The redemption of Rick Santorum as Serious Foreign Policy Thinker(tm) comes courtesy of Michael Ledeen in the WSJ.
After leaving the Senate in 2007, Mr. Santorum wrote about foreign policy frequently for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he was a fellow until June of 2011. In essays written for the center, he acknowledges that terrorists are indeed inspired by radical Islam—but he wants to work with Muslims who do not wage jihad, subjugate women or oppress minorities. He’s specific about the radicals: They are evil men who have perverted the meaning of “martyrdom,” changing it from the act of dying for one’s faith to killing others to advance the dominion of one’s faith.
His opposition to tyranny abroad has been a constant in his political career. Even in the final days of his losing 2006 re-election campaign, Mr. Santorum never stopped calling for action against Iran and Syria. Apparently, Pennsylvanians weren’t impressed by his Iran Freedom and Support Act, enacted in 2006, which imposed sanctions on the regime and authorized $100 million annually for the democratic opposition, or his 2003 Syria Accountability Act.
But today he looks prescient and gutsy. Back then, the Bush administration was trying to run away from such ideas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at one point turned to a Democrat, then-Sen. Joe Biden, to block Mr. Santorum’s Iran bill, before it finally passed. But Mr. Santorum’s basic vision has prevailed.
And so it goes. Clearly the Murdoch machine is hedging their bets when it comes to the very real possibility that the man who will carry the GOP’s standard into battle against President Obama is going to be a know-nothing fundamentalist dipstick. So like Bush 43 before him, the same “scholars” who told us that it didn’t really matter that the Republican candidate is a moron because he would be surrounded by a brain trust of great minds led by the necessary vision and will to “win” are hard at work constructing the exact same fantasy with Iran as their target.
Ledeen and his crew of bloodthirsty ghouls have been after “regime change” in Iran now for over a decade. To see him latch his lamprey maw onto Santorum’s back to try to ride him into a war with Tehran should be setting off alarm bells in the head of every American old enough to vote. They want war, and Rick Santorum is the best way to get it. Ledeen allowed out of his crypt to try to sell Santorum as Commander-in-Chief means that not only is the GOP establishment making plans for Santorum vs Obama in the fall, but that when it comes to all the truly important boxes to be checked, that Ricky will do for them just fine.
The GOP establishment will prevent Santorum from winning over Romney? Really? At best they are hedging pretty damn hard, and at worst they are sabotaging the increasingly failtastic Mittens to get the man they wanted all along. If “probability of deciding to go to war with Iran” is your top criteria for picking a GOP nominee, then Santorum’s the clear choice. If Murdoch and the neo-cons are backing him, the notion that Santorum will crash and burn long before Tampa is no longer so assured, is it?
Gex
Someone just shoot me in the head.
Spaghetti Lee
Santorum’s opposition to tyranny abroad is balanced out by his full-fledged support of tyranny at home.
ETA: I was channel flipping and heard some newshead say that “Santorum’s consistency has been questioned” on conservative issues. I don’t blame him for not wanting to test it himself.
TooManyJens
How did “picking up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business” work out last time, Mr. Ledeen?
Although I guess it worked out just fine for HIM.
Baud
Hope not.
Jeffrey Kramer
Thank GOD there’s finally an American who is willing to stand up and say that Al Qaeda is evil!
kth
If anyone is more of a joke than Rick Santorum, surely it’s Michael Ledeen.
The Moar You Know
No harm to Mr. Ledeen, no foul, I guess. I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that I’m pretty sure no one at the execrable WSJ has any kids or grandkids who might be at risk of having to go over there and fight.
Martin
The tricky part is getting Santorum to admit the only reason he wants to see Iran overthrown is they’re not ruled by Christians.
arguingwithsignposts
@Martin:
Really? Give him a few minutes.
