http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030304239.html

The rhetorical frame of The Good Doctor’s (TGD) latest essay is unsurprisingly self congratulatory: could this be just another example of the self-obsession, even the blatant narcissism, of the Neo-Conservative thinker, in situ? Or might we just settle for the adolescent braggadocio of the schoolyard bully? These two questions can be considered as open. The question of the comparison of the ‘Mideast Spring’ and the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive invasion, conquest and eventual stalemate is the TGD’s argument. Are they similar in any way? Can an indigenous, self propelled, revolutionary groundswell be compared to an invading army of the world’s super-power? Is this not the stuff of the post-war American comic book hero, of a puerile, self- serving political/theological imagination? It is hard to be patient with TGD, he engages in an intellectually dishonest, bogus comparitivism of the evil of Hussein and Gaddafi: to what end but the moral justification of the Bush Doctrine, as necessary, as indispensable, as an historical inevitability, leading to a moral clarity: an antidote to the ‘moral inversion’, that resides in this country’s major political actors, Obama and Clinton: a  Thinking mired in a free-floating, unresolved, irresolute state, in this crisis, of this historical/political moment. We then could argue that the ‘inversion’ that is taking place is a moral/political ‘inversion’ as argued by TGD as a cover, even a moral justification, for he first posits this as a moral problem, for the Bush Doctrine ex post facto: ‘Everyone is a convert to Bush’s freedom agenda’. Picking through this set of arguments in its convoluted conjectures and self-justifications leaves one in awe of the power of the stories that one can invent, and the twists that one’s reason can make in the pantomimes of good faith.