanchism.

So, at any rate, goes the indictment from neoconservatives and liberal hawks. They’re certainly right to complain about his overall performance, but their specific allegations miss the mark. The real problem with Obama’s foreign policy is not that he has been intervening abroad too little. It is that he has too often intervened in an inconsistent and ineffective manner.

The belief that Obama has presided over an era of retrenchment presumes that he has had a coherent foreign policy. But in Syria as well as Asia, he engaged in empty talk about U.S. red lines. Asked about America’s commitment to defend the Senkaku Islands, for example, he gave what New York Times columnist Roger Cohen generously called an “evasive” response: “The implication of the question, I think, . . . is that each and every time a country violates one of these norms, the United States should go to war or stand prepared to engage militarily, and if it doesn’t, then somehow we’re not serious about these norms. Well, that’s not the case.” Actually, it is. U.S. policy in Asia and elsewhere is supposed to be based on a credible deterrent, not on the whims of a president who airily decides when he does, and does not, choose to back up solemn commitments.

Nor is this all. For all the complaints about Obama retreating from the world stage, the truth is that he has in fact been quite ready to employ military force abroad. In 2009, Obama backed a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan that merely postponed the inevitable. In 2011, Obama, together with European allies, attacked Libya to avert a slaughter in Benghazi and ended up driving Muammar el-Qaddafi from power, thereby exceeding the UN mandate and convincing Russia that Washington had used the pretext of humanitarian intervention as a convenient smokescreen to install a regime more to its liking. In reality, Obama quickly washed his hands of Tripoli.

What’s more, his original intervention merely helped set the stage for a conflict in Mali and an even bigger civil war in Syria, as Libyan militants and weapons poured out into the neighborhood. Unlike in Libya, however, Obama threatened to intervene but then retreated as Congress rebelled against the prospect of a new Middle East war. But with the collapse of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State, the mood has palpably begun to change. Obama, in his recent national address on the Islamic State, adopted a more crusading credo in Iraq and Syria: “Our own safety, our own security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for—timeless ideals that will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the Earth.”

IF THIS sounds redolent of David Frum and Richard Perle’s neocon manifestoAn End to Evil, that’s because it is. Over a decade ago, Illinois state senator Obama denounced the impending Iraq War as a “cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Now, under President Obama, it’s suddenly springtime for neocons.

No sooner did Obama sound the tocsin on Iraq than the neocons declared that they had it right from the beginning (one of the honorable exceptions is none other than Frum, who recently acknowledged, “The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003. Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost this country dearly”). “Dick Cheney Is Still Right,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page announced. “Say what you will about George W. Bush: He got every one of these questions right while Mr. Obama got every one of them wrong,” wrote the paper’s columnist Bret Stephens.

The real dream of the neocons is not simply to defeat the Islamic State but also to engage in a renewed bout of regime change around the globe. Toppling the Syrian regime has been a long-standing goal of the neocons. In August 2013, the Foreign Policy Initiative—the successor to the Project for a New American Century (headed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan), which was itself the successor to the Committee for the Free World, which was the successor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom—issued a letter to Obama imploring him to take out Bashar al-Assad. At the time, Fouad Ajami wrote, “The regime itself—its barons, its secret police, its elite military units and its air bases—ought to be legitimate targets, and the same is true of Assad’s presidential palace.” That mantra is now being revived. In a New York Times op-ed, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham wrote that to stop the Islamic State, it would be necessary to end the civil war in Syria and to create a political transition “because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS [an alternate name for the Islamic State]; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

But in asserting that Assad and Al Qaeda are united, McCain and Graham are engaging in semantic jiggerypook that is reminiscent of older claims that Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Laden. What’s more, had Obama ousted Assad a year ago, it might well have expedited rather than retarded the rise of the Islamic State. McCain and the Foreign Policy Initiative, among others, have consistently declared that a moderate opposition could take power in Syria, but whether moderation backed by U.S. arms, which seem to have a penchant for ending up in the hands of militant Islamic rebel groupings, would really carry the day is a rather iffy proposition.

It’s also the case that the neocon program for combating the Islamic State is considerably more expansive than anything Obama should contemplate. According to Max Boot:
We need to send many more advisers and Special Operations Forces to Iraq, backed up by airpower, to aid not only the Iraqi security forces but also the Kurdish peshmerga and the Sunni tribes to fight back against ISIS—and . . . we should also step up our aid to the Free Syrian Army to put pressure on ISIS on the other side of the border.