Baud
Apparently, then-Sen. Joe Biden didn’t try too hard:
Villago Delenda Est
Ledeen is a vile sack of warmongering shit who, in a civilized society, would have long ago been exiled to Siberia or some other place far away from the centers of power.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Michael “Bulgarian Connection” Ledeen, also of Iran-Contra?
sal
Perhaps he should try those approaches himself first.
pseudonymous in nc
Given that Ledeen is a) an authentic fascist; b) up to the earlobes in foreign spooking, I think it’s clear that Icky Ricky is considered Candidate Most Likely to Bomb Wherever The Fuck The Neocons Tell Him.
Amir Khalid
The whole thing feels like an armed stand-off from a John Woo movie. What worries me about the US/western policy toward Iran is that it seems all stick and no carrot. Why does Iran, or any rational player, want nukes? It’s not to drop them on its enemies; Iran’s, for example are too physically close for it to escape the fallout.
Iran wants nukes so that its enemies won’t dare mess with it. It wants nukes all the more urgently because it already has an avowed enemy in the region with nukes: Israel. It wants nukes because America, a nuclear power with a long history of messing with Iran, is Israel’s patron.
So when Israel and America make threatening noises as they’re doing now, that only makes Iran regard nukes all the more as a need, not a luxury. The louder the threatening noises from Israel and America, the more urgent that need feels to Iran. Speeding up nuclear fuel enrichment is thus a rational response to these threats, the only one available to Iran because they don’t have a bomb yet.
Iran wouldn’t want to give up trying for a nuke unless that looked like the winning strategy for them. If you want them to give up trying for a nuke, you have to make that case to them. Threats of war make the exact opposite of that case.
Silver
The world would be a better place if Putin would just push the button.
Joseph Nobles
I may not be able to campaign for President Obama if Rih gets the GOP nomination because I will be laughing SO HARD.
hhex65
Ricktory!
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
Well yea, Neocons want to blow shit up and count the brown bodies of their fantasies. But I don’t think the US voter is going to be the least bit impressed by their bloody minded bullshit, after Iraq and screwing up Afghanistan. The 2000 election was almost soley about domestic issues with a lot of humble pie being served for foreign stuff.
And Rick Sanitarium is no George w Bush. While no less bloodthristy, Bush was on duty when 911 happened and the malevolent seeds of destruction in the president that Karl Rove built, blossomed under the potent right wing message machine, and Dick Cheney’s darker side guiding the iron fist.
Rick is an unpolished turd, and seems utterly unteachable, how to fool the rubes into seeing him as anything remotely moderate. He is not a real threat to be president. But if he wins the nom, then serendipitous forces will be in play for a two man race. Leeden is pissing in the wind, with the crop of hopefuls at present ending up his ticket to Iraq 2.0.
And I think Obama is way too smart to go with the conventional wingnut mode of American exceptionalism of blazing into Iran like a dumb cowboy. And I don’t think he will simply bomb and hope for the best. This president actually thinks about what will work and what won’t. If it comes to it, there could be a genuine world coalition put together to deal with this shit. And that would likely be the only way an invasion, or even airstrikes would happen, imo. The recent polling shows some public approval of some kind of mil action down the road. But it will have to be something like the Libya model, with everybody all in.
On the other hand, I could be completely full of shit. But it is not a good idea for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, and not really that much due to Israel.
Raven
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): I didn’t think we’d do any of this shit after Vietnam either.
mclaren
Listen up, buckaroos: here’s what’s going on…
Long ago in a galaxy far away, the GOP elites encouraged fundamentalist evangelical lunatics to take over the party because they were much more rabid than regular voters and they could be whipped into frothing foaming frenzy and sent out to vote in vast numbers by promising ’em culture war.
Ronald Reagan of course never kept any of those culture war promises, but that didn’t matter to the GOP elites: Reagan slashed the top marginal tax rate and gutted business regulation and oversight, so that was good enough for the corporate elite who ran the GOP.
But then a funny thing happened. The fundamentalist evangelical doomsday cult who had been invited into the GOP gradually took over its grass roots. Eventually they wound up voting in Republican primaries in such huge numbers that they dominated the Republican primaries.
