We all know that before 9/11 the neocons didn’t give a damn about terrorism (and still don’t, really.) But what were they obsessed with? Saddam, yes. Israel, yes. But they reserved a whole bunch of their firepower for the great yellow peril, the Chi-Coms, whom they are anxious to blame for the North Korean nuclear threat today. They apparently don’t feel we have enough problems, we need to start poking China in the eye too.
In their view, Beijing has always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms programmes, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China sees itself as a “strategic rival” of Washington, a phrase much favoured by administration hawks during Bush’s first year in office.
Indeed, in the most prominent neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to “punish China” for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.
Among them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is sometimes credited with inventing the phrase “axis of evil”, in which North Korea, Iran, and Iraq were lumped together, for Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, urged the administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South Korea to do the same, and thus force China to “shoulder the cost of helping to avert” North Korea’s economic collapse.
Frum, who is also based at AEI, urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to be invited to join NATO and that Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, to send observers to NATO meetings.
Frum, who in 2003 co-authored “An End to Evil” with former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, also suggested that Washington “encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.”
“A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most (after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan),” he asserted.
Somebody has got to get the DEA to confiscate that shit these guys are smoking. What magic do these guys think we possess? Aside from the fact that China is holding all of our markers at the moment, does it seem like a good idea to be encouraging any country to renounce the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty right now? It’s an invitation to a nuclear free-for-all. Have their hare-brained schemes to destabilize the middle east failed to satisfy them enough that they have to destabilize Asia as well?
This is the nature of neocon thinking. After all we’ve seen, after everything they’ve screwed up, they still believe that they can control events on the world stage as if they were pieces in a board game. I’m not sure a simple madman would be more dangerous.
In America, it would be the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, saying this
The head of the Army is calling for British troops to withdraw from Iraq “soon” or risk catastophic consequences for both Iraq and British society.
In a devastating broadside at Tony Blair’s foreign policy, General Sir Richard Dannatt stated explicitly that the continuing presence of British troops “exacerbates the security problems” in Iraq.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Sir Richard also warns that a “moral and spiritual vacuum” has opened up in British society, which is allowing Muslim extremists to undermine “our accepted way of life.”
The Chief of the General Staff believes that Christian values are under threat in Britain and that continuing to fight in Iraq will only make the situation worse.
His views will send shockwaves through Government.
They are a total repudiation of the Prime Minister, who has repeatedly insisted that British presence in Iraq is morally right and has had no effect on our domestic security.
Sir Richard, who took up his post earlier this year, warned that “our presence in Iraq exacerbates” the “difficulties we are facing around the world.”
He lambasts Tony Blair’s desire to forge a “liberal democracy” in Iraq as a “naive” failure and he warns that “whatever consent we may have had in the first place” from the Iraqi people “has largely turned to intolerance.”
The grown-ups have awakened from their stupors and have decided to save us:
MATTHEWS: The real grown-ups, gentlemen, and Margaret — is that the best critics of this war are the Republicans. [Sen.] John Warner [R-VA], the chairman of the Armed Services [Committee] — it’s not the lefties, it’s not Jack Murtha out there even. It’s the smart, grown-up Republicans who are questioning this policy and calling for a change.
We’re saved!
Get prepared to go back to the future, folks. If and when we manage to take back one or both houses of congress get prepared to relive those glory days of the 90’s, when the Republicans acted like raving lunatics and braindead losers like Chris Matthews blamed it all on the Democrats.
It is going to be as if the Bush years never happened. All this unpleasantness will be disappeared and we will begin anew with a horrible fiscal situation, a terrible global situation, a hopeless military situation which will be laid squarely at the feet of the “lefties” by “smart, grown-up Republicans,” the shrieking rightwing harpies and their close relatives the robotic codpiece-worshipping pundits. Oy.
One of the most hyped tales of political wizardry in recent years is the story of how Karl Rove energized the evangelical base and created an army of Republican GOTV foot soldiers. The facts are that the targeting of the evangelicals goes back much farther than Rove and can be attributed to earlier GOP grassroots strategists:
“With Paul M. Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, Blackwell met with Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority. ‘Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape: evangelicals. Out there is what you might call a moral majority, he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. That’s it, Falwell exclaimed. That’s the name of the organization.’ [David Grann, “Robespierre of the Right,” New Republic, October 27, 1997]
Rove and these other strategists knew the religious right were “new voters” which is the political promised land. Everybody dreams of dragging some of the unaffiliated, apathetic uninvolved into the political arena. Getting an entire block of voters who will vote according to what they are told by an authoritarian organization is a miracle. Hallalujah.