Then there is the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. In the Weekly Standard, she invokes Burke’s sulfurous “Letters on a Regicide Peace” to issue a demand for an apocalyptic struggle against the Islamic State:
With such an enemy, there cannot be a “red line” defining how far, and no further, we may go; a “no troops on the ground” policy, limiting our involvement in the war; an “end-of-war” strategy that prescribes at the outset when and how the war will be terminated. On the contrary, a war with such an enemy is a total war.

But America has already witnessed the depredations that the penchant for war without limits, domestic or foreign, has inflicted upon its reputation and democracy. It was Burke, after all, who warned about imperial hubris: “I must fairly say, I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men; and that as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves in some way or other.”

THE UNITED States lacks the ability to suture the suppurating wounds of the Middle East. At most it can attempt to cauterize them. What the neocons are offering, though, is a message of power worship, one that is a recipe for a permanent revolution abroad that will further ensnare the United States in foreign predicaments that it cannot reasonably hope to resolve. In this regard, the neocons themselves appear to have lost their confidence and are eager to blame America first for its foreign woes. In 2004, Joshua Micah Marshall perceptively observed in the New Yorker that the neocons, buffeted by the descent of Iraq into civil strife, were starting to exchange an imperial “tone of mastery” for “fire and foreboding.” Gone was the “hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect.” “As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s,” wrote Robert Kagan recently in the Wall Street Journal, “we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.” And so the counsel of these warrior intellectuals is a curious mixture of defeatism and false bravado. All that the United States has to offer the rest of the globe, it seems, is unremitting combat.

“There can be no such thing as a little war,” the Duke of Wellington said, “for a great nation.” That is why warfare should never be a matter of convenience, guided by the triumph of hope over experience. Uncle Sam shouldn’t have to cry uncle. But the very measures that the neocons advocate to reestablish American power would erode it. As Obama grapples with the rise of the Islamic State, however, it’s also becoming increasingly clear that he saw what he wanted to see in Iraq and Syria. His missteps have given a new lease on life to the crew that is responsible for much of the mess in the first place. Now that the region has become more inflamed than ever, Obama’s dream of extricating the United States from foreign entanglements has turned out to be a mirage that the neocons are deftly exploiting.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest.

A METAPHOR FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION:



An unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after lift off from a commercial launch pad in Virginia on Tuesday, a NASA TV broadcast showed

59 comments:

  1. All smiles in the Kremlin tonight as NASA returns to the old Vanguard Missile Days

    (Reuters) - An unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from a commercial launch pad in Virginia on Tuesday, marking the first accident since NASA turned to private operators to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, but officials said no one was hurt.

    The 14-story rocket, built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp, blasted off its seaside launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility at 6:22 p.m. EDT carrying a Cygnus cargo ship for the space station. It exploded in a huge fireball moments later.

    Orbital Sciences stock was down 12.74 percent after hours, or down $3.87 at $26.50.

    The cause of the accident was not immediately known, said NASA mission commentator Dan Huot.

    Huot said there were no reports of any personnel in the vicinity of the explosion. An Accomack County Sheriff's spokeswoman added, "As far as we know, all personnel are accounted for and everyone's OK."

    Orbital Sciences said in a statement: "We've confirmed that all personnel have been accounted for. We have no injuries in the operation today."

    NASA launch control said damage appeared to be limited to the launch facility and rocket. The Antares rocket has been launched successfully on four previous missions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Had you not noticed, I posted the video of the Antares rocket disaster at the bottom of the post

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  3. O God.

    The old Neo-Con Line again.

    It gets old, Deuce.

    You and Rufus and Obama are in charge now, and have been for the last six years.

    I suggest supporting Israel, the Kurds, and the Egyptian military.

    The Conga LIne?

    Deuce: hint hint hint

    Who has been Commander in Chief the last SIX YEARS?

    Any clue?

    It gets stinky as croc shit.



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  4. The Conga Line

    What a bunch of horse shit.

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  5. Why are you still blabbing about Bush when he has been goodbye baby for SIX YEARS???????

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  6. hmmm...?

    Information flow roundabout?

