Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 7:08:42 PM     I find this essay hopeful, reminding us of an America that can be, because it (sort of) was. http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts44.html Neoconservatives Are Anti-American When Bush says that torture is not indicative of American values, he is speaking of the old America, the America of restraint, the America that did not believe that the ends justify the means, a classically educated America that understood that hubris brings nemesis. The new emerging America is Jacobin. Its will to power has cast off restraint. Its inherent and unique virtue gives it the right - Bush says the duty - to exercise unlimited power in the name of enforcing American values elsewhere in the world. The new aggressive spirit of America is embodied in the neoconservative ideology that drives the Bush administration. Professor Claes Ryn describes this new spirit in his recent book, America the Virtuous. It is an imperialistic spirit whose arrogant moral purpose justifies mowing down whatever is seen to stand it its way. Those most imbued with this spirit are trapped firmly within it. If Iraqis resist military imposition of US values, then they must be "thugs and outlaws" deserving to be exterminated for standing in the way of America?s virtue and superior morality. Only evil people would resist the good we are imposing on them. Thus has Bush cast the conflict as one of good vs. evil. Some US soldiers have caught the spirit that Bush has infused into the conflict. If you pay attention to Bush?s speeches, you will see that he is trying to infuse this spirit into the American people. Beware. It is an evil spirit. Because it brooks no objection, it will bring a police state at home and death and destruction abroad, just as the Jacobins brought to 18th century France and Europe. Americans must understand that the neo-Jacobin spirit that guides the Bush administration is anti-American. It is not unpatriotic to resist this spirit. It is the same evil spirit that motivated Deutschland uber alles (Germany over all). Just as the Nazi claim to be the master race trumped all traditional moral standards, the neoconservatives claim that America is uniquely virtuous justifies America?s domination over the rest of the world. Unless Americans stand firm against this spirit, Americans will endure endless wars and great disasters. May 5, 2004 Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 10:43:07 AM     This is an amazin specimen of Bush's thinking, the landscape of concepts.. Secondly, in order to make good decisions, I've got to listen to smart people. I like to be around smart, intelligent, capable people. I like to walk into a roomful of people like Condi Rice -- (applause) -- Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld or Colin Powell. (Applause.) I like to tell people the Oval Office is the powerful place. People will stand outside the Oval Office, and they say, I can't wait to get in there and tell him what for. And then they open the door, and they walk in this majestic shrine to democracy, and they're overwhelmed by the atmosphere. And they say, man, you're looking beautiful, Mr. President. (Laughter.) Which means, you better have people around you who tell you the truth. (Laughter.)" Pat of what is interesting is that he clearly is being made aware that he is being portrayed as not talking to even small groups of people in the whitehouse. ********

Posted here Wednesday, May 05, 2004 at 9:18:20 AM     This excellent quote from Counterpunch from C Wright Mills http://www.counterpunch.org/ Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quagmire By GILBERT ACHCAR In an important book first published in 1958 and unjustifiably underrated since- probably due to its title, The Causes of World War Three, referring to the tensest years of the Cold War-C. Wright Mills expressed views the relevance of which should be obvious today. I consider these views central to any understanding of modern U.S. politics. That is why I hope you will excuse me if I quote some of them at length: "[I]n those societies in which the means of power are enormous in scope and centralized in form a few men [in the following sentences, we may now ad: "and women"­G.A.] may be so placed within the historical structure that by their decisions about the use of these means they modify the structural conditions under which most men live." "At the top [of the United States] there has emerged an elite whose power probably exceeds that of any small group of men in world history, the Soviet elite possibly excepted. The middle levels are often a drifting set of stalemated forces; the middle does not link the bottom with the top." "Corporation men move into the political directorate, and the decline of Congressional politicians to the middle levels of power is accelerated. The legislative function often becomes merely a balancing of sovereign localities and partial interests Behind the increased official secrecy great decisions are made without benefit of public or even of Congressional debate." "The leading men of the U.S. government--the political directorate-are neither professional party politicians nor professional civil servants; they are former generals and former corporation men or the hangers-on of the higher business and legal circles. The state in which we live, in its personnel and in its persistent outlook, does indeed appear at times as a committee of these ruling circles of corporation and high military." At the time of his writing, Mills ascribed to these ruling circles a foreign policy based on what he called "crackpot realism." They are "so rigidly focused on the next step that they become creatures of whatever the main drift-the opportunist actions of innumerable men-brings In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands." ********