Dances with Wolfowitz, et al

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

A party whore will hug anyone. A dance or a pose, it doesn't go well with the lipstick or the disguise. McCain --the self-styled, 'straight-talking moderate'--dances with radical, Zionist war-mongers and neocons, 'promising' them and the Military/Industrial complex that the US may stay in Iraq for 100, 10,000, possibly '...a million years". Should McCain get elected, I would not be surprised if Wolfowitz himself came in out of the cold to claim vindication.

On CBS’s Face The Nation last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) claimed Americans would not be “concerned” if the US spends “10,000 years” in Iraq. Earlier in the week, he said it “would be fine with” him if the US military stayed in Iraq for “a hundred years” or even a “million years.” Despite his push for an indefinite presence in Iraq, McCain somehow had a “wide advantage” yesterday with New Hampshire Republicans who “disapproved of the war“:

Exit polls found 64 percent of Tuesday’s Republican voters still support the conflict — and Romney, whose criticism of Bush’s management of the war has been muted, led McCain among those voters. But among the 34 percent who said they disapproved of the war, McCain had a wide advantage over the GOP field — even over Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the sole advocate of a US withdrawal in the Republican field.

--‘10,000 years’ McCain wins anti-war GOP vote.

Sure --Paul Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are gone but "neoconservatives" were and continue to be the ideological well-spring of Bush's quagmire. Kissing up to such ilk is a high price to pay a kooky cult for their support.

Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

--Michael Lind, How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington and Launched a War.

McCain sold out for the support of 'sixty-seven percent' of GOP voters. Quick --what's 67 percent of 33 percent? Any way you figure it, that's not enough to get you elected 'President'. McCain will have to steal the election! No problem!

One may be forgiven for not knowing how to characterize McCain: kiss-up or extremist. In any case, McCain is what you get by kissing up to 'extremists', fear mongers who created a war upon a pack of criminal, treasonous lies for the very purpose of misleading the nation.

The GOP is easily fooled by extremists and even more so today. Even so --Fred Thompson did not get far with Neocon tough talk. [See: The Talking Neocon 'Tough Love’ Doll]

In 1964, the GOP paid a high price for having eschewed Nelson Rockefeller for the Goldwater road to extremism. Interestingly, the GOP has gone so far today, that Goldwater would be compared to Ron Paul, a libertarian, or perhaps even a moderate.

Bogged down in a war that has already bankrupted the US and gutted the dollar, McCain's war of 10,000 years will simply finish off the American dream of freedom or --worse --exchange it for a theocratic big brother and FEMA camps secure from prying eyes. It is a symptom of the sickness of which the GOP is symptomatic, that Bush has visited upon America what Barry Goldwater --an 'extremist' in 1964 --warned this nation about back in 1964!

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

--Barry Goldwater, Candidate for US President, 1964

Goldwater could not have understood or appreciated the dangers posed by his own party. When he said extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, he most certainly had not foreseen the pernicious nature of Bush/Neocon extremism. He had not paid attention to the warning that GOP President Dwight Eisenhower issued with regard to the Military/Industrial complex. Goldwater was prescient but not nearly enough to save us from the GOP.

Addendum

SHUT DOWN THE IRS / SHUT DOWN THE WAR

On March 19, 2008, we will set up a nonviolent blockade of the national Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington, DC, as part of the day of actions against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as military recruiters supply the bodies for the war, the IRS supplies the funding. Just as some soldiers have the courage to resist the war, we — as tax payers — should have the courage to resist paying the taxes that send soldiers to war. We call on all war opponents to help dramatize our opposition and to disrupt business as usual by joining this nonviolent blockade.

For at least this one day — March 19, 2008 — we need to create a disturbance in the smug complacency of the IRS/Pentagon money-axis. ...

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