Monday, December 30, 2013

A neocon’s annual wrap-up

In the interest of tying up some loose ends, here are a few updates before the new year.
  • Principle, What Principle?
Remember how 2013 began with much ado over Al Gore’s unseemly $500 million sale of Current TV network to Al-Jazeera, aka “the Muslim Brotherhood channel”? Even anything-for-a-buck Time Warner Cable saw fit to drop the Qatar-owned “news” organization from its package. Well, TWC this month announced that, yes, it will be bringing Al-Jazeera America into 55 million American homes after all. “Financial terms weren’t disclosed,” USA Today reported.
  • The Few. The Proud. The Gender-Normed.
Remember how, with a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role would be off-limits to women? Call it the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. But hold on about “equal.” As Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has reported, “gender-norming” is the Pentagon’s idea of “equal.”

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Neocon WSJ editor sits down with France’s Iran critic

Gerard Baker is an Iraq War-cheerleading neocon, goofball Obama ridiculer, and author of some of the wrongest commentary of the financial crisis.

He’s also editor of The Wall Street Journal.

And earlier this week he had a byline in the paper. It’s always worth a second look when a paper’s editor gets a byline and so it is with Baker’s. Here’s the headline:
France Voices Doubt on Iran Nuclear Deal

Foreign Minister Fabius Concerned Tehran Won’t Drop Ability to Build a Bomb
Read the entire article 

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Former CIA Head: Snowden “Should Be Hanged By The Neck Until He Is Dead”

In a statement that conjures images of the middle ages, former CIA chief and all round globalist neocon James Woolsey said on live TV Tuesday that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be hanged for treason.

Woolsey’s latest comments echo those of fellow arch-neocon, Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who said this week that Snowden should “swing from a tall oak tree” as punishment for exposing NSA spying.

Read the entire article

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Neocons target Ukraine in “Orange Crush”

The neocons are still alive and active as ever inside Secretary of State John Kerry’s State Department. Kerry’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, who previously served as Hillary Clinton’s State Department mouthpiece, has threatened sanctions against Ukraine.
Ukraine, which resisted efforts by the European Union to integrate it into Europe’s banker-led federation of austerity and poverty, came into the EU’s cross hairs after it abandoned talks with Brussels and Berlin in favor of an economic union with Russia. That move triggered off what can be described as the “Second Orange Revolution,” a mass street uprising in Kyiv’s Maidan (Independence) Square that demanded the resignation of Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and government.

Monday, December 16, 2013

A neocon message on Ukraine

Neoconservative Bolton cites Obama's weakness in Ukraine's civil conflict. Presumably to appear balanced, he mentions that Republicans also overlook this issue.

Is Bolton running out of complaints about Obama, or is this simply a lame excuse to launch into such propaganda as "the failure of America's national leadership," "Obama's inattention to national security," "hard to imagine that Obama gives even a passing thought to Ukraine's drama" and, my favorite, "if America lacks such leaders, we face no higher priority than finding new ones, and fast"?

Read the entire article

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Michael Rubin Keeps Pushing For 'Regime Change' In Iran

Neocon Michael Rubin has been calling for “regime change” in Iran for many years. In other words, letting people on the other side of the Earth decide their own fate is out of the question. In his eyes, it’s the job of the United States government (using our hard earned money) to install a government for the Iranians.
That the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was in reaction (i.e., blowback) to the U.S. pulling the strings in Iran with its puppet dictator (the Shah) doesn’t seem to make a difference. Rubin won’t let a bunch of clerics throw the U.S. out of their affairs, and let them get away with it; even 30 years later.

If there’s one thing that neocon foreign policy has proven in the Middle East, it’s that every stone that is overturned must have the U.S. seal of approval. Iran has bucked the system, and nothing less than removal of the clerics will satisfy Michael Rubin.


Read the entire article

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Neocons Twist Iran’s Anti-Nuke Fatwa

In the wake of the preliminary nuclear deal with Iran, the Washington Post’s “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, has questioned whether Obama administration officials should have taken the anti-nuclear fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seriously. But the column is less a disinterested investigation of the truth about the issue than a polemic that leans clearly toward the related position of Israel, AIPAC and their congressional supporters.

After quoting Secretary of State John Kerry’s acknowledgment in November of Khamenei’s fatwa against the possession or use of nuclear weapons, Kessler referred to it as “the alleged fatwa” and as a “diplomatic MacGuffin”. A “McGuffin” is a device that moves the plot forward but, as Kessler put it, is “unimportant to the overall story”.

'NYT' and Post won't tell us why Dems are abandoning Obama on Iran deal

Writing in The Forward, former George W. Bush administration official and life-long neocon, Noam Neusner… [writes] They can’t support Obama’s Iran achievement because these Democrats are “the men and the women, after all, who are on a first-name basis with most of the board of AIPAC” and “they want to be in Washington long after Obama leaves the White House.”
Anyone who has any doubt about what Neusner is talking about should note his reference to the Democrats’ “first name” relationship with the AIPAC board. He doesn’t just refer to the lobby or to AIPAC in general. He certainly does not refer to Jewish American voters who tend to be part of the Democratic party’s progressive wing and are no fans of Netanyahu’s or his paranoid visions. No, he refers to the AIPAC board which is composed of AIPAC’s wealthiest members, the ones who decide who the lobby will support (or try to defeat) in November 2014.