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  7. The Neocons are hardly about yesterday. They are still at it, determine to drag the US into another destabalizing decade of wars in the Middle East. This is only the latest attempt:

    Neocon Sabotage of Iran-Nuke Deal
    October 22, 2014

    Congressional neocons are determined to sink negotiations to constrain but not end Iran’s nuclear program – all the better to get on with bombing Iran at the heart of their agenda. They are now disguising their sabotage as a constitutional argument, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.


    By Paul R. Pillar

    David Sanger’s article in the New York Times about how the Obama administration is seeking a nuclear accord with Iran that would not require any early votes in Congress has garnered a lot of attention. Naturally, the administration in response has offered assurances that Congress has a role to play and no one is trying to shove it out of the picture. Just as naturally, opponents of the administration accuse it of such shoving.

    We all know what’s going on and what’s at stake here. The more of a role Congress does play in the immediate aftermath of signing a deal, the greater the chance that elements opposed to anyone reaching any agreement with Iran on anything will be able to torpedo the deal.

    This is reflected in the substantial record Congress has already compiled, as cataloged by Navid Hassibi’s review of that record, of past attempts that would impede the negotiations. It also is reflected in the fact that some of those quickest to complain about a supposed offense to Congressional prerogatives on this matter are those who have been most determined all along to sabotage any agreement with Iran.

    So for anyone who realizes the advantages of having a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program versus not having a deal, the less Congressional involvement right now the better.

    {...}

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    1. {...}

      A major caveat to this conclusion is that any lack of confidence on the part of the Iranians in the staying power of a deal in which the United States fulfills its part of the bargain only through executive action may also make it harder to complete the negotiations. If the Iranians believe all they are getting in the way of sanctions relief is tentative and reversible, in an accord that can be undone by Congress or a later president, they understandably will be reluctant to offer anything other than tentative and reversible things in return.

      This is why the assertion that has routinely accompanied past efforts to slap more sanctions on Iran during negotiations — that this supposedly would increase U.S. bargaining power — is fallacious (and if it really did increase, why wouldn’t any president want to have the added power?) Instead, the effect would be to make negotiations more difficult by increasing Iranian doubts about the administration’s ability to fulfill U.S. commitments.

      Probably the best way to deal with all this is to rely, as Hassibi suggests, on the combination of a couple of years of compliance with an agreement and confirmation of its terms in a United Nations Security Council resolution to make the saboteurs’ task harder.

      None of this appears to be really about high constitutional principles concerning the relative powers of branches of the U.S. government. It is about whether the United States is going to seize or to blow the best opportunity to preclude an Iranian nuclear weapon and to do it in a way that will have other benefits for U.S. interests in the Middle East. There are, nonetheless, some more principled things to say about the role of Congress on different types of national security matters.

      Consider the issue of the Iranian negotiations alongside another subject on which relative powers of the legislative and executive branches have received considerable attention: the use of military force. One legislator whose stance is worth looking at is Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia. Kaine has taken a responsible position regarding the Iran negotiations, opposing any Congressional interference with them in the form of new sanctions. He also has become quite an activist in asserting a Congressional prerogative to approve or disapprove the use of military force.

      In fact, he has broken openly with the president of his own party by arguing that the current use of force in Syria and Iraq should have first obtained Congressional authorization. Kaine’s positions should be emulated, and here’s why.

      There is good reason that the Constitution placed the power to declare war with the people’s representatives in Congress. It is a major and potentially highly costly departure. Expending blood and treasure in warfare is one of the riskiest and most consequential things the nation can do. As has been demonstrated painfully and recently, going to war has a way of dragging the nation into even costlier and longer-lasting commitments.


      {...}

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    2. {...}
      An agreement of the sort being negotiated with Iran is none of those things. The agreement would impose no new costs on the nation; in fact, it would involve reducing the cost that sanctions inflict on the United States. It does not create, as warfare does, any new exceptions to normal peacetime relations with other states; instead, it would be a move toward restoring normality. It does not, as do some other matters that are appropriately codified in treaties subject to Senate confirmation, impose any new legal obligations on U.S. persons; instead it is a step toward reducing the costly and cumbersome restrictions on U.S. business that the sanctions involve.

      It does not mark a departure in national goals and objectives, because it is an almost unanimously shared objective that Iran not acquire a nuclear weapon. The issue instead is what is the best way of executing policy to achieve that objective; that is part of what the Executive Branch is supposed to do.

