Letters to the Editor
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Inside Washington's and New York's Thoughtless Tanks
There is a class of academics and politicians who inhabit the world of diplomatic and think tank dinner parties. Membership spans both the right and left and they are all very chummy and cosy. Steve Clemon's in The Washington Note provides tidbits. This crowd is rarely afflicted by self-doubt. They cross the Atlantic and dine with their British and German friends, fret about being criticised for their noble efforts to bring peace to the Middle East and other places of unrest. Ambassadors of some European countries provide venues, food and drink. None of these people look emaciated, on the contrary.
They have no idea of the evil they have wrought in Iraq; they are in the mutual reinforcing business and they have a high opinion of themselves.
The pity is that they will continue whether there is a Democratic or Republican administration in 2009.
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Orville H. Lawson. @ 11 ; 47 (heh)
^ < snarky > ^
No more buttered pop-corn, cheese, beer, milk, soup, and off soon I'm going in the wild blue yonder. I'm gone if I ever get my laundry done and delegate a few green runs down the road.
I'll hire a lettuce green hack. OT~A polecat survey in hillbilly land reports : Pollack and 0' Hanlon are the amazing ill problems in our devastating world. 'Um pervert the truth. Oy!
I heard it's "not nice" to label people "stupid" or drop bombs on moms, dads, and new born infants. okay.
Sane persons prefer to giggle at the Orville read. ref; The Kennedy comment. Kennedy said, * "Well . .... she is old enough isn't she?" * I love that thought! I feel like going out and buy a pack O Lucky Strike smokes.
Visit a Hindu 'shrink' in India.
They seem to "act their age"...
In America? If four, act four.
Pollack & O'Hanlon Whores!
O`Honest. It's neocon war porn.
There's no need to stretch an imagination.
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Ask any wonder women or wonder man anywhere to shackle them to a tree after a fair trial?
O` pop-up 0`Hanlon and Pollack a last meal of buttered popcorn. Careful. Stone Walls have a hard backdrops and will cause a ricochet. It be just our luck that the big waist-band poster and cut wind paster, LWM, would get shot? Che can strap people to beds and give a test.No smack bra straps. (nonviolence)
Serve chickenhawk soup. Give a lie detector test. Ask if people like Susan MC's chicken rice soup. Force feed Anonymust's chocolate chip cookies. See if there are any physiological changes of those strapped to the gurney cot : Observe closely. Bystanders can help observe the many, casually. Report any "harsh interrogation TORTURE." E-mail the Attorney General and the FBI's foot patrols support group. Watch for serious body changes :; Sweaty palms, enlarged balls and nipples, dry heaves, or choking on the rancid DC's kool aide scum bags
"think-tank" Sewer!
Is it okay to call the murderous, the home-breakers, and the war=porn stars a WHORE. After the scum test is performed... HONEST probes.... Report if there has been a surge of those itchy microscopic scum invading their GOP skin. It's best to have LWM keep scrubbing 'um.
He scrubs a body with lard soap. The Lye soap suds work on the DC scum bags. Maybe later?
LWM will spray like a black and white skunk! Squirt a 55-gallon drum barrel of monkey crap!
0`Hanlon and Pollack smell worst than a cute skunk. 'Um have odors of Vicks Dung Dew.
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The neoconservative is "old enough" to be tried, and to be real.
Examined. Hold them responsible for peddling war's perversions.
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mikeinportc
Your numbers would make the 1/3 dead-displaced more within reach. I simply used the number posted at wiki, which says (I believe) 28 million, and I added 2 for those who fled to Syria/Jordan, etc.
But I think another point being made remains unchanged, regardless of the numbers used--that is the lack of knowlege about demographic changes brought on by the invasion and occupation, which fits as a piece with the lack of true analysis and coverage, the lack of war imagery being shown to the american people, etc. It's all part of sanitizing the consequences.
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The abstraction of abstraction
There is a sociopathy that you rightly note, Glenn, when we invent things like "think tanks." The Rise of the Vulcans made the case that the neocons were academics, as well. Despite the fact that none of them seem particularly intelligent, much less overwhelmingly so, the disconnect between those who consider matters as abstractions and those who consider them as realities is enormous.
