Boo Hoo. Like Viet Nam made any difference. Same con job, same con war. Viet Nam vets run the flag up the pole and send their kids off to die in the next armed Peace Corps operation.

In spite of all evidence to their stupidity, Neo-cons are still the darling pundits of the main stream media. The Republican and Democrat parties are run by neo-cons who are bought off by the Merchants of Death and other corporations.

I was listening to Gen Sanchez on CSPAN yesterday. The Army was betrayed by a few bad eggs in the White House. It wasn’t their fault. America was betrayed by the liberals and the media. The Military tried to warn them but Rumsfeld and Bush wouldn’t listen.  In other words the same things the German generals said when they returned from the trenches.

great post! Too bad that some other people end-up paying for Kaplan’s mistakes, while he gets paid to write a book about it… These guys never lose!

Chances are, we’ll be hearing quite a few “culpas” from the neocons in coming months. After all, it’s mid-spring and they’re feeling the chill in Dumboland. This wrap-up of the GOP’s elephantine woes is via yesterday’s Politico.com:

“In a piece published in Human Events, the Republicans’ onetime captain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, warned his old colleagues that they face “real disaster” on Election Day unless they move immediately to “chart a bold course of real reform” for the country.”

“And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.”

I smell write-off. The party will hold off and hope President Obama amateurishly bobbles the ball - and they can re-emerge in 2012. Or - GORSH! - 2016.

This year is tubbed: McCain fronts a package lobbied-up and neocon-heavy, and he can’t/won’t shake off the Iraq War from the bottom of his shoe. Add to that his economic grounding seems limited to abacus technology - and his recovery ideas offer crumbcake to restive peasants - and the Republicans are looking at disaster, top to tip.

This could be an ass-kicking a’la 1932, when Hoover’s intransigence and inaction in THAT desperate era turned out the party for two fat decades. If that occurs this year, there’s NO WAY the neocons won’t be hung with the debacle; they will, overnight Nov. 4, become as welcome as a smoldering fart at a perfume counter.

That’s the upside, come the fall.

Kaplan: “If one says that you can’t democratize Iraq because they are Iraqis or Arabs, one is really taking a step into outer space in the sense that you then have to embrace arguments about culture and pursue a certain relativism that I am not ready to embrace.”

What Jewish ideologues, Neocons, left-liberal internationalist Neolibs and even One World Capitalist-materialists don’t like is the idea that it takes a Western Christian foundation to make liberal democracy work, or a liberal democracy with a strong Christian foundation and life-force (which was the case in post WWII America) to impose a liberal democracy on the non-Western, non Christian world (ie Japan).

It now seems clear that Christian-hating ideologues have been carrying out a two-stage scheme in the US for some decades: stage 1) eradicate Christianity in America; stage 2) engineer a post-Christian America’s invasion of foreign countries (ie Iraq, Yugoslavia) and impose a successful “liberal democracy.” And woolah, you have “proven” that the liberal democracy can be attained without the hated Christianity.

The problem is, their master plan is a proven disaster. But the stiff-necked can be stubborn animals.

I would suggest to Kaplan and other Christian-haters to take their theories to, say, Israel, and prove it can be done absent the Christian ethic by turning the Jewish state into a liberal democracy with a liberal democratic constitution.

Heal thyself, Kaplan.

Newton the Adulterer is probably right. But after years in power and especially with complete control of the government they have zero credibility to start preaching how terrible they were but they have learned their lesson now. This generation of pols need to wander in the wilderness for 40 years until they all die off.

Nobody wants to intervene in Darfur for two reasons: one, it is a logistical nightmare, and; two, it isn’t our problem. Concerning the first point, sustaining a modern army in a country the size of Texas with no infrastructure is nearly impossible. There is simply no way for a foreign army to defend the place. And this is true of most places, even places like Iraq and Vietnam.

Which leads to the second point, which is really a question: Who is capable of defending Iraq, Vietnam, or Darur? The answer is not the US or the UN, but rather the Iraqis, the Vietnamese, and the Darfurians. Outsiders can help by changing the balance of power, say, by supplying arms and training and other assistance. But when it comes to killing their countrymen, it is a job best left to the men of that country.

Tribes in places like Darfur have centuries of grievances against each other, few of which I understand and none of which I am willing to die for, or rather see my son die for; I am not their judge and even less their executioner. Of course, we cannot ignore the genocide, if such there be, but the proper course is to threaten to arm the victims, and to actually do so if the threats fail. The Government of Sudan knows that we cannot get an army in there, and hence doesn’t take our threats seriously. However, we can get arms in there, and that is a threat they would take very seriously. One hopes that a threat is enough to do the job, since the last time we actually armed a group of rebels, we created the Taliban.

Deemo-crazy? Why would anyone want it? Our own founding fathers rejected it (they created a White republic instead). All deemo-crazy is is another type of egalitarianism. As for Arabs, you can’t force deemo-crazy onto clannish, low-IQ urchins who don’t want it anyway.