At that point, a near-billionaire Mormon started to run for the GOP presidential nomination. Now the GOP elites faced a real problem: if they backed the Mormon, they’d split the entire Republican party and face a mass exodus of the fanatical evangelical Christian fundamentalists who now control the grass roots of the entire party and are the single biggest voting bloc in today’s GOP primaries. This could destroy the Republican party. If the fundamentalist evangelical Christians pick up their marbles and walk away (perhaps to create a third Dominionist party based on planks like “eliminate the separation twixt church and state” and “impose theocratic Christian rule on America”), the Republican party could crumble and disintegrate. If that happens, no more sock puppets like Dubya or Ronnie to further reduce top marginal tax rate and eliminate the capital gains tax etc.
So the GOP elites have no choice but to back Santorum. If they don’t, they face a revolt from their own party base.
…And that’s how the GOP wound up here.
Baud
@Raven:
It took us 30 years after Vietnam to get involved in another morass of that scale. It hasn’t been 30 weeks since Iraq ended, and Afghanistan is still going on.
Shawn in ShowMe
Grover Norquist boldy stated the long-term GOP strategy at CPAC: win congressional elections and use the presidency to rubber-stamp the legislation that comes out of Congress. In that context, it doesn’t matter that Santorum (or Romneybot) is going to get shellacked by a once-in-a-generation politician with an awesome ground game. History shows us we won’t always have those advantages.
The Masters of the Universe have all the time in the world — they can use the next few election cycles to perfect their new business model. It’s not like they have to worry about Dems learning to embrace and execute long-term strategies. We seem to get bored easiy.
pseudonymous in nc
At least it’s nice to see Grover Norquist saying that all he wants from a president is the ability to sign the bills he dictates to Congress, while all Ledeen wants is someone who can press a button.
The unelected GOP hierarchy is making known its choice of empty suit.
Raven
@Baud: Yea, well you go ahead and believe what you want. These motherfuckers aren’t above anything.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Raven:
It took thirty years before the hawks could talk the public into a standing start invasion and occupation of another country. The wingers worked hard and long to change the post Vietnam disgust of the public, and it took a massive terrorist attack before they did give permission.
Raven
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): Yea, now I remember. There was this big terrorist attack right before Desert Storm.
Keith G
No
Sorry, but I don’t see how you get there from here unless you have a loose reading of what makes up the GOP establishment or you are high.
Amir Khalid
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
It’s not a good idea for anyone to get a nuclear weapon, but I think an Iran with nukes is not as big a problem as some fear. The Soviet Union had thousands of nukes; but they never wanted a nuclear war, any more than the US ever did. They just wanted to make sure that a war with nukes was such a bad idea no one would dare try it on them. The world could all live with a nuclear armed Iran, just as we all lived through the cold war. it wouldn’t be comfortable, but we’d get by. If there was no way to persuade Iran not to acquire nukes, I’d settle for them having nukes and no one in the region making any sudden moves.
Raven
@efgoldman: Smarter than Tommy Franks?
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Raven:
Desert Storm was done by the numbers, and Bush 1 told us it was about oil, mostly. Or, the truth. We didn’t occupy, we stuck to the mission parameters. Like it or not, ME oil is in our vital national interest, Israel can defend itself. But anything that is a solid threat to rearrange the status quo concerning oil, and the bully power an atom bomb would give a country like Iran, is going to be taken seriously by any president. I like the one we have, for doing things in the best possible way for all concerned.
Baud
@Raven:
No question. I’m just saying that I think it’s more likely than not to be a losing campaign issue for them.
Chris
@mclaren:
If only. If only.
Violet
Well of course they are. They want to be able to control the Wingnut in Chief, not alienate him now and risk losing leverage. If a Republican wins the Presidency, they want that person to owe Murdoch so they own him. This is part of a longer game.