With the business marketing savvy of the big money boys of the GOP they were quite successful in the last decade or so at convincing the media and many of the public that the Republican party actually is more moral and more sincerely religious than the Democrats. However, the events of the last year have begun to unravel that carefully constructed image.
After Foley’s “naughty emails” were revealed, Paul Weyrich said what I think most people would expect an honest religious right leader to say:
“One of the things that people say to me all the time is, in Washington nobody takes responsibility for anything,” continued Mr. Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation. “And I think that he, having not delved into this the way he should have, has to take responsibility and therefore has to resign.”
Of course he backtracked the next day, but his first instincts, at least, were consistent with what you would expect of a cultural conservative. Dobson, Bauer and Perkins and the rest of the religious right leaders on the other hand, came out of the box sounding like slick, blow-dried PR spinners feverishly explaining away Foley’s predatory IM trail as a prank or a dirty trick. They behaved like political operatives, not religious leaders.
And this week we are also getting a glimpse into how Karl Rove and the Bush white house really view conservative Christians. The new book by David Kuo is causing quite a stir:
Kuo says, ‘National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy.’ “
So how does the Bush White House keep ‘the nuts’ turning out at the polls?
One way, regular conference calls with groups led by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, and radio hosts like Michael Reagan.
Kuo says, “Participants were asked to talk to their people about whatever issue was pending. Advice was solicited [but] that advice rarely went much further than the conference call. [T]he true purpose of these calls was to keep prominent social conservatives and their groups or audiences happy.”
They do get some things from the Bush White House, like the National Day of Prayer, “another one of the eye-rolling Christian events,” Kuo says.
And “passes to be in the crowd greeting the president when he arrived on Air Force One or tickets for a speech he was giving in their hometown. Little trinkets like cufflinks or pens or pads of paper were passed out like business cards. Christian leaders could give them to their congregations or donors or friends to show just how influential they were. Making politically active Christians personally happy meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda.”
This sounds as though the GOP thinks that conservative Christian leaders are dupes, but I doubt that is literally true. I think they understand each other quite well and have plenty of respect for their different roles in the power structure. It’s obvious to me that both the Republicans and the leaders of the Religious Right are contemptuous of rank and file conservative Christians, not each other.
If you doubt that, take a look at the response among the evangelical elite to the fall from grace of the co-founder of the Christian Coalition, a man who got so greedy for political power he stepped out of his religious role and went for it:
Given the Reed scandal’s potential to erode evangelicals’ faith in politics, it’s no surprise that the main reaction among movement leaders has thus far been “an embarrassing silence,” to quote Ken Connor, the former head of Dobson’s Family Research Council. Even Richard Land, the normally forthcoming Southern Baptist powerhouse, has been rendered speechless. (“Dr. Land has decided to pass on this topic,” his spokeswoman told The Nation after first agreeing to an interview.) …One notable exception to the official silence has been Marvin Olasky, a longtime Texas adviser of Bush who literally wrote the book on “compassionate conservatism.” Olasky, editor of the most popular organ of the evangelical right, World magazine, has been outspoken in his view that Reed “has damaged Christian political work by confirming for some the stereotype that evangelicals are easily manipulated and that evangelical leaders use moral issues to line their pockets.” World reporter Jamie Dean has filed a series of fearless Reed exposes, causing a sensation in the evangelical community. Her dogged questioning of Christian-right leaders whom Reed dragged into his “anti-gambling” campaigns inspired sharp criticism from the most powerful of them all, Focus on the Family leaders Dobson and Tom Minnery, in a February radio broadcast. “They have a reporter who wanted me to dump on Ralph Reed,” said an exasperated Minnery, explaining why he refused to answer questions from World.
Nobody has nailed the discomfort better than Reed’s old cohort Pat Robertson. “You know that song about the Rhinestone Cowboy,” he told The New York Times last April as the Abramoff-Reed connections began to go public. “‘There’s been a load of compromising on the road to my horizon.’ The Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon.” Robertson has subsequently fallen quiet on the matter–perhaps because he knows that a willingness to serve both God and Mammon has been indispensable to the success of evangelical politics. It’s the very glue that holds together the awkward marriage of Christian moralism and high-rolling Republicanism.
The glue that holds it together is the business of evangelism. Those followers who give their money to these churches and organizations that sell Republicanism as a religious brand might as well spend their money at WalMart. They’re buying the same thing. It’s tribal identity but it isn’t religious and it isn’t moral.
