Appeasement Club
by digby
Does this creep you out as much as it does me?
They neocons are still at it. They’ll always be at it. “Appeasement” is the foundation of their worldview — the notion that everything bad that happens in the world is the result of relying on pansyassed diplomacy instead of delivering a swift kick in the chops at the first sign of trouble. (In fact, the biggest disappointment in their lives was being unable to launch the codes against the commies, which is why the GWOT sent such a huge thrill up their legs.)
But I think even creepier than the fact that this anti-appeasement fetish manifests itself in $1000.000 a plate galas and video presentations by dead people, is that just a couple of years ago, this stuff was being openly bandied about in the highest reaches of government and the salons of the political cognoscenti as if it were perfectly normal.
Mr Bush is known to keep an Epstein bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, and in the wake of the September 11 attacks New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, invoked the Churchillian spirit of the Blitz. This week, in a speech to 3,000 marines at a military base in California, Mr Rumsfeld recalled Churchill’s rejection of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy at Munich in October 1938: “It wasn’t until each country got attacked that they said: ‘Maybe Winston Churchill was right. Maybe that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening was right.”‘
There are rumours that Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s most prolific biographer, was called in to the White House to give Mr Bush a private lecture. And talking to Murdoch-owned Fox TV last week Mr Rumsfeld took up the familiar analogy: “Think of all the countries that said, well, we don’t have enough evidence. Mein Kampf had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. Maybe he won’t attack us. Maybe he won’t do this or that. Well, there were millions dead because of the miscalculations.”
Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz had persuaded the conservative intelligentsia that we were already fighting WWIV:
It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.
This was considered normal, mainstream discussion not two years ago. As was, shockingly, this:
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
This may have been the low point:
On Friday, November 19, the Claremont Institute will honor Rush Limbaugh with the Statesmanship Award at its annual Churchill Dinner in Los Angeles at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel.
The whole country went crazy for a while there. And maybe it still is. But I can guarantee you one thing — they may be quiet for the moment, but old neocons never die, they just lurk in the dark until they get their next chance at power. In the meantime, they’ll be keeping the dream alive, waiting for the next Neville Chamberlain or sell-out at Yalta or “Who lost China” — or the new one, a liberal “stab in the back” on Iraq. It’s how they organize their world.
H/t to batocchio
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