That is what Chris Dodd said Obama did not seem to understand when making pronouncements concerning Pakistan and first use of nuclear weapons.

Words most certainly do mean things. Throughout my formal education, from grade school through college, there were words that meant things, very important things, words that I should have been exposed to and was not. So many of the things I learned about our country -- its history, its politics, its values, its social institutions and its relationship to other nations -- I had to learn outside my formal education. If I had not pursued knowledge on my own, I would still not know many of the things that now form the basis for my understanding of this society and my place in it. I do not think I am alone in my experience.

For example, I knew nothing about the international arms trade until I saw a book from Jane's Defense lying on a coffee table at a friend's house in the late 1980s. I had never heard of Jane's. So I asked and was told about about Jane's International Defence Directory and the CIA Fact Book and a number of other related documents. So I informed myself. It was a real eye-opener. And although I had read Adam Smith and Marx and Keynes and had studied social psychology, sociology, history and political science in college, I knew next to nothing about global economics until I met and worked with a hedge fund manager/investment banker in the late 90s who gave me a beginner's course in commodities, international trade, tariffs, taxes and contract law. I learned how hedge funds and international supply chains worked. Another eye-opener. And finally, from one of my grad school art professors, I learned about the corporate use of intellectual property in international agriculture, pharma and manufacturing. It just doesn't stop.

After I had learned these things I went back and re-read the political writings of Zinn and Chomsky and nothing has been the same since.

I have absolutely no patience for scholars who do not do their homework. If any hard scientist were as wrong about the predictions of his or her hypotheses as the purported "scholars" in the foreign policy community have been about the outcomes resulting from US foreign policy, they would have no career. They would be a standing joke. These people are not scholars. Most of them are not even legitimate wonks. They are professional propagandists. They dress up opinion and ideology in white papers and call it strategy.

I'm with Obama on this. Our politicians should take it upon themselves to inform us and to educate us. They should tell us what they think, not what they want us to think. We've had enough misinformation, secrets and second-guessing in the past six years on the parts of our government, military and foreign policy establishment to last more than a lifetime.

We need an educated and informed public. An informed public would be in a position to tell the politicians and the analysts what to do and not the other way around. That's how a democracy should work.

Has anyone done an academic family tree for the people who are insiders in the foreign policy community? In my field, there are only a handful of academic advisors and two or three academic grand-advisors. Might be interesting to see if their orthodoxy starts in grad school.

there are only so many hours in the day, and these people have important things to think about and accomplish. It's all they can do to keep up their trivial debates with one another, much less have to take precious time out to address laypeople like yourself and your quaint thoughts about very very serious and difficult issues that you can likely only barely comprehend, if at all.

It's like when sophomores in college think they are smarter than their tenured professors. I mean you are a precocious chap, and no doubt your peers (like the sophomore's) might be impressed with your "insights" (which only goes to show how naive they are), but really ... that doesn't mean the professor must debate you before the whole school. The professors have nothing to gain from such a exchange. Indeed, they only risk losing face when you make some naive argument the audience, in its ignorance, buys, and which the professor cannot set right because the audience is too stupid to understand the subtle and difficult points that ultimately show the professor to be correct.

Linking to an Obama talking points paper? And honestly, can't someone from Harvard do better than to repeat herself again and again? Obama was right, conventional (HRC) thinking was wrong. [Therefore, Obama is always right and conventional (HRC) thinking is always wrong.] We Americans may be stupid and naive, but most of us aren't so deaf that we have to have the same ten words repeated at us 7 or 8 times per thousand.

I have seen references to the same bunch of so-called foreign policy experts as comprising the "security class." They have enormous influence over policy makers of both major parties.

There is an equally wooden-headed group of political consultants who advise the Democratic Party leadership. Somehow, election after election, they manage to hold onto their positions, despite being spectacularly wrong about so many things. What they and their paymasters have in common is that they fear the progressive wing of the Democratic Party more than they fear the Republican Party. Also they have a condescending attitude towards progressives, whom they see as being soft-headed. Of course the opposite is true. Progressives want Democrats to fight hard, while the consultant class want them to play nice. If the boat gets rocked too hard, some of them might fall overboard.

but most of us aren't so deaf that we have to have the same ten words repeated at us 7 or 8 times per thousand.

We're having a serious policy debate about whether it's a good idea to use a nuke to take out 100 guys in a cave!!!

Tell me again how attentive we've all been to important questions? And how reasonable "conventional wisdom" is. And just WHO we should be listening to?