It’s time everybody recognized that so we can deal with it honestly. These so-called religious leaders (and it’s not just the national leadership, it’s the whole hierarchy) are not dupes. Sure Rove and the rest call them nuts. But the leadership and the party know they are essentail to each others’ continued status, even if they spar over who’s their daddy. The truth is that they are all elites who have the same goals — power.
The big losers are the followers who are being sold a cheap bill of goods by both the Christian Right leadership and the Republican Party. Maybe some day they’ll wise up but it’s a tall order. It means they have to lose faith in both their church and their party and I wonder how many of them have that in them. It would be a terrible disillusionment.
There’s a vacuum to be filled in the evangelical leadership by preachers and leaders who eschew worldly, political power for its own sake. It remains to be seen if anyone steps up to claim it — and whether the sincere believers are not just “red team members” but true Christians who will reject the Elmer Gantrys who have been playing them for fools.
Update:Here’s more on the same topic by Hans Johnson in In These Times:
This June, Dobson had to devote a page of the magazine to coming clean about his ties to Jack Abramoff and the other Republican corruption scandal. In classic Dobson fashion, the disclosure was wrapped in an attack on “liberal” philanthropist George Soros and titled, with the subtlety of a schoolyard taunt, “We’re calling your bluff.” So much for mea culpa.
Far from being a free-standing moral voice, Dobson and Company are part and parcel of conservative political machinery. He has used his organization’s tax-exempt status, radio network and greedy data-gathering techniques for the past 25 years to convert it into bare-knuckled political empire dressed up as a Christian ministry.
Update II: And now it is reported that Rove personally threatened Foley when he tried to retire last year. Oh what a tangled web we weave…
The Republicans really, really need to deal with their latent sexual issues because this is getting ridiculous. I just flipped over to FoxNews and saw two scantily clad young men (with very unmilitary looking mop-tops) sitting across the desk of a giggling and blushing Neil Cavuto, flogging a Marine Hunk beefcake calendar. I’m not kidding.
You can kind of understand why Foley self-destructed. It’s strange and creepy in that Republican closet.
Oh and speaking of creepy, if you’d like to sign a petition objecting to the great Christian child psychologist James Dobson’s characterization of Foley’s p[redation and hastert’s cover-up as a joke, you can go here.
PARIS — French politicians are galloping into diplomatic quicksand with a proposal to imprison anyone who publicly denies that the Turkish massacre of Armenians a century ago constituted genocide.
The draft law, to be debated by the National Assembly Thursday, was submitted by the opposition Socialist Party and has strong support among those on the political right who hope to derail Turkey’s candidacy for European Union membership.
Members of France’s 400,000-strong Armenian diaspora, whose votes are important to all sides in next spring’s presidential election, have lobbied for years to criminalize negating their genocide, just as it is a crime in France to deny the Holocaust.
Is there such a thing as indirect genocide, such as might happen when you intentionally destabilize a foreign sovereign? I suppose in crime parlance, one would call it reckless genocide. The drunk driver, after all, didn’t intend for an innocent death to be the outcome of the actions taken (the drinking.) But the driver is nonetheless held accountable. Cause and effect, you know.
Dear Rightwing Defenders of the Politically Incorrect,
Are you bored by Idomeneo? I don’t blame you. After all, it’s not Mozart’s best opera by a long shot. I vote for Figaro or Zauberflote, but won’t complain if you say Giovanni. Oh, and if you know what’s good for you, get the Gardiner DVD of Figaro.
But I digress. For you courageous defenders of free speech who spoke up so bravely for the wealthy rightwing Danish newspaper magnates that published those Muhammad ‘toons, here’s your new cause celebre. This guy is about to get into a heap o’ trouble for speaking his mind. You must put your considerable moral power behind him, rise to his defense, denounce the thought police that would eliminate his right of free expression and, well, you know the drill:
A university instructor who came under scrutiny for arguing that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks likens President Bush to Adolf Hitler in an essay his students are being required to buy for his course.
The essay by Kevin Barrett, “Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11,” is part of a $20 book of essays by 15 authors, according to an unedited copy first obtained by WKOW-TV in Madison and later by The Associated Press.
The book’s title is “9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out.” It is on the syllabus for Barrett’s course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Islam: Religion and Culture,” but only three of the essays are required reading, not including Barrett’s essay.
Barrett, a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison, is active in a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group’s members say U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
“Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies,” he wrote.
Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
Now, you may think he’s just an hysterical nut. But he’s not. He’s quite thougtful in advancing his bold, audacious thesis. He is not in any way saying that Bush personally is comparable to Hitler. Read on:
“That’s not comparing them as people, that’s comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that’s an accurate comparison that I would stand by,” he said.
