Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 2229 Editor's Choice: 19
-
Moving past the current form of government
[Read the article: Neoconservative Eliot Cohen's new position at the State Department]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]With the author of the Pearl Harbor memo, and various imperial power screeds appointed to the State Department, maybe this is the time to call attention to the column by David Brooks, "Human Nature, Redux" published 2 weeks ago in the New York Times. The (restricted) link is
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00B13F63F5A0C7B8DDDAB0894DF404482
It's a Times Select link, meaning that if you don't subscribe to the NYT you have to pay for it, so I will try to summarize:
Mr. Brooks, who's neocon credentials were in full display when he defended them and PNAC a couple of years ago on behalf of the Weekly Standard, has been reading pop neuroscience, and participating in seminars at the American Enterprise Institute on "neuromorality". He has been trying, among other things, to prove that all of society's ills can be ascribed to problems with oxytocin discharges that he believes cause people to instinctively participate in marriages. Be that as it may, he has now decided that modern brain science has proven that the "noble savage" and "tabula rasa" concepts of the enlightenment scholars, specifically Jean-Jacques Rousseau are dead wrong, and that science has for all time vindicated Thomas Hobbes' characterization of the natural state of man as short, nasty and brutish.
But along the way, he claims that all these philosophies ever led to was revolt against bourgeois social convention, bohemianism, hippies, bad social policy, bad educational policy, bad therapy, you name it.
"Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up."
He goes on to claim that the state of nature is now on display in Iraq, and that humans are pre-wired against the natural goodness of man. "Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state." And he finishes up with a plea to conservatives to embrace evolution (possibly because he wants to argue next for Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists, we'll have to see, stay tuned).
What "strong order-imposing state" might he be talking about? Because the most large scale, grand experiment in the thinking he declares is wrong and dead, was the creation of, as Lincoln put it, "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The creators of the American republic were followers of the Enlightenment thinkers, and the noble savage concepts were formed in the thinking of John Locke and the Iroquois nation, from which our nation was formed. Apparently, the Constitution is part of a failed experiment that goes against our neurological programming as human beings, in the current neocon analysis.
So when a neocon tells us that the thinkers of the Enlightenment were wrong, and human beings need a strong order-imposing state, does this have anything to do with the imperialist philosophies that people like Eliot Cohen spout?
We had to wait 3 years into the Iraq conflict before the press allowed anybody with any standing to use the word "Vietnam". When will we be allowed to use the word "fascist"?
-
Companies and institutions that support Ms. Coulter
[Read the article: Ann Coulter explains it all to you]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mitsubishi
Tropical American Tree Farms
Ads by Google
Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute
Premiere Speaker's Bureau
Presumably, if all these sponsors left her, her true friends, currently distancing themselves from her, would have to play their money cards, and we could out them.
-
8% of PNAC has now been convicted of lying
[Read the article: Spinning away the Libby verdict]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That's right, I.Lewis Libby is the 2nd of the 25 original signatories of the Project for a New American Century statement of priniples who has been convicted of not telling the truth under oath.
Elliot Abrams was the first, convicted of 2 misdemeanors of not telling the truth to Congress about Iran-Contra.
Let's see, in Abrams case, he was convicted, then pardoned by a President Bush, then put back into play by another President Bush, to, among other things, convene a secret conference about what went wrong in Iran-Contra and how to do it again without getting caught, so they could finance Al Qaeda terrorists in Lebanon with Saudi money (at least according to Sy Hersh).
So that means that President Bush should pardon Scooter, so he can be appointed to a future Bush administration so he can place neocons in the government and blow CIA operatives' covers. The press will let all of this happen again because their database only goes back to the last horse race.
I hope Scooter Libby goes to jail and that indictments follow for a lot of other people. I hope they put the whole lot in jail. I hope some of them go to the Hague.
Otherwise, we'll keep recycling these criminal bureaucrats, vice presidents, campaign operatives, and testosterone craving neocons forever, with a war or two to show for it each time they come round.
If Ann Coulter satisfies the conservative craving for masculinity, lets find 50 of her. I'd rather hear her call everybody a faggot a hundred times than litter the world with hundreds of thousands of dead bodies every time the Right feels paranoid or needs a masculinity rush.