Raven
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): I’m tired, I’m not arguing about Obama, I’m arguing about A-fucking-merica. (Grapes of Wrath in the background isn’t helping”
Shawn in ShowMe
@Amir Khalid:
It was never about another country acquiring nukes. North Korea has nukes. The fearmongering in the GOP is possible because it’s a Scary Muslim country acquiring nukes. And if the Scary Muslims will attack us with planes, what happens when they get the bomb? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Amir Khalid:
The difference is oil, and our addiction to that which is in the ME. Iran with a nuke is much more likely to create mischief that involves oil supplies to the west. If they just have in mind a nuke for self preservation, then I agree. But if not, once they get one, and start using it to bully its neighbors, then that won’t stand. So we have to make a choice, or whoever is president, whether it is worth the risk to act now, or trust the good intentions of the Mullahs. And I personally, agree with you and others. To make the effort to live with a nuked up Iran. But it is not an easy call. Due to all that is at stake.
Mark S.
Doesn’t Ricky think that Iran has Hezbollah cells in Central America that they’ll use to attack us?
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Raven:
No, the points and feeling you have about this shit are legitimate. I have them too, as a child of the Vietnam era, and now Iraq. Honestly, I don’t know what the fuck to do. There are no good options here.
Raven
@Shawn in ShowMe: Dawg, if you don’t think the NK’s are scary you need to spend some time on the DMZ.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
This is, unfortunately, part of the problem with the US being tied to closely to Israel. We really don’t have any other negotiating position available to us, because any hint of a carrot for Iran would make Bibi and the rest of Likud go apeshit. We can offer threats and … that’s about it.
Once again, I curse that fucking incompetent asshole George W Bush, who spat in Iran’s face after they made their first diplomatic gesture in 20 years after 9/11. The US had a chance to unite the entire world — including the Muslim world — against al-Qaeda and we shat on it.
Raven
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero): There’s nothing we can do but keep the faith and pass the ammunition.
PeakVT
Even if Iran got the bomb tomorrow, Pakistan’s nukes would pose a bigger threat to America. I would trust the Iranians to keep control of their nukes a lot more than I do Pakistan’s deeply corrupt and Islamist-infiltrated government.
eemom
@Raven:
heh. Channeling the old Norskie, I see.
“9,873 days and the killin goes on and on and on…”
Raven
@eemom: I miss him. I see the Dragon has a morning slot. I bumped into TREx yesterday and we didn’t even mention the joynt.
Shawn in ShowMe
@PeakVT
Hey, hey, only one Islamic super-villain at a time. The GOP script writers prefer simple, straightforward tales that even a South Carolina primary voter could understand.
Chuck Butcher
There may be those who think of themselves with control as the GOP elite, I’d say ’10 ought to have disabused them of the notion.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Let’s not give Bibi & co too much credit: IMO, a large part of the American public would go ape-shit as well (the 27%ers would freak, a ton of the mushy moderates would follow their lead because OMG, scary Moozlins). The public might be tired of war, but I think it would still freak if we actually tried to move in the other direction.
@PeakVT:
I agree completely with this.
Amir Khalid
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
Iran hasn’t needed nukes so far to do what you call “creating mischief”, which I’m pretty sure they call “keeping an eye out for our own interests”. The thing with nukes is, they’re the big-ass weapon no one has dared use in nearly 70 years. And there aren’t too many regional conflict scenarios in which Iran can plausibly threaten to drop them. You carry the big stick, you don’t brandish it at all and sundry. That would start to look like bluster, and degrade the deterrent value of nukes. And I suspect that an Iran less worries about imminent attack would be rather less tempted to mischief, or defensive maneuvering if you will, and more amenable to reason. Same goes for Israel.
SteveinSC
@Mnemosyne:
Ah, yes and remember AIPAC had us lined up to “drain the swamp” so Iran “helping” after 9/11 was not part of the script. And fuck Ledeen and the AIPAC crowd.
Keith G
@Amir Khalid:
The Levant is pretty close quarters and the last time I checked, fallout doesn’t stop at borders or the shore line.