He added: “Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush, so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler.”
Now some of you may think that, unlike Germany, this is America where free speech is respected and defended as a matter of course. He doesn’t need your help as there are no repercussions. Not so:
The university’s decision to allow Barrett to teach the course touched off a controversy over the summer once his views became widely known.
Sixty-one state legislators denounced the move. One county board cut its funding for the UW-Extension by $8,247 — the amount Barrett will earn for teaching the course — in a symbolic protest, even though the course is unrelated to that branch of the UW System.
Democratic Governor Jim Doyle and his Republican challenger, Mark Green, have both said they believe Barrett should be fired.
So to the barricades, my rightwing friends! Contact David Horowitz and come ye all together, rise to Professor Barrett’s defense! And denounce the liberals and Democrats and Republicans (RINOs, obviously) who are calling for him to be fired and vilified for his views.
love,
tristero
P.S. Please don’t ask me to join you. But don’t get me wrong. I’m all for free speech and free expression, even if I hate it. That’s why I’m a card-carrying member of ACLU who I’m positive are following the attempts to censor, censure, and shut Professor Barrett up very closely. If ACLU determines that his rights have been violated, I’m sure they will defend him, as they have Oliver North and some other paragons of free speech who wanted to hold a politically incorrect march through Skokie, Il. Since I didn’t resign when ACLU defended North, I certainly won’t resign if they rise to Professor Barrett’s defense. But that’s as much activism in his cause as I have time for. You see, I’d like to do more but I have some important things I really must do. Like fr’instance, this morning I have to go watch some paint dry. Somebody has to, y’know.
P.P.S. Special note to those who seriously wish to discuss the merits of Professor Barrett’s theories on who was behind 9/11: Of course, my friends, I agree with him. And you, especially you. I wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with you. Ever. You’re all absolutely right, Bush himself meticulously planned 9/11 and set up bin Laden as a patsy. I don’t see how anyone – do me a favor, please, and just stay back over there in your chair, thanks – could doubt you. I”m serious. Hey, have you heard about Clinton and Dallas, ’63? Well, some say it’s just speculation but…no, seriously, please sit down. Please!
Ok, ok. Put it down. PUT IT DOWN, I SAID! Put that CD DOWN! N-n-n-n-n-n-noooooooooooooooooo! Don’t play it, please God, no. Anything but that, please! Get away from that cd player. Please I’ll do anything you want, believe anything you say. Really, ah…ahh….!
Reading this article by Jacob Weisberg on the subject of Bush’s creation of the Axis of Evil, I realized that one of the most frustrating aspects of right wing hawkish thinking is their belief that it is useless to have any kind of short-term solution to a problem unless it can be guaranteed to result in a long term resolution. Indeed, they even think of truces and ceasefires as weakness. Here’s Bush a couple of months ago talking about Lebanon:
“Our mission and our goal is to have a lasting peace — not a temporary peace, but something that lasts,” said Bush. “We want a sustainable ceasefire. We don’t want something that’s, you know, short term in duration.”
Right. Tell it to the people who died or were wounded because that “short term” solution just wasn’t good enough for George W. Bush.
That is just one very bizarre aspect of their black and white thinking that leads to such things as their ridiculous posturing on North Korea in which no interim agreement (like that achieved by Clinton with the Agreed Framework) is countenanced because they will only accept a permanent solution. I suppose one could say that this might be a useful way to run a kindergarten, but real violence in the real world is something that should always be punted if at all possible. This is not because of a general moral revulsion toward violence, although that should certainly be a factor. Nor is it simply that to delay would save lives “in the short term.” It’s because we cannot tell the future. Kim Jong Il could die from a heart attack. A short term cease fire in Lebanon could have given everyone a chance to catch their breath and perhaps recognize that escalating the war was indefensible. Anything can happen. A break from violence creates a possibility that it won’t start up again. A crazy dictator delaying the development of a nuclear bomb opens up the possibility that he won’t develop one.
I realize that Bush and his pals think that their “enemies” are nihilistic at best and animals at worst. But they are humans and humans are always subject to change from within or without. The idea that it is “useless” to put off something like a a war or a nuclear showdown until tomorrow when you can have one today (or put off a ceasefire ’til tomorrow when you can have one today) is beyond stupid or irresponsible. It’s sick.
* I should note that the right has come to think that anything short of a hostile, aggressive military response to everything is “appeasement.” It isn’t.
“The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Chamberlain’s premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else’s expense.” D.N. DIlks, Appeasement Revisited, Journal of Contemporary History, 1972.