O'Hanlon can be excused, like other "think tank" proponents, for looking at lives as if they were a multiple choice test in PoliSci 600. They have gotten into jobs that perpetuate the disconnect and unreality, and the original purpose of things like Rand was to provide a purely disconnected analysis to which those who could only see the real could appeal for perspective. It was never meant to be policy.
However, to this disconnection, to this sociopathic impulse, we can add the central distinction between Republican and Democrat: empathy. Those who dwell only in their own heads, own groins, or own checkbooks are liable to fall victim to the Republican appeal of egoism. If we marry the egoism of the contemporary Republican to the egoism of the think tank, we get the Iraq policy. O'Hanlon is not especially conservative or Republican, not delusional as Feith, and he is merely useless once people begin to bleed.
You can tell instantly that the disease here is the lie that academic thought carries no consequences by looking at the way that he equated the fate of a nation and the lives of thousands to a True/False quiz. Only the most hopelessly removed could conceive of such a thing, but also only the most gleefully powerless.
Some people still believe that they can be observers of history, that they can be analysts without any effect, that they can make statements like this and not be responsible for the dead. This is a lie.
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Mona: re Mao
I'm still gobsmacked by the dissonance of a very successful Chinese artist in America (he's much more successful now than he was when I interviewed him, but he was doing well then), delighted with the success and the money he'd found here, and yet still a thorogoing Maoist, utterly unrepentant for his actions during the Cultural Revolution, and still continuing some of it in his interactions with his former and once-again neighbor, who he'd actually helped to emigrate to this country! Yet he was still denouncing his neighbor, still lording it over him, just as he did when he was a Red Guard.
I've interviewed Soviet refugees who've told me of their suffering under the Nazis (it's almost impossible to imagine what happened to Russian and Ukrainian civilians under Nazi occupation, though sometimes it seems we've been trying to replicate it in our overseas satrapys.)
But they left the Soviet Union because of Communist oppression? Oh yes! Oh yes! Very oppressive! Were the Nazis worse? Oh much worse! We were all starving. Nobody went to school. People were rounded up and shot all the time. Whole families. We just kept our heads down, tried to survive.
Glorious Victory over the Nazis in 1945, the whole country went crazy with joy! What did you think of Stalin? He was a hero, but he was very cruel. Khrushchev? Ha! An idiot. The others who followed him? Drones and nonentities. Did not make life better, just tiresome, routine. People left the Soviet Union by the millions. The Jews, the Methodists, the Baptists. There was no reason to stay. If there was any way out, people took it. Can you blame them?
What about Gorbachev? Yes. Yes. Necessary. Too late to save the Soviet system. Too rotten for too long. Putin? A hero, too. He should have a tomb on Red Square, in the Kremlin wall. Did you know he's a religious man? Yes. Yes, he is.
But Putin was a KGB agent. Yes, yes, well everybody had to do something. It isn't like you were allowed any freedom. Of course you did what was expected, what you were told. Service to the State came first. I was a Young Pioneer. I knew what service was. Too many forgot. The higher they got in the Soviet system, the less they remembered of their duties to the masses. That's why it all fell to pieces. It was too rotten at the top. Putin didn't just remember his duties, he redoubled his service after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Would you go back to Russia or the Ukraine? No. Left it behind, there's nothing to go back to. It's all in the past. But things are better now? Some things, yes; some things, no. Maybe my grandkids will visit one day. Maybe not. "I would like to visit my homeland," says a grandchild. "But maybe not any time soon."
All the time I got the impression they were thinking of what might have been, what should have been, but what never was -- and still isn't. Whatever illusions of America they'd had were long since gone, too.
Totalitarianism really does a number on people. Hard, maybe impossible, to truly shake free of it.
Despite our spiral into Autocracy, we, the American People, have not yet succumbed to Totalitarianism. So far our rulers haven't sought to impose it. Who knows what they are planning for our future?
The near absence of resistance is telling, however. The less We, The People are prepared to risk or to do to preserve or restore the institutions of a self-governing constitutional republic, the more inevitable our Totalitarian future.