Half an Oaf

Is still an Oaf

It is in some perverse way reassuring to know that you know the entire Conservative playbook. After all, it only has four cardinal points, and if you know where you are standing and which way you're facing, you will never be surprise.

Because in Manichean, “My Way or the Highway”, “Compromise is Treason” Wingnut World, America can exist in four and only four possible states:


Stage One -- Liberals in Power:

Peace and prosperity. A burgeoning Middle Class. Tolerance running rampant. The rights of working men and women taken as the necessary bulwarks of a stable society and not luxuries to be frittered away whenever Corporate Master needs more profit. Social problems are grappled with – sometimes well and sometimes poorly -- using available data and compassion, and not a burning cross and Bronze-age superstition. Women vote. Brown people vote. Chicks make out with chicks without being stoned as witches. Children run right up to bigots and Broders, call them fucknozzles, and then laugh at them.

In other words, Conservative Hell on Earth.

That’s when the knives come out. The midnight torches are lit. And God is once again hijacked and put in the service of degenerate freaks like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell.

Stage Two -- Wingnuts Ascendant/ Liberals Receding:

Liberals get lazy or stupid with power, or get hamstrung by an ideal of tolerance into believing that all views should by tolerated; even the views of fascists. And although Wingnuts are divided about 50/50 between those that want nothing to do with their fellow citizens, and those that want a full-on feudal state, their mutual hatred of a tolerant, progressive America drives them into each other’s arms.

Fascist financiers throw millions at the Wingnut movement for their own dark motives. The Dobsons and Falwells and Limbaughs are allowed to rise to a crescendo that drowns out every voice of caution and reason.

As the world suffocates under a million screaming, self-righteous, Jebus-powered rhetoric decibels of Jeremiad against All Liberals for being Commies or egg-heads or atheists of Jews or feminists or brown or whatever, all excesses in service of the Glorious Christopath Revolution become permitted: Christmas card lists because cause for Wingnut Congressional Hearings and blowjobs become grounds for impeachment.

Stage Three -- Wingnuts in Power:

Republicans sweep the Most Staggeringly Hypocritical category at the Academy Awards as their million decibels of screaming, Jebus-powered righteousness falls instantly and utterly silent.

Because they never meant a single word of it.

Suddenly the Righteous Wingnut Congress loses interest in the oversight they had spend years demanding at any price and for any infraction.

Suddenly no flagrant criminality, no avalanche of bald-faced lies, no abuse of basic Constitutional rights is even glanced at cursorily. When there are hearings and Wingnut paymasters are involved, Wingnut Congressmen do not allow them to be put under oath.

Where once a little consensual Democratic fellatio triggered a full-on Constitutional Crisis, Republican Lies, War Crimes and Treason now openly frolic in the halls of the White House. The Wingnut Congress yawns and smirks and “Heil Five”s each other.

And no one lifts a fucking finger.

Stage Four -- Liberals Ascendant/ Wingnuts Receding:

Having seized power, Conservatives actually try to govern: If it weren’t for the slime trail of debt, death and destruction they always leave in their wake, I would give that notion a loud ”Bwahahaha!”

Because when your philosophy of governance is “Seize power, hold it long enough to loot the place, then burn the rubble” things are bound to go horribly, horribly wrong (See “Four Trillion Dollar Deficit, A”, “Great Depression, The”, “Vietnam -- Part II”, “Scandal Iran/Contra, The” “Gate, Water”, “Clusterfuck, Iraq”)

People suddenly remember that, however nice their hair or glib their line or comfortingly Deliverance their accent, Conservative are essentially hateful fucks who consort with scum, and Conservativism is essentially an ideology they cobbled up to let themselves think it was OK – maybe even patriotic and Christian – to be hateful, scum-consorting fucknozzles.

Wingnut who had left no moral sewer unspelunked in their mad scramble for a One Party State, now almost-hysterically try to share the blame for their failure. The Great Haters of Comprise are now only too desperately eager to split the tab…on their catastrophes.

Which brings us to Bobo’s column today.

Bobo has been maundering on like the Concern Troll from Jupiter these last many weeks. As Iraq, the Bush Administration, and everything else on which he has staked his ideological life have completely imploded, Bobo has suddenly found politics uninteresting. Suddenly discovered the joys of absenting himself from noticing the bloody, ugly world entirely of his Party’s making.

Instead he has wandering away into the deep, abstract and forgiving forests of brain architecture and early childhood development (“It’s not my fault I’m a Conservative hack!” you can almost hear him cry. “I was decanted badly in the crèche!”)

And yet the NYTs loyal Conservative Apparatchik cannot remain forever on walkabout far, far away from the central issues of our times, transcribing the ideas of others and musing “Hmmm” safely distant from the war in Iraq; his paymasters need him to eventually begin to weave up a reason why The Surge is a great idea, or why the Bush Administration's infecting of every single level of government with Team Rove bone cancer was really a good thing.

Or at least why Liberals are worse.

Of course, stuck with a Stage Four Emergency, The Pastel Avenger can’t very well continue directly hawking the Conservative Snake Oil that made the Dubya Administration possible to begin with. Now that most of the country would rather have rats chew out their eyes, crawl down their throats and die in their lungs than have George Bush continue as President for another minute, Bobo has to get a little more subtle and creative.

Run into his own end-zone and punt.

See if you can spot the card he palms here in these tiny snips from his column “A New Global Blueprint”, transcribed from the paper with the aid of some ancient Oban.

Bobo begins…

“A few weeks ago, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia brought together some big thinkers to discuss the future of American foreign policy, and guess what? They couldn’t agree.

