StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/libya-and-the-potemkin-alliance/2011/06/17/AGdQ2UZH_story.html

‘America’s intervention in Libya’s civil war, the most protracted and least surreptitious assassination attempt in history, was supposed to last “days, not weeks,” but is in its fourth month and has revealed NATO to be an increasingly fictitious military organization. Although this war has no discernible connection with U.S. national security, it serves the national interest, in three ways. It is awakening some legislators to their responsibilities. It is refuting the pretense that the United Nations sets meaningful parameters to wars it authorizes — or endorses, which is quite different. And it is igniting a reassessment of NATO, a Potemkin alliance whose primary use these days is perverse: It provides a patina of multilateralism to U.S. military interventions on which Europe is essentially a free rider.’

Mr. George Will has lost his usual sang-froid, such as it is or could be, in his latest essay grandiloquently titled Libya and the Potemkin alliance. As this opening paragraph illustrates, although not very succinctly. What did Mr. Will expect after the Bush Restoration and its dull-witted intellectual minions John Yoo, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz made all out war on the very notion and practice of constitutional governance and tripartite power sharing. Mr. Yoo and the utterly bogus idea of ‘The Unitary Presidency’ now is fully entrenched in our National Political Life. It is fully operative and completely useful to the abuse of executive power. Who can stop the President from actions he deems necessary, since he possesses superior knowledge? That was always the argument: so why the outrage from the prescient Mr. Will? As America’s foremost public intellectual could he not see the ramifications of the War on Terror, The Patriot Act and its readily ascertainable concentration of power into the practice of executive fiat? Where was the political indignation, then, about a constitutional affront to the very practice of republican governance and its implicit ethical imperatives? It was sacrificed to the cultivation of political hysteria realized through unrelenting fear mongering. The real question here is where were Mr. Will’s critical faculties, then, as opposed to a now? When a through critique of those policies and laws could have made a difference, in preventing exactly what is happening, today. But the political questions raised by Mr. Will results in a condemnation of Mr. Obama and his policy blunderings that are manifestly serviceable to the imperatives of the approaching campaign.

Political Observer        

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/21/huntsman-s-gay-rights-shakeup.html?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BOAeUMB8cA9gDk

The American Psyche was pushed into political irrationalism by September 11^th with the assistance of the Neo-Fascists, Neo-Conservatives, and War Mongers who pounced on the opportunity to pursue the American Imperial Dream of Endless War and the concomitant project of the wholesale destruction of constitutional governance, with the nullification of habeas corpus. That is the historical frame of American politics that partakes of that political irrationalism and feeds upon the cultivated paranoia that is a necessary part of that endeavor: The Other is the object of not only suspicion but the active subverter of American Tribalism. Muslim and the LGBTI communities have borne the brunt of this manufactured hysteria. Enter the political arena John Huntsman of The Sclerotic Old White Guy Party, a moderate voice among the shrill voices of the not so new American Paranoia. My rage and skepticism are high, that my civil rights, the exercise of my inherent civic virtue, as argued in our founding documents, will be bought over the bodies of how many innocents, in the pursuit of that malign murderous reverie.

Queer Atheist          

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-europe-no-longer-matters/2011/06/15/AG7eCCZH_story.html

It is hard not to feel a certain welling contempt when reading Mr. Richard Haas’ latest opinion piece ‘Why Europe no longer matters’ in The Washington Post. Here is a public intellectual, the president of the council of foreign Relations and the director of policy and planning at the State Department from 2001 to 2003. Mr. Haas is a well connected establishmentarian thinker and writer, but the Olympian tone of the expert is here obvious and ill serves his argument, that Europe is no longer important to American Interests, to NATO, to projection of American power and the guarding of American interests in the region. Those interests might have been thought of as mutually self serving, if not for the American penchant to wage war at the drop of a hat. Why would the Europeans be reluctant to follow America’s lead in its quixotic, self destructive, murderous policy blundering, to put in bluntly? The fact of two world wars fought on the very territory they call home might be a clue, to their reluctance to follow our war making lead. A war has not been fought on American soil since the Civil War, a vivid touchstone of American History but not a memory of the realities of its utter destructive carnage. We are so distant from the realities of war, the Europeans are not and do not share that distance, it is too close in the memory of too many to be the subject of a corrupt, misplaced romanticism and the ethical distortions that  brings to the matter of policy, i.e. war.   

In the larger context of American politics we can look at Neo-Conservatism as a transitional step from the post cold war to a more aggressive and violent form of American Imperialism, this can act as a rhetorical/historical frame for his essay. The question then becomes what of the 5 wars that America is now involved in, with the tacit or implicit consent of Public Intellectuals like Mr. Haas, and his coven of Intellectual rationalizes and enactors of American Exceptionalist ‘ideal’. Mr. Haas, as spokesman for a discredited intellectual elite, will now write off our European allies, as no longer worthy of our policy concerns and actions, on the dubious grounds of changing, evolving demographics and a skepticism about the notion of a common defense as defined  by the reality of endless warfare.

Political Observer