(1) What the FPC lunatics think of as the National Interest is often in no way an objectively argued conception of what is truly in the best interests of the U.S. population and our neighbors around the world.

The Foreign Policy Community (or establishment, as I call it) has historically operated by making huge and fraudulent assumptions about what is in the U.S.' "National Interest".

More specifically, the interests of some particularly favored and inefficient corporation or of some particular group of investors are NOT even the same as the U.S.' rational economic interests. There is no serious, sane way to argue that the national interest was served by a century's worth of backing tyranny, dictatorship, mass slaughter, and genocide in Guatemala, to a large degree shaped by support for the United Fruit Co., yet this was enthusiastically backed by Reagan, the U.S.' evangelical right wing, liberal hawks, and most 'serious' publications, albeit with criticisms for details of the bloodiness of the operation.

U.S. corporations, and our entire economy, would have been far, far better off had we backed real independence and democracy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America as opposed to the rotten, stinkoe dictatorships continually backed by the neo-Khan right and the liberal hawks. Maybe United Fruit would have been worse off, maybe, if Guatemalans had been allowed democracy and development, but the U.S. economy as a whole and the U.S. corporate community as a whole would have been much, much better with a healthy trade and investment partner than the hawks' murderous Guatemalan charnel house for a century.

In the same way, today's right wing and liberal hawks literally care nothing, not one bit, about actual U.S. security or safety from terrorist attacks, just as Bush Jr. and Condi Rice and Dick Cheney could not care one tiny, microscopic, measurable bit about responding to security concerns in the 8 months between inauguration and September 11th.

(2) The FPC and their pundit worshipers do not in any way believe in those Western values of objectively sustainable arguments based on evidence which they magnanimously compliment all the time -- and those of us citizens who demand proof of their lunatic assertions and fraudulent calumnies are deemed "unserious".

Every real scholar who devotes attention to the subject notes that the U.S.' intensive and carpet bombing of Cambodia from 1965 - 1973 directly contributed to the ability of the lunatic Khmer Rouge guerrillas to take over the nation. Yet if you suggest that such idiotic hawkish U.S. policies led to genocide and were contrary to the U.S. national interest under any sane definition, you are Not Serious. Henry Kissinger, on the other hand, is Serious. Talking about the (true) guilt of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in murdering Cambodians is Serious. Mentioning the U.S.' role in handing the Khmer Rouge power is Not Serious. Yet you can empirically study these things, down to each bombing crater and each village location, and it doesn't matter, because the FPC hates facts, they hate argument, and they hate being evaluated objectively.

In fact, the strongest arguments justifying the need to invade and occupy Iraq were based on people telling us citizens that the government possessed secret information they couldn't tell us which justified their lunatic war.

So we citizens who ask that our democratic government justify a policy of war based on publicly available evidence we citizens can evaluate, we are the Un-Serious ones. And those who told us to Trust Our Government and let them tell us that we must believe them that they have secret information to justify a controversial attack on a nation not attacking us, They Are Serious.

and, finally,

(3) The FPC insists that they have the moral authority to carry out any action or back any value which they simultaneously demand that other nations and movements must not.

Good lord! The United States government in 2004 by way of its own troops kidnapped and deposed the elected President of Haiti, Jean Bertrande Aristide, on the grounds that he was potentially threatened by rebels based in the Dominican Republic that the same U.S. government had been supplying!!!!

My god! Under what lunatic regime of anti-logic is that some representation of the ideals of U.S. democracy and international law?

Can you imagine for one second the FPC suggesting it might be a "Serious" idea for a Caribbean nation, say, Cuba, to send forces to arrest the U.S. President and ship him to some undisclosed African nation without his permission and forbid his return, all because Cuba thought the U.S. government might be under threat from rebels whom Cuba had been supplying?

For the last few decades (until Venezuela's Chavez and Argentina's Kirchner blew the system apart and their countries have grown amazingly since) so called FPC experts happily advised governments around the world (who, unfortunately had to listen to them) -- the newly free Russia, the starving nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, the imploding economies of Latin America -- that they needed to follow crazed 'free market' policies, 'belt-tightening' for public services, and unaccountability for Western investors, and yet these crack-head versions of U.S. 'supply-side' voodoo would destroy the U.S. if their advice had been followed here.

Glenn and other bloggers have really touched a nerve with the Serious Folks this time, mainly because they realize that the U.S. population is once again willing and able to question the FPC as types who claim to represent all of our best interests yet who hate those of us who ask for a rational defense of their hawkish policies.