Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Neocons Dig in to Bomb-Bomb Iran

It has not been a smooth month for those who want to keep Iran in pariahdom forever and thus seek to kill any international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The sanctions bill that is the deal-killers’ principal vehicle at the moment and is in the Senate Banking Committee has not been attracting the hoped-for Democratic co-sponsors.

The strong position taken on the issue by President Barack Obama obviously is a major reason for this. And however unlikely this may seem with almost anything that happens these days in Congress, reason and good sense have probably had some effect — among those who realize that the bill adds no negotiating value whatever in threatening additional sanctions on an Iran that already knows full well such sanctions would follow any breakdown of negotiations.

Monday, January 26, 2015

When you're right, you're right: The realists vs. liberal neocons on the Mideast

Despite 13 years of evidence to the contrary, many Americans are still under the mistaken impression that the so-called "neo" conservatives are hard-headed realists.

Nope. They' re pure fantasists who follow a philosophy descended from the thinking of Leon Trotsky. It's old-time conservatives like Pat Buchanan (see note above) and me who are the realists. We don't believe the U.S. military should be used to perform the social work needed to "liberate" our potential enemies in the Muslim world and help them create functioning democracies.

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Outdoing Dr. Goebbels: The propaganda war against RT

The reason for these attacks is fear. What is clear is that the success of RT has caused real panic in the ranks of the west’s neo-con/‘liberal interventionist’ elite.

RT urges us to question more – and questioning more is the very last thing that the elites in the west want us to do. They want us to accept hook, line and sinker THEIR narrative of world events – a narrative which told us that Iraq possessed WMDs which could be deployed within 45 minutes and which posed a threat to the entire world. A narrative which told us that Muammar Gaddafi was ‘massacring his own people’ and so, for the benefit of the Libyan people, who our leaders cared so much about – we had to have a ‘humanitarian intervention’.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Pitiful Neocon Hit Piece Exposes a Rand Paul Blogger for Not Loving War

The neoconservative Washington Free Beacon has discovered  some amazing inside information relating to Sen. Rand Paul's likely presidential run: some of Sen. Paul's supporters—get this—oppose endless military intervention.
That's not news to anyone here; it's not news to anyone, anywhere, in fact. And yet The Free Beacon has dedicated 700 words to the cause of chronicling one Paul campaign blogger's very ordinary libertarian views. Here's how the The WFB headlines its piece on Marianne Copenhaver (a.k.a. "Libertarian Girl" ), who was hired part-time to do social media work for Paul:

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

‘Neocon Fantasy’ American Sniper Gets People ‘Cheering’ for More War

Liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald sparred with ex-Congressman Patrick Murphy on MSNBC today over the movie American Sniper, which Greenwald denounced as a war-hungry “neocon fantasy.”

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Greenwald argued the film sends the message that “there is no good Iraqi except for a dead Iraqi. Murphy, a veteran himself, shot back that Greenwald’s exaggerating and isn’t considering how the movie humanizes Iraqis who worked with Americans to stop the real enemy.

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Sunday, January 18, 2015

Neocons: The ‘Anti-Realists’

The primary distinction between the neocons and the liberal interventionists has been the centrality of Israel in the neocons’ thinking while their liberal sidekicks put “humanitarianism” at the core of their world view. But these differences are insignificant, in practice, since the liberal hawks are politically savvy enough not to hold Israel accountable for its human rights crimes and clever enough to join with the neocons in easy-to-sell “regime change” strategies toward targeted countries with weak lobbies in Washington.

In those “regime change” cases, there is also a consensus on how to handle the targeted countries: start with “soft power” – from anti-regime propaganda to funding internal opposition groups to economic sanctions to political destabilization campaigns – and, then if operationally necessary and politically feasible, move to overt military interventions, applying America’s extraordinary military clout.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

“American Sniper” movie: ruinous neocon propaganda

Purchase a copy of  Michael Hoffman's review of Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-nominated movie, American Sniper" 

Review Title: A Sheep Dog Tricked into Serving the Wolves

Format: PDF file sent to the e-mail address you provide.

Length: The review is 3700 words and ten pages in length.

Price: It sells for $1.50 online, only through the link below.

“American Sniper” is reviewed by revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, who deconstructs this ruinous neocon propaganda and analyzes the clever manipulation techniques that power Eastwood's brilliant and thrilling movie-length commercial for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. 

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The crazy US 'groupthink' on Russia

Has anyone in Official Washington thought through the latest foreign policy “group think,” the plan to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia? All the “smart” people, including the New York Times editors, are rubbing their hands with glee over the financial crisis being imposed on Russia because of the Ukraine crisis, but no one, it seems, is looking down the road.

This reckless strategy appears to be another neocon-driven “regime change” scheme, this time focused on Moscow with the goal to take down Russian President Vladimir Putin and presumably replace him with some U.S. puppet, a Russian-speaking Ahmed Chalabi perhaps. Since the neocons have never faced accountability for the Iraq disaster – when the conniving Chalabi was their man – they are still free to dream about a replay in Russia.


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Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Will Jim Webb Be Democrats’ Anti-Hillary?

While many, if not all, Republican-leaning realists have—and for good reason, considering the alternatives—decided early on to hitch their wagon to Rand Paul’s star, might there be a realist option for those on the other side of the great political divide? The putative 2016 Democratic primary lineup, dominated as it is by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would seem at first glance to offer scant hope for realists, not least because Clinton herself seems to be completely held captive to the reigning neoconservative magical thinking on issues as diverse as Syria, Russia, the utility and rightness of the surveillance state, and the supposed threat posed to American interests by the IS group.

Astute analysts like The National Interest’s Jacob Heilbrunn and former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb have both written that there are abundant signs that the neoconservatives, supreme political opportunists that they are, have been playing footsie with the former Secretary of State, with neoconservative-in-chief Robert Kagan going so far as to re-brand himself as a “liberal interventionist” in the hope of snagging a high-level appointment in what he clearly hopes will be a third Clinton term. And why wouldn’t he? Even a cursory look at Mrs. Clinton’s record reveals a politician only too eager to try and turn neoconservative fantasy into actual policy.

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Thursday, January 01, 2015

2015: “Year of the Militaristic Neocons”: Looming Global Financial Crisis and Wars?

These days, militaristic Neoconservatives, or Neocons, have near complete control of the American government under the façade of whoever is president at the time. They direct U.S. policies at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the U.S. Treasury and at the Fed central bank. They are thus in position to influence and frame American foreign policy, military policy, economic and financial policies and monetary policy.
This was not the case before the Ronald Reagan administration (1981-1989) when the latter adopted a neocon-inspired “muscular foreign policy” based on military intervention abroad, perpetual war, arbitrary regime changes, and imperial worldwide governance in any matters deemed to be in American interests and of that of its close allies. Even though they fared less well under the George H. Bush administration (1989-1993), when they were considered the “crazies in the basement”, they resumed their ascendance within the American government under the Bill Clinton administration (1993-2001) with the U.S.-led Kosovo war and with the irresponsible dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act, thus paving the way for the 2008 worldwide financial crisis.