They couldn’t agree on whether China would replace the U.S. as the world’s leading power. They couldn’t agree on whether Islamic extremism would be central or peripheral in the years ahead. They couldn’t agree on the significance of America’s unpopularity.

But there were two competing papers that illuminated most of the issues roiling to and fro. The first was by John Ikenberry of Princeton. He argued that the U.S. will not face one big threat in the coming decades.
…”

You see what we’re havin' here? How the table is set?

From his lofty perch at the NYT, Bobo is letting us in on a Very Serious Conversation about Foreign Policy.

A conversation that is divided between two, Equally Serious positions, journalismed fresh to your plate from the wilds of Virginia courtesy of David Brooks.

Who is doing nothing more here than looking on as sober and serious as a tennis judge.

So John Ikenberry is one half of this Serious Conversation.

And who is the other half?

I’m glad you asked.

“Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment argues that this sort of global system would be workable if the great powers shared common political principles. But Russia, China and the U.S., among others, do not have common understandings or interests, so it will only lead to paralysis.”

Robert Kagan?

You mean this Robert Kagan?

Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958, Athens) is an American neoconservative scholar and political commentator. He graduated from Yale University in 1980. He later earned a Masters from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD from American University in Washington, DC. He is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, PNAC Letter sent to US President Bill Clinton. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Robert's brother Frederick and father Donald are also prominent American neoconservatives, and also affiliated with the PNAC.

The same Robert Fucking Kagan who co-authored this letter in the Weekly Standard with "Bloody" Billy Kristol? (emphasis added)

Iraq One Year Later
By Robert Kagan, Robert Kagan, William Kristol
Publisher: Carnegie
Weekly Standard, March 22, 2004

Originally published in the Weekly Standard, March 22, 2004

A YEAR HAS PASSED since the invasion of Iraq, and while no sensible person would claim that Iraqis are safely and irrevocably on a course to liberal democracy, the honest and rather remarkable truth is that they have made enormous strides in that direction. The signing on March 8 of the Iraqi interim constitution--containing the strongest guarantees of individual, minority, and women's rights and liberties to be found anywhere in the Arab world--is the most obvious success. But there are other measures of progress, as well. Electricity and oil production in Iraq have returned to prewar levels. The capture of Saddam Hussein has damaged the Baathist-led insurgency, although jihadists continue to launch horrific attacks on Iraqi civilians. But by most accounts those vicious attacks have spurred more Iraqis to get more involved in building a better Iraq. We may have turned a corner in terms of security.

What's more, there are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.
...

The Robert Kagan who concluded that letter with this stern coda in favor of stifling anyone who dissented from the PNAC/Chene/Bush/Robert Kagan view of Iraq?

Real and important progress has been made in this momentous, and at times trying, year. There should be no debating the need to persevere.
--Robert Kagan and William Kristol

The same Robert Fucking Kagan who flatly asserted in the Washington Post that fateful year of 2003 that…

"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty”

That Robert Kagan?

Yeah. That Robert Kagan.

Bobo brings his column home by exactly aligning it with the spirit of the larger Wingnut Retrenchment Project one hears everywhere these days. Their aggressive campaign to salvage their now-completely discredited dogmas by claiming either that everyone else is half-wrong too (After six, straight years of GOP rule, it is somehow “Washington” that is to blame for our nation's woes), or their most disgraced and repudiated ideologues are still, somehow, magically, half-right, as in this toxic little gem of a paragraph which which Bobo – ever the Reasonable Mediator -- begins to wrap up:

...For what it’s worth, I’d say Ikenberry underestimates the power of nationalism. There’s little evidence that different nations with their contradictory moral cultures can really cooperate, except in utter crisis. But I’d also say Kagan underplays postnational threats. More than in the 19th century, security threats come in the form of global guerrillas, loose nukes and disintegrating nations.
…

See? In Boboland, everyone’s a winner! And everyone is a equally wrong, and the Emperor of PNAC gets to be Bobo-feted (yes, I meant to do that) as some brilliant-if-slightly-flawed thinker instead of the rapacious beast he actually is.

So am I suggesting that I am a foreign policy wizard?

No.

What I am is an informed citizen who knows that, in all complex endeavors, there is a line which stretches from master, to expert,

through maven,

past hobbyist and gifted amateur,

makes a left through enthusiast,

goes over the river and through the woods to passer-by,

right on by the Completely Unaware

and then off the cliff of Intractably Dead Fucking Wrong About Everything.

And from here we draw two simple lessons:

First, no matter how deep your vocabulary pantry goes, or how many degrees you have on your wall or in your immediate family, when you have been as bloody and monstrously wrong about every fucking thing as Bob Kagan, you have to go to the back of that line.


And, second, when you devote an entire column to quietly gut-rehab the foreign policy reputation of “Bloody” Bill Kristol’s PNAC “Iraq Or Bust” reacharound buddy ...an entire column to imputing to Robert Kagan the authority to speak for half of the Serious Public Thinking on the subjects of likely threats to American interests in the 21st century, the rise of foreign empires, the supposed tension between nationalism and other, global-ordering “isms”, and all the other goodies that are cooking in the kitchettes of America’s premier think tanks, and none of the following words, phrases or acronyms are mentioned even once:

Iraq.
Iran.
PNAC/Project for a New American Century.
Neocon
WMD
Surge.

then you are simply lying by omission.

As if Bobo were Seriously and Objectively reporting on the whether or not Vampirism is a more likely threat to the villagers than Lycanthropy, and leaning heavily for half of the debate on the hematological expertise of Dr. V. Tepes…

….without bothering to mention that his expert also goes by the nicknames Graf Orlok, Count Dracula and Vlad The Impaler