Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government, talks about manliness and Theodore Roosevelt: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/mar05/mansfield.htm

And, yes, I understand it's a metaphor justifying imperialism: that only makes it more childish, to reduce international relations to personal egoism and sexual insecurity: dominance and submission on the international scale as an S&M fetish.

Posted this on yesterdays thread, but it appears to be dead. Some of y'all (including Glenn) might be interested in the psychological/philosophical monstrosity of the neo-cons - liberalism's misbegotten spawn:

Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government, talks about manliness and Theodore Roosevelt: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/mar05/mansfield.htm

And, yes, I understand it's a metaphor justifying imperialism: that only makes it more childish, to reduce international relations to personal egoism and sexual insecurity: dominance and submission on the international scale as an S&M fetish.

It seems to be a dark conspiracy that a government lab would be researching offensive biological weapons.

Why? I would assume that to be the case, for any fairly large and/or rich nation. First, without researching OBWs, how can you develop defenses? Your opponents aren't publishing their research. Second, if the treaty restrictions break down, whoever is capable of unleashing OBW would be at a huge advantage.

I'd be surprised if it were a large program - that would be difficult to hide. But a small program? I'd expect that many would see not doing the research as irresponsible. There are so many classified research programs, that hiding a small OBW program wouldn't be difficult, and there are sufficient researchers who wouldn't see it as unethical.

The DOE is big-time into bio research nowadays - that's where I'd put it.

Who's doing it in the open? I haven't seen any published paper, but then I'm trapped in my own little discipline.

The mistake y'all are making is in thinking of "an" intention. The beast has many heads, pulling in different direction - this is why conspiracies are nigh impossible to disentangle.

There are folks on the right who wanted a catastrophe - to clean the board. GG has quoted them often enough. That doesn't imply, however, that Georgie knew or understood it - I don't even know if that boy is literate (a C avg at Yale? At least he didn't fake intellect like Kerry did.) There are a multitude of intentions in contention. Some who want to steal the oil; some who want to take it off the market; some who want democracy in Iraq; some who want to institute imperial rule; some who just don't give a damn, as long as they can profiteer.

That's one of the reasons analyzing this administration is so difficult. Usually, there is a master spirit at play - a leader strong enough to be directing the conspiracies working at cross-purposes. Here we have a fool at play - his henchmen play the boss, rather than the other way around.

It's pretty clear from the Gonzalez/USAs story that the left-hand knows not what the right hand does.

This is not a new phenomenon. Ever since the Maine, we've been watching propaganda posing as "objective" reporting. Ever since the rise of television and the consolidation of radio in the 50's and 60's, we've been living Pravda - more sophisticated than the Soviets, but still a pack of lies uncritically reported. Remember Tonkin!

What has changed is that we have. Just as Soviet citizens begin to see the disconnect between the official line and Pravda by the '70's, we are starting to slowly wake up to the fact that the last 50 years have been a pack of lies. The Vietnamese were never a threat to us. Nicaragua was not going to invade us in the '80's. Iraq was not going to nuke our cities.

Now the journalists will need to decide which side they are on. Are they going to continue to act as propagandists, as professional liars, or are they going to start spilling the beans? Where do they want to sit when the wall comes down?

It's deeper. The press didn't need to be as sophisticated (systematically) back in Vietnam. The eyes were less sophisticated - and the protests of the '60's erupted among the more media savvy kids. So the press developed in response. Reagan was smarter in terms of media than Nixon; the entire club learned from the media explosion of the '60's and incorporated the very tools of rebellion. But they haven't yet understood how to appropriate the blogs - the web in general.

This is part of what happened to the Soviets. They weren't nimble enough to handle the same changes in media in the east. They tried to shutdown the copy machines and the faxes; they blocked the introduction of computers. Their economy couldn't compete without those tools, of course. Records went from hand to hand, no matter what the bureaucracy tried, and they couldn't manage their clients who did have access to fax machines. But don't doubt that the New Russians are much better at handling these realities.

I recall during the Kosovo war that a radio station in Belgrade was shut down as an attempt by Milosevic to keep control (B4 or something like that). So they continued to broadcast on the web. The government shut down their web site, so they moved it outside Serbia. The government at the time didn't have China's fancy "Great Firewall" so that was the end of the matter - the radio station kept on playing through the rest of the war.

Either we dismiss such a normal, natural societal occurrence as 'conspiracy theory' or some other ideologically-flavored term, or we somehow carry on the tradition of magical American exceptionalism, in which the kinds of things we know to have shaped history for every other society just hasn't happened here.

Believing that it's all the hidden hand of the market is just magical thinking.