StephenKMackSD's Blog

Could it be that the Democrats asked Ms. Harman to run again so that Ms. Winograd could be denied the seat. Making it more readily winnable for the more politically conformist and malleable Ms. Hahn? Carefully planned political positioning could be a  better explanatory frame than this political back-biting mythologizing. It certainly plays to an audience enamored of the notion of ‘Bitchdom’ a perennial misogynist trope.

Arianna Huffington is one of the great self-promoters of our present age,rivaling her precursor Clair Booth Luce in the scope and reach of her political/business ambition. She pays her core staff and then gets the other posters to work for free, for the prestige of appearing on the Huffington Post. She learned that at the knee of the great fake ‘Economist’ and apostle of greed and apologists for thieves Milton Friedman.This could be the root of her addiction to the notion of transcending the ‘politics of left and right’ as no longer viable.Her site is a self-conscious arm of the Democratic Party meaning that it is a propaganda arm of ‘progressive’ Democrats which, in sum, means the timid New Democratic rule of Mr. Obama. Now, the shaping of the public conversation by selective censorship and outright manipulation of ‘progressive’ opinionators, on her site, places her in the same category as Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch and the other manipulators of the public consciousness for political ends.

Not totally surprising, but the Huffington Post is censoring all negative posts about Jane Harman, in reply to this post by Mr. Clemons; although they did find a Party stooge to post a one line of almost praise. So truly sad. Huff Po will make great partners with AOL and the Democratic Party, the New Trinity in Mind Control and political manipulation.

To his fellow Egyptians and to most observers across the world, Mohammed el-Baradei looks like a hero—an international diplomat who might well have lived out his days in the comforts of Geneva and New York, but returned home to provide leadership despite serious personal peril. But to leading figures on the American right, Mr. El-Baradei is a figure to be mocked, scorned and dismissed as a stooge of darker forces in Egyptian politics and the Mideast.

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his years of stewardship of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he is suddenly the target of insults and attacks from Republicans who deem themselves expert on the politics of the Middle East. Former UN ambassador John Bolton calls Mr. El-Baradei a “dilettante” and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer goes further, calling him “a bad guy.”

The opinions of these veterans of the Bush White House, perhaps the least successful government in American history since the Hoover years, are not worth much—except as a reminder of the continuing ill wind blowing from that defunct administration and its policies. Their hostility to Mr. El-Baradei and to the mass civic movement in Egypt reveals the hollowness and uselessness of the neoconservative worldview at a moment of intense crisis for American diplomacy.

To everyone else, it is obvious that Hosni Mubarak can not abide much longer as president of Egypt, despite the billions in aid that we have lavished on him these past three decades. And to everyone else, it is also obvious that whenever he goes, the most promising alternative is Mr. El-Baradei, a secular liberal with strong ties to the West.

But to the neoconservatives, the possibility that Mr. El-Baradei might help preserve his country’s 80 million souls from bloody chaos matters much less than the fact that he disagreed with them about the invasion of Iraq and that he still disagrees with them about a pre-emptive  strike against Iran. He committed the unforgiveable sin of being right when they were wrong about Iraq’s mythical nuclear weapons program, and he has insisted on pursuing a peaceful resolution of Iran’s atomic ambitions as well. 

With their peculiar belief that what we always need is more armed conflict in the Mideast, the neoconservatives despise Mr. El-Baradei—although Americans would have saved thousands of lives and trillions of dollars if only we had listened to his truth rather than their lies.

Among those lies, of course, was the notion that “regime change” in Baghdad would spark a democratic renaissance across the Mideast beneficial to America and Israel as well as the people of the region. That didn’t happen, but today a burgeoning movement of youth demanding democracy and human rights has appeared—and the neoconservatives now warn us to fear and reject them.

Let us hope that the Obama administration is sufficiently sensible to ignore such awful advice. Balancing our national security interests against the complexities of places like Egypt and Jordan, with strong Islamic political movements, will be difficult to say the least. But there is no point in nostalgia for the friendly dictators of the past and the arrangements we once made with them. Hysteria over the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood should be assuaged by the example of Turkey, where the ruling Islamist party is seeking even now to restore ties with Israel and join the European Union.

Neglect, arrogance and cynicism have left us with little knowledge and few relationships that will be useful as we cope with momentous changes in the Mideast. If we face that fact, then the last thing we should do is undermine those, like Mr. El Baradei, who might help us negotiate this challenging course.