All this lying McCainiac finger-pointing about Clinton being at fault for North Korea having nukes is par for the course. That’s the GOP game — if it wasn’t Clinton it would have been Carter — or Truman — or Woodrow Wilson. It’s never their fault. Here’s Rich Lowry explaining it to us from their perspective:
The Clinton administration dealt directly with the North, producing the Agreed Framework, a sham that the North Koreans began cheating on, in the words of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, “as the ink was drying.” The North agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for two light-water nuclear reactors and fuel deliveries. Immediately, however, it set up a secret uranium-enrichment program and obstructed inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency. When the U.S. called the North on it in 2002, the North confessed, expelled IAEA inspectors, withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accelerated its nuclear quest.
I like Josh Marshalls pithy translation for those of us who live on planet Earth:
“Failure” =1994-2002 — Era of Clinton ‘Agreed Framework’: No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.
“Success” = 2002-2006 — Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.
But let’s take Lowry at his word that all the smart people knew that the agreed framework was bunk and that the eight years of a non-nuclear North Korea it bought were worthless. Why in the world was Donald Rumsfeld involved in building those light water reactors back in the 1990’s?
I understand that when this story came out back in 2003 the media were still in thrall to the Hunky Rummy, but what’s the excuse for not pursuing that question now? The only person besides Bush who still thinks he’s even sane is Midge Decter,and she never loved him for his mind anyway — it was his hot 72 year old bod and macho aggressiveness that turned her on. (That probably explains Bush’s infatuation with him too, come to think of it.)
May 12, 2003
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it’s surprising that there is no clear public record of his views on the controversial 1994 deal in which the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons program. What’s even more surprising about Rumsfeld’s silence is that he sat on the board of the company that won a $200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.
[…]
FORTUNE contacted 15 ABB board members who served at the time the company was bidding for the Pyongyang contract, and all but one declined to comment. That director, who asked not to be identified, says he’s convinced that ABB’s chairman at the time, Percy Barnevik, told the board about the reactor project in the mid-1990s. “This was a major thing for ABB,” the former director says, “and extensive political lobbying was done.”
The director recalls being told that Rumsfeld was asked “to lobby in Washington” on ABB’s behalf in the mid-1990s because a rival American company had complained about a foreign-owned firm getting the work. Although he couldn’t provide details, Goran Lundberg, who ran ABB’s power-generation business until 1995, says he’s “pretty sure that at some point Don was involved,” since it was not unusual to seek help from board members “when we needed contacts with the U.S. government.” Other former top executives don’t recall Rumsfeld’s involvement.
Today Rumsfeld, riding high after the Iraq war, is reportedly discussing a plan for “regime change” in North Korea. But his silence about the nuclear reactors raises questions about what he did–or didn’t do–as an ABB director. There is no evidence that Rumsfeld, who took a keen interest in the company’s nuclear business and attended most board meetings, made his views about the project known to other ABB officials. He certainly never made them public, even though the deal was criticized by many people close to Rumsfeld, who said weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from light-water reactors. Paul Wolfowitz, James Lilley, and Richard Armitage, all Rumsfeld allies, are on record opposing the deal. So is former presidential candidate Bob Dole, for whom Rumsfeld served as campaign manager and chief defense advisor. And Henry Sokolski, whose think tank received funding from a foundation on whose board Rumsfeld sat, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the 1994 agreement.
I guess he must have felt that just because Clinton was conducting a “feckless, photo-op” foreign policy, as St. John McCain used to say, that was no reason he shouldn’t make a buck on it. He’s a Republican, after all.
Update: Dover Bitch points out the irony of the Republicans blaming Clinton and Carter (yes, they’ve blamed him too) for all things wrong in the universe while simultaneously decrying the notorious “blame America first” crowd. (They are always able to have it both ways, aren’t they?) She found this amazing little nugget from Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous 1984 speech on the subject:
“When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame America first.”
I suppose they can always fall back on their belief that Democrats aren’t “Real Americans” so it’s not inconsistent to them that they always blame America first themselves — and always have. (“Who lost the civil war?” “Who lost China?” “Who lost Vietnam?” “Who lost Iraq?”)In fact, their entire worldview is shaped by the idea that the enemy within, the treasonous Americans among them, are at fault for everything that’s gone wrong in the world. James Wolcott dismembers Dinesh D’Souza just today for claiming that Americans are to blame for islamic terrorism.
In fact, I suspect that if Republicans couldn’t blame America for every single thing that they believe has gone wrong in the world they would completely lose their moorings.
