"DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory." Will Hutton in Sunday’s "Guardian."
It may come to be that in the end the neocon Jacobins and the merely megalomaniacal like Rumsfeld will be thought of as having been "taken for a ride" along with the rest of us.
Rumsfeld has a certain owlish appeal in his self-assigned role as the "Grinch who Stole Christmas." One could learn to appreciate his doddering curmudgeonly figure as a "talking head" infesting the Sunday Newsathons.
The neocons? It seems increasingly possible that these intellectual poseurs, now mainly roosting at AEI and elsewhere, have been duped by the Iranians in the greatest intelligence coup since Felix Dzershinsky ran the anti-Soviet underground from Moscow as chief of the Cheka. "Curve Ball?" Hah! This curve broke straight through the "strike zone."
No. History will probably reserve a very special and perhaps unique place for the folk of the "K Street Project." They deserve it for further poisoning the well of American political life. They will get "top billing."
It is odd how many Texans there are in this mess. "Lawyers, bankers and oil men. Lawyers, bankers and oil men." A Texan told me that these are the categories of men who run Texas in our time. Forget the cowboys. Forget the Comanche. Forget everything but the money and power. That’s what a lot of them have done. I think their time is coming.
I guess we should add a fourth category to the list, former "exterminators."
Pat Lang
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1582977,00.html
Oh how I hope you are correct. Such naked love of power and open hatred for anyone who would dare to want something different for the nation.
You hear Republicans, some, saying the true principles have been sold out to power-hungry types like Delay. And this is no doubt the case in its measure. But some of those folks still endorse the policy goals, foreign especially, that the neocons sold them. They drank a good portion of kool-aid.
What I mean by this is that some Republicans seems to have accepted neocon “philosophy” but are disowning the authors because so many are corrupt and incompetent. Will this spawn another generation of foolish pols who fancy imperial hubris is really the best policy, you just have to get it right if you are going to do it? A case of the movement being betrayed by its founders, only to breed an even more rabid groups of “true believers”? The psychosis of ideological puritanism I guess.
Now that Larry Franklin has pled guilty to espionage and the AIPAC case heads to trial, what to make of it? Is this another example of another neocon plan – this time to attack Iran that has gone awry at the starting gates? And what is the role of our great ally in the Middle East, the state of Israel? How come we periodically break up and arrest Israeli spy rings? If we are such good friends why can’t we just tell them to cool off on the espionage and just ask us for the information? Wouldn’t we most likely just give it to them?
Exalted Eskimo
You have a point. For a relationship that is so enduring and close it is remarkable how one sided it really is. pl
You may learn to appreciate Rumsfeld’s act, but it makes me sick, knowing how his incompetence has killed many Americans and Iraqis.
Greenie,
Irony is my style.
pl
Isn’t there actually a confluence of two different strands here?
The neocon triumphalists wanted an Imperial America that would solve the world’s problems by fiat. That is not an especially partisan view.
The modern Republican party wanted power, and didn’t much care about how it got it.
9/11 was an opportunity for both, and they exploited it mercilessly.
I am intrigued by the sodality of the aspens … in the Libby to Miller email.
“Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.”