      Recognition of that last point is reflected in the laws about sanctions that give the president waiver authority and thus the flexibility needed to achieve the objectives that the sanctions were supposed to be all about. Those were laws that the U.S. Congress enacted. That is why it is ridiculous for Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida — one of the most consistently Iranophobic hardliners in Congress — to say, as she does in a “dear colleague” letter she is circulating, that the President is “circumventing” Congress by making use of waiver authority that is written into sanctions legislation that she sponsored.

      There is a time and place for Congress to assert itself, and different times and places for it to defer to the Executive Branch in execution of its proper functions.

      Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

      Delete
  8. The Neocon push is relentless. Their agenda is not what is best for the US interest. Their agenda is that of what they believe is in the best interest of Israel.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Let's make this really clear -

    If there is any Conga Line today the head of it is Commander in Chief Obozo, voted into office by Rufus and Company.

    With Harry Ried as back up.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That would "Dirty" Harry who takes money from whores in Vegas.

      Delete
    2. The people Ruf voted for......

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    3. No, it is both parties and Obama as bad as he is, is not as bad as Bush. Not even close.

      Delete
  10. The quicker we demote Israel to its rightful standing in US interests, somewhere behind Chile, the sooner we will regain security for the US.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Israel, untethered to the US, can do what it wants and sleep in the bed they made.

      Delete
  11. http://news.yahoo.com/us-air-war-costing-8-3-million-day-214242685.html
    US air war on IS costing $8.3 million a day: Pentagon


    "Since air strikes began on August 8, the campaign -- which has involved about 6,600 sorties by US and allied aircraft..."

    "The cost of flying the spy planes range from about $1,000 an hour for Predator and Reaper drones to $7,000 an hour for high-altitude Global Hawk drones, or as much as $22,000 per hour for E-8 J-STAR (Joint Surveillance Target Radar Attack System) aircraft."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Image of ISIS jihadist with his head cut off by a bomb: PRICELESS

      Delete
    2. Cost of an Army of Occupation in Iraq - $100 billion pr year.

      What is happening now, expressed in thousands of dollars ...
      Not even millions per week, let alone Billion$ of dollar$ per week.

      Delete
  12. 'The Neocon push is relentless'.....in your own mind.

    For Christ's Sake, Obozo and Harry Reid have been running things for the last SIX YEARS.

    Supported by intelligent voters such as Rufus.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Democracy at its finest.

      Funded by whores in Vegas.

      Whooopoie

      Delete
  13. I know you think that a Republican win in the Senate will make all better. It will change nothing fundamental, but I appreciate your optimism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Deuce, it can't make it any worse.

      Taxes might go down a bit, and think of the aged on the Supreme Court.

      Delete
    2. Bob, let me ask you a question. How did some of the Bush and Reagan appointments work out. The problem is not who gets appointed. The problem is that they are appointed for life and not subject to recall by a majority of the States.

      You want to fix the Supreme Court, change the law and allow for a 90 day review of court decisions by a sixty percent majority of State governors.

      Delete
    3. Sure, that would have worked wonders back during the Insurrection.

      Delete
    4. The Supreme Court should have an age limit.

      80, maybe.

      75?

      Someone will, finally, have the last say.

      There is no easy answer.

      And I don't have it.

      Delete
  14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rzNLXxo01Q
    Antonio Carlos Jobim - ♫ One Note Samba ♫

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    1. Nice allen, but being older, I like more skin, to remind me of more frisky days.

      Delete
    2. I am not quite to Joe Campbell's " what was the whole hullaballo about anyways" outlook yet but tending that way.......

      Delete
  15. All smiles in the Kremlin tonight as NASA returns to the old Vanguard Missile Days

    But as Obama and Hillary always remind us about private ventures, "You didn't build that."

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    1. .

      All smiles in the Kremlin tonight as NASA returns to the old Vanguard Missile Days

      Not necessarily. The problem happened right after launch and I heard a report the rocket was powered by a Russian engine.

      .

      Delete
    2. that deserves a closer look.

      Delete
  16. Hey, this is about as democratic as it gets. One wing finds an article and I put it up. The other wing has complete freedom to express their views. No post gets censored because they are vehemently opposed to mine.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Except when it gets personal.

      But you have put on a really good blog, Deuce.

      And I mean that.

      Delete
    2. Triumph of the Will had really good choreography. And I mean that.

      Delete
  17. Then with your cooperation and that of others we can disagree amicably.

