I have reached the point of complete exasperation with the self-proclaimed technocrats, the ones that Lippmann celebrated as the guardians against too much democracy, who have been not just wrong, but catastrophically wrong, on almost every ‘policy question’ since 2000 or even before, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the collection of utter failures in between. Or on the question of our benighted ‘ally’ Israel! The jackbooted thug Netanyahu pronounces himself the spokesman for world Jewry. How credible is that? Think of that Paris synagogue where the congregation spontaneously sang La Marseillaise in answer to his assertion that Israel was the only safe place for Jews.   And the burning question as to who is an Anti-Semite: those who don’t kowtow to this current political orthodoxy are guilty, prima facie!
One is reminded of the gossipy yet insightful histories that are collected in The Georgetown Set, and other books like Joe Alsop’s Cold War, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, The Color of Truth. Of Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers in the New Left Review of September/October 2013 and of the Fall 2013 issue of  Cold War Studies forum on George F. Kennan and the questions that the John Gaddis biography raised.
Do not forgive me for lashing out at your patent moral/ethical bankruptcy, your continuing exercise of bad judgement  and self-aggrandizing self-exculpatory chatter of ‘now I have it right’! Too little too late! You are deserving of not just my paltry exercise of scorn, but of closing up shop as reliable commentators on anything other than the weather, and the condition of your outsize egos!

StephenKMackSD