Mr Stagger Lee
I wish these damn Neocons would get out of their Manhattan Bubble World and go down to Ft.Lewis Washington(or Joint Base Lewis-McChord) and see what 10 years of war has done to the troops, the suicides, murders, rapes, robberies, domestic disputes that end violently. These guys are good people but are being pushed in a psychological hell that approaches criminality. Now these Israel defenders wants to open the ball on a Nation twice as big as Iraq with many a mountainous region like Afghanistan, to do battle with an army that is tanned rested and ready? And how will we pay for this insanity? We haven’t even begun to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of the treatment of our troops.
Fuck send Michael Leeden and his neocon fucks to Iran first!
Silver
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Find a Black Muslim. Might have to dig up Malcolm X.
As stupid as the retards in the South are, they ain’t colorblind…
Rick Taylor
It’s disturbing to me how similar the lead-up to the Iraq war was to what’s happening now. Back then, you had Democrats calling for letting sanctions work, and if we invaded Iraq, only doing so after bringing together a proper coalition, while Republicans wanted war now. The Democratic position was superior to the Republican one, but it was still completely immoral We were forcing thousands of people to suffer in the vague hope they’d turn on Hussein, and with justifications that turned out to be lies. Iraq didn’t even have the weapons we claimed they did.
And now Democrats are calling for letting sanctions work; if we make the Iranian people suffer long enough, either their leaders will do what we want, or their people will turn against them. Meanwhile Republicans are all but calling for war now. Of course given the choice I’m going to support the Democrats as by far the lesser of two evils. I actually feel reasonably confident that while Obama is President, barring Iran doing something stupid, Obama isn’t going to start a war, and he’s not going to give a green light to Israel to start one either. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure Santorum would start one in the unlikely event he became president. Santorum publicly rejoices in Iraqi scientists being assassinated, and remarks Russian scientists shouldn’t feel safe. And as for Romney, I don’t know if he’d start a war or not. He only says what he thinks will get him elected, and I have no idea what his core beliefs are or what he’d do. I don’t want to find out either. A war with Iran would be an unimaginable disaster. Iraq was a disaster, and there we made sure to destroy their country’s infrastructure first through years of crippling sanctions before invading. Iran would actually attack back if invaded. Honestly I think this upcoming election is one of the most important we’ve ever had. The Republicans seem so extreme I can’t imagine how even Romney can win, but I’ve been shocked before by who the American people were willing to vote for. And it looks like the popular media is starting to bang the drums of war.
Just to explain my own position, I think we actually could get Iran to negotiate a deal that might satisfy all parties, if instead of dictating the terms of what would happen, and then trying to bludgeon them into submission with sanctions when they didn’t agree to all our terms exactly as we dictated them, we actually negotiated with them and Turkey and neighboring countries and showed some willingness to compromise. I honestly don’t understand why Obama hasn’t pursued this route. Maybe he feels he has to take a hard line, lest Israel take matters into its own hand.
mclaren
@efgoldman:
Where’s the evidence that Petraeus is “smart,” let along “super smart”?
Petraeus has systematically failed at everything he’s attempted in wartime operations. His so-called “strategy” in Iraq amounted to bribing the Taliban to keep them from attacking Americans. How is that “smart”? That’s just paying protection money, and it’s stupid, because the people you bribe always wind up demanding more money than you can pay, and then you’re back where you started.
Then Petraeus switched to so-called COIN (COunter INsurgency tactics) that were nothing but a retread of the failed and foolish inkblot strategy pursued in Vietnam. Naturally, Petraeus’ ignorant and foolish COIN efforts failed abysmally.
So what has Petraeus ever accomplished in his entire career, other than to get promoted and score well on tests? Out here in the real world, Petraeus has scored a 100% record of total failure and complete incompetence. Petraeus has never won a major battle. Petraeus has never put in place a strategy that accomplished what he claimed it would accomplish. Petraeus has never used any military tactics that actually worked.