    ReplyDelete
  18. .

    Bob OreilleTue Oct 28, 08:10:00 PM EDT

    Why are you still blabbing about Bush when he has been goodbye baby for SIX YEARS???????



    You still, don't get it Bob. The neocons are not a party, they are a philosophy. You can call them neocons, you can call them hawks, they can be liberal or conservative, GOP or Democrat. It is a mindset, a worldview that believes in American exceptionalism to the point that they believe we have a duty to spread our values throughout the world whether the world wants them or not and if it takes breaking a few eggs to make that particular omelet, well be confident that God is on our side, the ends justify the means.

    Lot of clichés there but then so are they. They consider themselves, like the Blues Brothers , to be on a mission from God; and if you can make a little bread along the way all the better.

    .

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    1. .

      Of course, what I was talking about above was neoconservative 'foreign policy' views. Back in the 60's and 70's, the older generation of neoconservatives also had a distinct domestic policy in opposition to the New Left but it has kind of got lost in the shuffle as a new younger generation of neocons took over.

      .

      Delete
    2. Obama certainly did Stay the Course !

      Delete
    3. .

      I probably use the term 'neocon' too often rather than making distinctions based on unique differences in their philosophies, things like, do they just believe in US dominance militarily or do they also believe we should be spreading democracy and American values also, do they believe in regime change. Maybe the difference between hawk and neocon should be emphasized. Bolton hawk. Kristol neocon. Hillary hawk. Powers neocon. McCain/Graham neocons. Krauthammer hawk.

      Someone I read recently (Breitart?) suggested we just call them Imperialists. But by the he was already breaking them down into further classifications, Democratic Imperialists, Realistic Imperialist, and even Anti-Imperialist to describe Rand Paul.

      .

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    4. The Blues Brothers......


      Wow


      Only from the mouth of a very confused old sole in outer Detroit.

      Support the Kurds and be done with it. Keep the oil warm in the B52s........

      Wipe out that mountain top full of ISIS if we must.......

      You know the one.......Mt Whatever........wipe the silly killers off of there.......



      Delete
  19. The peshmerga forces landed early Wednesday at the Sanliurfa airport in southeastern Turkey, according to AP video journalists. They left the airport in buses escorted by Turkish security forces and are expected to travel to Kobani through the Mursitpinar border crossing.

    Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the BBC that sending the peshmerga was "the only way to help Kobani, since other countries don't want to use ground troops."

    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2810916/Iraqi-Kurdish-fighters-head-Syria.html#ixzz3HUxeHq00
    Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

    ReplyDelete
  20. The 43rd President has told friends the ex-Alaska governor isn't qualified to be President and criticizes Arizona Sen. John McCain for putting Palin on the 2008 GOP ticket and handing her a national platform.

    "Naming Palin makes Bush think less of McCain as a man," a Republican official familiar with Bush's thinking told the Daily News.

    "He thinks McCain ran a lousy campaign with an unqualified running mate and destroyed any chance of winning by picking Palin."

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  21. I assume the space station needed the 5000 lbs of supplies that were blown into the ocean off Virginia. Do they have a back-up plan that does not require a Russian rocket?

    This will be interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Elon Musk from Wired two years ago:

    "Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.”

    ReplyDelete
  23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1ehMrK3itM

    Mainlined for 'Detroit Quart'.

    Soul Man

    This is about geopolitics if you might wonder........

    I'll take Shania Twain.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'll take the Salmon River Breaks.

      Fuck outer Detroit, and inner Detroit too, for that matter.

      Delete
  24. How 'bout this -


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDLLXUaqZxg

    ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let Quart have his "Blues Brothers"

      or let them have him.........

      Delete
    2. Quart, actually, needs to be arrested.

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    3. The Blues Brothers???

      All Points Bulletin

      Restrain and Arrest Quirk on sight.

      Delete
  25. Energy Is Pure Delight
    And Is Of The Body

    William Blake

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  26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgonooza

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  27. I am working up to it now, Ash.

    The Image of the dead floating women inaccessible behind the glass partition unpunctured by the short o so short implement.......I am there now.......Hemingway knew what he was doing without knowing what he was doing..........

    It is the monomyth upside down.......I am becoming certain of it......"After The Storm"......

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    Replies
    1. A story of spiritual despair.

      But the monomyth remains, untouched, undespairing......

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