Let's Give Netanyahu and the Neocons a Mandela Moment | RSN

How far should we push our attack on Netanyahu and the neocons? In an earlier column, I accused the Israeli leader and his supporters of "dealing from the bottom of the deck, consciously stirring up irrational fear of a second Holocaust at the hands of Iran simply to bolster Israel's strategic role as a regional super power." They are still doing exactly that, and I'm even more convinced that "Jews and non-Jews alike should reject this as the cynical ploy it is."
But this is just an analytical starting point. We need to act in a way that makes the point to Congress, grabs Netanyahu's attention, and perhaps saves "the nightmare man" from himself. As the top-notch Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote last month in Haaretz, the success of sanctions in persuading Iran to seek a negotiated settlement suggests that similar sanctions "will get Israel to end the occupation" of the West Bank. The first step, he argues, is the movement now building in Europe and the United States to boycott the settlements.

Friday, December 06, 2013

Neocon Heads Explode Over Iran Deal

With this past week’s news of a tentative deal between the “P5 + 1″ (read: the U.S. + a few puppet governments) and Iran that would – theoretically and hopefully – ease sanctions while guaranteeing that Iran will not be attacked by the United States – it should come as no surprise that the usual neocon talking heads are in a tizzy about it. Setting aside the ridiculous notion that people halfway across the world should have to get “permission” from the United States or other countries to pursue certain technologies, any step towards peace and away from war should be seen as a positive.

Let’s take a quick look around the Neocon Rogues Gallery:

Jeffrey Goldberg seethes over at Bloomberg:

Read the entire article

Thursday, December 05, 2013

How France became the neocons’ favourite nation

What happened to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Just over a decade ago, the French, having refused to join the allied adventure in Iraq, were the butt of every hawkish joke. (Remember ‘Freedom fries’? Oh how we laughed.) Now, as America and Britain are beating a retreat from the world stage, France has turned into the West’s most reliable interventionist. Its President, the disaster-prone François Hollande, rattles his sabre at any despot or war criminal who dares to stand in the way of liberté, egalité, or fraternité.

American neoconservatives — the War Party in Washington — have turned Francophile as a result. ‘Vive la France!’ tweeted Senator John McCain, America’s most insatiable hawk, after the French tried (unsuccessfully in the end) to scupper the deal between the world’s leading powers and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear development programme. ‘Thank God for France,’ added Senator Lindsey Graham, another arch-neocon, ‘The French are becoming very good leaders in the Mid East.’ One contributor to the right-wing American magazine the National Review suggested that President Hollande should run for the White House in 2016.

Read the entire article

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

JFK : neocon ahead of his time

Let me express my agreement with Wall Street Journal favorite, Ira Stoll, who in "JFK, Conservative" has written a polemic showing that if Kennedy were alive today and pursuing the policies he did during his presidency, we would consider him a conservative.

What Stoll means is that Kennedy was a neoconservative before his time. He was a liberal internationalist in foreign affairs, who affirmed America's mission to bring "human rights" to everyone on the planet. Moreover, while Kennedy contributed to the incremental growth of the federal welfare state, he also enacted with congressional approval a reduction of marginal tax rates for the wealthy. He practiced supply side economics before Reagan, the purpose of which is to increase the government's intake of taxes by allowing more money to be invested in the private sector.


Read the entire article

Monday, December 02, 2013

Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Deal Show Neocon Influence on Her Presidential Run?

People have noticed the silence of former Secretary of State and widely presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry. Where does she stand? How long can she dodge? And how long can former President Bill Clinton dodge?
It's not like the Clintons have gone into seclusion on public affairs in general or U.S. foreign policy in particular.
The Hill reports that Hillary is urging Congress not to cut U.S. aid to the Afghan government as U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan. In early September, Hillary issued a statement supporting President Obama's effort to seek authorization from Congress for bombing Syria. Then she welcomed Russia's proposal that Syria place its chemical weapons under international control.

The Neocons Go Nuclear

The neocons are testing their remaining strength in Official Washington by firing off rhetorical bombs against President Obama and his interim agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear program, including absurd comparisons to Hitler and Munich, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By now most readers know that the five permanent member nations of the UN Security Council – the United States, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom – plus Germany,  (referred to as the P5+1) have reached a six-month interim diplomatic settlement with the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding its nuclear program.

Read the entire article

Sunday, December 01, 2013

Iran Nuke Pact Defies the Neocons

For anyone who genuinely wants to avoid an Iranian nuclear weapon and whose attitude toward the nuclear negotiations with Iran has not been shaped by some other agenda, the “Joint Plan of Action” that was agreed to in Geneva last weekend is a major achievement that deserves enthusiastic applause.
Without delving into minutiae that understandably would spin the heads of most Americans who are not nuclear technology enthusiasts, several key attributes of this agreement stand out.