Or do they feel people in the US are too scared to think about the world without blinders on?

It depends on which blinders you're talking about. The American people definitely have a s set of blinders on when it comes to evil acts committed in their name. As the Beauchamp affair demonstrates (and the Dixie Chicks affair before), there is a lot of discomfort associated with the fact that the business of soldiers is killing and that killing is an inherently evil act. While I won't suggest that killing is never justified, I will point out that in all cases it NEEDS to be justified. This creates a dissonance in the minds of many people.

And whenever someone says or writes or says something whice brings this dissonance to the fore, it needs to be SHOUTED down.

One of the best movie depictions of these Serious Thinkers is the character of Professor Groeteschele played by Walter Matthau in the 1964 film Fail Safe. The opening sequence with Matthau in his tuxedo entertaining other guests at a tony dinner party which has lasted all night with theoretical discussions about thermonuclear war is, I suspect, rather on the money.

This is a wonderful demonstration of the "serious," "experts," and their collective urging regarding the impending 6-month window of decisive moment remaining in the Iraq war...

I highly recommend you view this site...hysterical...I think Tom Friedman wins the "expert" race!!!!

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/08/timeline.html/

cliff

Funny, I didn't realize you went after scholars hard.

I thought you went after people who wrote naive, polyanna-ish op-eds in the New York Times hard.

The problem with these self-styled scholars is that they want to engage in political discourse and shape public opinion, but they find accountability and actual debate distasteful and "unserious."

They can't have it both ways. I'll treat him like a scholar when he stays in ivory-tower academe. The moment he appears in my newspaper, he has to play by other rules.

And then these Very Serious People go on Fox News? Puh-Leeze!

Quoting Glenn's excellent article: "...but instead on the ground that he committed the sin of actually discussing with the American people what our foreign policy would be."

Excuse me? Perhaps when half the adult American population can point to France on an outline of Europe there would be grounds for participation? Until then, the world's complexities force the American public into choosing personalities. Seems to me that virtually every politician, senior government official and most MSM pundits already know this.

The thing one has to understand about foreign policymakers is that, unlike political journalists, they're part of, or party to, the apparatus of government, not critically distant from it. Foreign policy people have a sort of code, part of which states that you serve the elected government of the day irrespective of your own politics.

It was this "code" which led the large part of the American foreign policy apparatus, especially that which existed within the government itself, to reflexively support the Bush regime's projects. Many of them rolled their eyes at Bush's ignorant pronouncements, but that was hardly anything exceptional. They get ignorant pronouncements from politicians all the time, because you, the American people, can't be bothered to educate yourselves well enough to not keep electing idiots.

(Plus it helped significantly that affable, engaged Colin Powell replaced brittle, distant Madeline Albright at the State Department -- from personal observation I honestly think that did a lot to lull the foreign policy crowd into a critical extra few months of happy indifference to Bush.)

The thing is, over the last 6 years there has been a completely unprecedented phenomenon within American foreign policy circles, as diplomats, foreign service operatives, policymakers, and scholars (yes, they're at least as much scholars as economists, which may not be saying much but that's a completely separate subject) have been abandoning their posts, sometimes writing impassioned, desperate cries for help from their fellow citizens in stopping this dude and his degenerate regime.

At the same time there has been an almost as equally unprecedented purge by the regime itself, which has demanded more than just the traditional code of neutrality as the price for continued insidership.

So yeah, the ones that are left on the "inside" are jerkoffs, echoes of Dean Acheson's (ostensibly liberal) cadre that blundered from war to war in Southeast Asia without ever once having an inkling of what they were doing wrong. (And sometimes more than echoes -- I'm sure there are some familiar faces still around.)

But as the recent memo illustrates, there are also competent, energetic, open-minded people in the scene, waiting for a government that recognizes and rewards those characteristics. We Americans have yet to provide them with one, nor have we remained engaged in questions of foreign policy once we do.

It's our right to not give a good god-damn, but let's not complain about what we get if we don't.

I'm still waiting for one mainstream foreign policy "scholar" to question whether we actually have the right to invade sovereign countries or interfere in their domestic affairs. Some of them have been more enthusiastic than others vis-a-vis the Iraq invasion, but none that I know of actually said-wait a minute, who died and made us the masters of the universe?

Hillary Clinton would turn America's foreign policy into an incident of empire.

In a constitutional democracy like ours that vests practically unbridled foreign policy power in a president, there's no way to rein it in except through regularly staged "accountability moments." These she and others like her would demote to a ritualistic plebiscite that ratifies a candidate on his or her "leadership qualities" with only a scant and generally misleading idea where the person will lead us. Then, when disaster strikes, the president can point back at us and say, "You put me here." The Beltway and its attendants do their utmost to perpetuate the ritual between elections, in ways that need no explaining to Glenn's regular readers.

Three quotes from Clinton in that AFL-CIO debate show this mentality at work on the hustings:

"I do not believe people running for President should engage in hypotheticals …" But it's fine to spin hypos about "them" coming here if we don't fight them there over there or to float other dire "end of life as we know it" scenarios. These fall outside her maxim, since they whoop up the unwashed in line with conventional wisdom or, rather, get from them a blank check (since one can always relent and give them the peace they crave so badly).

Referring to action in Pakistan: "I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that." But if it's a question about nuking Iran, that's different. There she repeatedly said, "Nothing is off the table." A "No comment" followed by an explanation like her lecture to Obama would done, and more neutrally. Nukes you can telegraph; no nukes is too confining.

"You can think big, but remember: you shouldn't always say everything you think if you're running for President because it has consequences across the world and we don't need that right now." Right. This fits to a tee George W. Bush's strategy in 2000. Iraq was on his brain, yet he talked small, about no nation-building. His thoughts, of course, were none of our stinkin' business.

In short: to Hillary's way of thinking, the conventional wisdom trumps the wisdom of the crowd every time. Yet at the mic it's hidden in doubletalk. Or is it doublethink? For the life of me, I can't tell.