Skip to main content

Sarah Palin. Neocon Messiah

For an outsider, a non-American, it hard to see how Sarah Palin is seemingly gaining so much traction. It's even more startling when one hears and reads how she described by her followers.

Robert Scheer, writing on truthdig.com provides a background to what he describes as Sarah Palin being seen as the "neocon's Messiah":

"Judge them by their enemies. More evidence that Barack Obama might be shaping up as a good president is that Norman Podhoretz hates him so much. In a Wall Street Journal column Monday the guru of the neoconservatives declared: “I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”

I know that does not properly address all of the serious questions raised about the Obama presidency by progressives, myself included, and as of today we must now add offshore oil drilling to the list. But it is somewhat reassuring that the surviving father of the neocon movement should be left so totally unglued. He is joined in this embrace of the Palin rage by Bill Kristol, whose late father, Irving, was Podhoretz’s comrade in the long march from the far left to the far right. That shift brought the neoconservatives to the pinnacle of power in the Bush administration before they flamed out over the distortions of fact and logic they peddled as justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Among other things—and this was particularly important for Podhoretz, who for 35 years had edited Commentary, a leading journal in the Jewish community—the elimination of Saddam Hussein was supposed to leave Israel more secure. Instead, just the opposite has occurred as a consequence of the vastly increased power of Iran in the region thanks to the elimination of its most feared local adversary. Any effort to contain the power of Iran has been compromised by the leading role of the disciples of the Iranian ayatollahs in the politics of Iraq."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...