Here are the first two paragraphs of Mr. Divine’s latest political encyclical titled ‘The Establishment Will Never Say No to a War’

The question before us is a relatively simple one: What would be the criteria for removing our remaining troops from the Iraqi, Syrian, and more general Middle Eastern conflicts? Or, for that matter, from Afghanistan, where we have been trapped for more than 17 long years of still open-ended occupation?

If the answer to that question is that only when each of these countries is a healthy pro-American democracy, and Islamist terrorism has ceased to be an “enduring” threat to the West, then the answer, as the old Bob Mankoff joke has it, is “How about never — is never good for you?”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-establishment-will-never-say-no-to-a-war.html

Mr. Divine’s record on supporting the War in Iraq, and  his scrupulous account published by himself, was meant to indemnify him from criticism in the future, a link to his egregious record, in all of its 136 pages:

Click to access andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

No amount of public moralizing will remove from the public mind Mr. Divine’s cheer-leading for the War in Iraq, nor his enthusiastic support for  The Bell Curve! , nor again for Free Market Economics and its two false prophets Thatcher and Reagan ! Mr. Divine must think that his readership is replaced every few years, by readers who only know of him in his most contemporaneous iteration. Yet some of us are afflicted with long historical memories, that vividly recall the whole of his panoramically bad judgment, in its damming totality!

Old Socialist