A policy we desperately need.
Posted by olvlzl.
Listening to the usual AEI crowd, and now that should always stand for Aristocratic, Establishment Idiots, pushing the Bush escalation of his failed war in Iraq before his speech, it seemed time to bring this up again. Until there are absolute, negative consequences for the guess pool dross, the talking heads, the university based hacks and their op-ed equivalents, there will be no reason for them to stop lying us into immoral and illegal disasters. Until their careers as flacks for imperial policies earn them and their media hosts universal contempt, they will get another chance in another war in another place. Ken Adleman on Diane Rehm the other day saying that success of the Bush escalation was unlikely but that it should be done anyway was among the more irresponsible things I’ve heard since Condi Rice making excuses for not trying to stop the Israeli-Lebanese war last summer.
If they got the contempt that their lies in the service of a corrupt oligarchy have earned them and if they lost their influence in public policy they would be left with only their war profiteering. That would be a damper on this most revolting neo-con job. As it is they get to profiteer while promoting wars to profit from.
There have to be even greater prices paid for the Iraq disaster than being asked a few moderately pointed questions before the stultus quo equilibrium of contemporary talk media is reestablished. The Republican Party has a horrible track record of criminality and incompetence going back to Nixon, it is a party whose interests do not lie with those of the American People or the world in general. They are a party of the privileged few and the psychotically superstitious. And there has to be a price for an ideology which has brought us Iraq and the rest of the Bush family crimes.
Conservatism is an ideology that has gotten its test of time and it has failed it miserably. Conservatism as defined after World War Two is a failure. Its failure is clear from the past six years when it had control of the United States government. It failed to secure the country, it failed to control government spending, it failed to bring prosperity to the American People, it not only failed to protect but eroded our civil liberties. Conservatism did succeeded in bringing about the worst foreign policy disaster in our history and it also produced a world which is immeasurably more dangerous and it’s getting worse. The Republican congress that ended last year was certainly one of the worst. Conservatism is known to have failed because with Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes it has brought us a series of what are demonstrably the most corrupt presidencies in our history.
Yet our establishment and its media keep having the same conservative liars on to cover up their known failings with new lies. It looks more every day as if what we need most of all is a new media.
You can start by looking at their words. Anyone who is still saying “surge” is a Republican stooge. They’re the ones using the word “Democrat” as an adjective, as in “the Democrat Party”, “The Democrat Congressman” or “The Democrat Speaker of the House”, all three of which I heard on the radio and TV this week. Even the BBC, post Hutton Report version, uses it now. Robert Dole made that usage the equivalent of “nigger” for Democrats, they should be called on it every time until they’re shamed out of it. And it’s even more important for them to call an escalation what it is and not some Republican market tested lie.