Instead, Petraeus has failed at every goal he claimed he would attain militarily — he has failed to win the “hearts and minds” of Afghans, he failed to defeat the Taliban and had to bribe ’em instead (the last refuge of the incompetent general is paying protection money to the enemy), he failed to pacify Iraq (constant violence still continues), he failed to pacify Afghanistan, he failed at nation-building, he failed to provide any strategy which would provide a viable military exit from Afghanistan…Petraeus has failed and failed and failed at everything he’s been charging with accomplishing.
How does this make General Petraeus “super smart”? In fact, how does this make Petraeus anything but an incompetent fool?
For more details, see “Petraeus’ lies and failures mount — to ever-greater career success,” Jeremy Sapienza, September 01, 2011, Antiwar blog.
Then we come to Hillary Clinton. Her contributions to U.S. foreign policy have been to lecture other nations about behavior which she calls “unacceptable” but which America constantly engages in itself. This makes America a laughingstock around the world and diminishes our “soft power” to absolute zero, since other nations can’t take us seriously when we spew this kind of utter bullshit in public.
Example:
Recently, Hillary Clinton harshly condemned Iran for its unacceptable censorship of the internet… Meanwhile, America forges ahead with illegally seizing the domain names of websites (oftentimes in error) which giant American monopolistic corporations allege to violate their illegally-extended near-infinite copyright terms. When the world saw this spectacle, it laughed its ass off at Hillary Clinton making a fool of herself, and of America.
Last year, Hillary Clinton vocally attacked Chinese leaders for repressing their dissidents…at the very same time America was holding Bradley Manning incommunicado without ever having proved or even provided any evidence that Manning had broken any laws. The world took one look at this ludicrous spectacle and snickered with disgust at American hypocrisy and ignorance.
Last year, Hillary Clinton attacked the North Korean leadership for their murder and repression of their own population…while Barack Obama casually signed off on the murder of an American citizen without charging him with a crime, or even alleging that he had broken any laws. The world stared gobsmacked at this bizarre spectacle and turned away in disbelief and revulsion.
How is any of this foolish and crazy behaviour by Hillary Clinton “super smart”? Where is the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s alleged intelligence? Where is the evidence that she is even minimally competent as secretary of state?
Then we have Leon Panetta, an ignorant incompetent fool who has made himself into a clown and the butt of public jokes whenever he has opened his mouth.
Source: Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2011, “Leon Panetta Makes Foreign Policy Gaffe.”
Just what you want in a secretary of Defense — someone so ignorant and so incompetent that he mistakes an ally like India for an enemy.
These are the “super-smart” people in Obama’s alleged “brain trust”? These are the hopelessly incompetent ignorant clowns who are supposedly masterminding America’s foreign policy?
Well, no wonder American foreign policy is in such deep shit, then.
And as for Barack Obama… Where’s the evidence that Obama is “super smart”?
Let’s take a look at Obama’s record at president:
[1] He signed off on Petraeus’ protection-money bribery of the Taliban to get ’em to stop attacking U.S. troop long enough for us to flee that country in ignominious defeat;
[2] He got duped and hoodwinked by the Join Chiefs of Staff into a pointless and counterproductive “surge” in Afghanistan which has mired us even deeper in an unwinnable quagmire — yet Obama is unable to extricate himself from Afghanistan, or even define a victory condition.
[3] Obama got duped and gulled by the giant banks and by Wall Street and observers described Obama staring “with disbelief” as the Wall Street bankers who took trillions in bailout money from the federal government turned around and gave themselves record bonuses last year while continuing the crazy unsustainable risk-taking financial gambles that crashed the world economy in 2008 and are certain to crash the world economy once again in the near future;
[4] Obama got scammed and duped by the hospitals and health insurers and doctors and medical devicemakers and by big pharma when they convinced him to pass a non-reform “health reform bill” which forced all Americans to buy unaffordable health insurance from private health insurers while imposing no cost controls on the underlying cost of medical services. As a result, Obama’s non-reform ACA has already been gutted (Obama announced that he was leaving it up to individual states to decide which parts of the ACA to implement) and the model on which Obama’s failed and foolish non-reform scheme was based, the Massachusetts state health care system, has just issued a report saying that all the so-called “reform” has not reduced health care costs by one jot, title, or iota.
Source: “Study: Massachusetts Health Reform is a Failed Model,” Les Masterson, HealthLeaders Media, February 19, 2009.
This study confirms the two reports recently issued by the Massachusetts state Attorney General:
Source: Masschusetts state government attorney general’s report, here.
Where is the evidence of Barack Obama’s alleged “smarts”?
The spectacle we observe in Washington D.C. is a pathetically inexperienced naively gullible president, far out of his depth, thrashing and flailing in desperation as he frantically kicks the can down the road while avoiding dealing with any of the real problems that are currently driving America into ruin and collapse.
Namely, a crazy out-of-control for-profit medical-industrial complex based on doctors and hospitals and medical devicemakers charging as much as they can possibly gouge out of the public in an orgy of unsustainable greed; a military-industrial-terror-prison-surveillance complex that took the excuse of 9/11 to engage in a feeding frezy of insane endless unwinnable foreign wars and a vast wasteful pointless military expansion together with a bizarrely East-German-style domestic surveillance and police-state apparatus whose spending has exploded so far out of control that not even the Pentagon knows how many trillions of dollars per year it’s pissing away because the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last decade; a college system with infinitely rising tuitions at the same time employment opportunities for new college grads have collapsed; an industrial base which today manufactures almost nothing but weapons for the Pentagon and has decided to shift the American economy to a crazy unsustainable model of “knowledge work” (which can now all the downloaded via the internet for free, which explains America’s sudden spasm of crazy anti-internet copyright enforcement frenzy) while offshoring all manufacturing to the third world, which hollows out America’s industrial base while destroying America’s middle class and eventually reducing our tax base to nil; and an endless unwinnable war on drugs and on copyright infringement, both of which have not only colossally failed, but which cannot even theoretically be won no matter how many trillions of dollars America pisses away on their futile and pointless policies.
This is the set of “super smart” policies expounded by Barack Obama?
This record of folly and failure and crazy counterproductive self-destruction is the proof of Barack Obama’s supposed “supreme intelligence”?
WTF?????!?!?!?!?!?
Are you people on drugs? Are you drunk? What the hell…????
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@Amir Khalid:
The thing about Iran, is no one really knows who is running it. Is it the mullahs or the revolutionary guard. Where some truly crazy religious fuckers are located. I hope you are right that Iran with a nuke will behave itself, and not try to bully others with it. I’m not so sure about that. And the Saudi’s will likely buy or build there own nuke when Iran gets one, and after that everyone in the neighborhood will want one for their own protection. So it’s not just Iran. Somehow that doesn’t sound like an all around good idea to me, for that part of the world. Would a MAD state of affairs keep everyone in line? I dunno
mclaren
@Rick Taylor:
Silly bunny.
Haven’t you realized that America’s military-industrial-surveillance-police complex has now taken over the American economy?
Haven’t you figured out that America is now engaged in the Forever War, a never-ending series of endless pointless unwinnable wars everywhere in the world, whose only purpose is provide a fig leaf of justification for the infinitely and constantly accelerating upward-spiral of military spending in America, which now runs more 1.2 trillion dollars per year when we count all the military costs (military pensions, CIA drone fleets, NRO military satellites, etc., etc., ad infinitum, on and on without end)?
I predicted this last year and the year before it. If we existed Iraq, I predicted that America would find some other country to invade. Iran, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Tierra Del Fuego, Norway, Patagonia, Monaco…it doesn’t matter which country, all that matters is that America must constantly be at war forever, everywhere on earth, to justify the insane and ever-rising military spending which is hollowing out our society and driving into ruin and bankruptcy.
So why are you surprised?
Why is anyone surprised?
This is Forever War. Eternal war everywhere, with everyone, forever. America will invade countries all over the world and get bogged down in endless unwinnable wars for goals we can’t explain with victory conditions we can’t specify, from now until America collapses. This is it. This is your future, people. Endless unwinnable wars forever.
Why are you surprised?
A basic rule of thumb: whatever you reward with money, that’s what you get more of.
America currently rewards weapons manufacture and surveillance of its own people and a growing military and more anti-terror goons and more police state repression of its own citizens and more war throughout the world with ma gigantic gusher of cash, more cash than America spends on anything else, including all our health care put together. America rewards all this militarization and endless war with vast amounts of money, so what do you expect?
Expect more of it. A lot more. Whatever you reward with huge amounts of money, you’re going to get a lot more of.
So expect more endless unwinnable wars, expect more assassination of U.S. citiszens without a trial by paramilitary goon squads, expect more militarized cops breaking down the doors of your home searching for [fill in the blank: caffeinated liquor, illegal downloads, marijuana blunts, whatever, anything to keep hiring more cops and breaking down more doors], expect more Buck Rogers superweapons that don’t work, expect more and more and more military spending without end.
That’s America’s future. That’s the logical end result of the crazy self-destructive policies we’ve put in place.
So why is anyone surprised?
dadanarchist
Would it be straying into Moore Award territory to admit that my deepest hope is that terrorists like Michael Ledeen will spend all eternity being fucked by Satan’s spiky acid-tipped dick until they drown in sulfurous pits of Santorum?
Is that uncivil?
Omnes Omnibus
@dadanarchist: Why do you wish that fate on Satan? What did he ever do to deserve that?
some guy
here’s an idea. let’s take up a collection and see if we can get enough funds to buy one of the old Soviet Union’s nukes (still scores of them in Ukraine) and ship it to Iran. they can keep enriching Uranium, but this way they have a nuke (bought and paid for by American citizens as a gesture of friendship with the people of Iran) and avoid all the NeoCon Saber Rattling bullshit.
the Russian Federation throws in a few surface to air missiles to keep everything safe, and we are good to go. A Nuclear Iran equals a Peaceful Iran. problem solved.
next problem to be solved: removing all the illegal colonists in Shiloh and Gush Etzion and Ariel. solution: low interest mortgages in Florida and California, removing the glut of unoccupied housing and foreclosed homes. two birds, one stone.
Yes, we can!
some guy
@General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero):
if the citizens of Bahrain had nukes I very much doubt the Saudi’s would have invaded them last year.
mclaren
Israel is demographically doomed. Within a generation, its population will be majority Arab non-Jewish, so Israel as it currently exists will not exist much longer. Therefore Israel is a non-issue.
Iran is nowhere close to getting a nuke, and even if they had one, the biggest enemy of the mullahs who run the country are the Iranian people…not America or Israel. At the rate at which Western culture is leaking into and liberalizing Iran, the Iranian fundamentalist Islamists are also doomed and they’ll be going away within a generation or two. They’re helpless against the onslaught of online porn and tight jeans and above all, the education and liberation of women, which is also taking place in Saudi Arabia so fast you can practically hear a sonic boom.
Saudi Arabai: King opens new women’s science university.
Fundamentalist Islam can’t stand up against that. All America has to do to watch militant fundamentalist Islam disappear is…nothing.
It’s already on the way out, courtesy of women’s education and the global communications revolution and the internet.
Tehanu
@mclaren:
Not disagreeing with any of your post … but I think efgoldman was being sarcastic.
mclaren
That’s the balloon-juice commentariat for ya…where you can’t tell sarcasm from “serious thoughtful political debate.”
harlana
And how the fuck do they propose to pay for this?
harlana
I just wish the “journalists” would remind everyone how many nukes we and Isreal have. Simple numbers, you don’t ever hear anyone talk about that.
ThresherK
The right can’t talk about the Lucky Duckies without saying “skin in the game” w.r.t. Fed income taxes.
When it comes to actual skin, however…
Oh, and just a late “thanks” to DougJ for the Carousel line. As long as this blog doesn’t degenerate into another one of those Rodgers&Hammerstein v. Rodgers&Hart theatre gang wars.