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It's a Twin-Spin!

Because absolutely nobody demanded it, and Kaptain's wimpiness over fighting a cold (loser!) delayed the first week of fisking, we're going to have two... two... two Gene Lyons fiskings this week.

U.S. can’t dominate world by force
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Almost regardless of who wins the presidential nomination, there’s small likelihood of serious debate about the most crucial long-term foreign policy question facing the American people: Do we or do we not want to maintain a global empire by force of arms?

Uh, Gene? The reason there is no serious debate about this "most crucial long-term foreign policy" is because of one reason. That one reason is: You can't maintain a global empire by force of arms when there is no empire to maintain. You can't maintain something that doesn't exist.

Or, to put it another way, what’s in it for us, as individual citizens, for the United States to maintain 800 military bases around the world? Does the word “superpower” actually mean anything in today’s world?

Let me see if I understand this correctly. We, the citizens of the United States, are maintaining a global empire.......... by keeping 800 military bases around the world. Have I got that correct? Have I adequately summed up Gene's thought process (such as it is)?

Hardly anybody in the foreign policy establishment likes having it put that way. It strikes them as vulgar and reductive;

Don't forget "stupid", Gene.

hence, anybody who questions, for example, whether the United States really needs to spend almost twice as much on wars and weaponry as the rest of the world combined gets caricatured as a crackpot isolationist, the kind of person who, in the usual formulation, would have ignored Adolf Hitler’s military buildup in the 1930s.

Hence, too, a seemingly infinite procession of miniature “Hitlers” clanking along like targets in a carnival shooting gallery—Gadhafi, Noriega, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, etc. “Endless Enemies,” the late Jonathan Kwitny dubbed them in his 1984 book of that name.

A named source? Good heavens, Gene, what's gotten into you?

Subtitled “The Making of an Unfriendly World,” the onetime Wall Street Journal correspondent’s thesis was that the majority of America’s armed interventions in the Third World constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy guaranteeing more or less constant war.

Yes, and before America's armed interventions in the Third World, everything was peace and love and frolicking puppies and marmalade skies. Mmmmmm, marmalade.

Today, only marginal political figures like Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan

Hey, didn't you have a column a little while back decrying Pat Buchanan's influence over American policy? Yes, yes you did. And now he's a "marginal political figure". Huh. Strange.

and Ralph Nader devote themselves to such arcane topics. Indeed, one sometimes wonders if the foreign policy experts and resident scholars who decorate Washington think tanks wouldn’t fear more than anything else the diminishment of their own swollen self-regard should Americans return to the Founding Fathers’ views of enlightened national self-interest.

Thomas Jefferson may have put it best in his 1801 inaugural address, promising “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” (Because it builds upon George Washington’s determination to avoid getting sucked into European wars, the phrase is often mistakenly attributed to him. )

No, al-Qa’ida didn’t exist in 1801, although Barbary pirates did.

And what did Jefferson do, Gene? Didn't he send the Marines in? A march from Egypt across 500 miles of desert to the town of Derne, made by a force made up of marines, mercenaries, and Muslim allies. Let's check the song: "From the halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli." Yep, that's what he did.
(If you want some background on this, look for the name of the diplomat who led this force, William Eaton. It's a very cool story, which has a pretty good summation here .)

That said, the time is rapidly approaching when events outside U.S. control will force a serious reexamination of America’s place in a fast-changing world. To anybody with both eyes open, what the Bush administration’s ill-conceived war on terror has demonstrated is almost the precise opposite of what its 2003 “shock and awe” bombing campaign was intended to show: not overwhelming U. S. tactical strength, but all too obvious U. S. strategic weakness.

To the neo-conservative imagineers

Imagineers? Are they anything like Fungineers?

who dreamed it up, the Iraq war was supposed to be the first step toward American domination of Asia, with the ultimate goal of containing China. (The Project for a New American Century’s founding document really has to be read to be believed.)

Sort of like Gene's blathering.
But on a serious note, it always amuses me whenever people of Gene's political stripe rant about the "neo-conservatives" at the PNAC as some sort of secret cabal, then urge you to go read their founding document. It's such a secret cabal with such a secret agenda, they cunningly put it on their website so that the average shlub like you and me wouldn't be able to read it. There's no flaws in that cunning plan!

Debate the surge all you want. Five years, close to 4, 000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis

4,000 dead Americans vs. hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Someone's not doing something right.

and close to a trillion dollars later, the U. S. remains tied down there like Gulliver in Lilliput. Its main strategic result has been to improve the position of Iran, theoretically our next opponent in an empire-building war that now appears blessedly unlikely to happen.

Weren't you panicking all last year, Gene, that Bush was going to attack Iran? Bush was stirring up things, making a case for going to war with Iran? And now you're saying, "it now appears" unlikely to happen.
It's good to see that sometimes this reality can intrude upon Gene's awareness, even if for only a little while. I'd sure like to know how Gene came to this realization, so that we can get him more doses of it.

Meanwhile, the Persians are making multibillion-dollar gas and oil development deals with China, whose continued willingness to buy American securities basically finances U. S. deficit spending for the war.

Further east, the U. S. and its NATO allies find themselves stuck in a slowly disintegrating Afghanistan, a nation (to use the term loosely) which history records has never been successfully occupied by foreign powers. In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination—another Bush administration daydream gone tragically awry

Huh? Is Gene saying that Bhutto's assassination was a daydream by Bush? Who knows? With Gene, anything is possible.
I think what Gene is insinuating here is that Bhutto's assassination occurred because the administration wasn't paying attention to her safety. Why her safety should be our concern when she wasn't an American citizen, and not particularly friendly toward us either, Gene won't make clear.
This is an ironic position to take, too, because Gene starts off this very column decrying our influence over other nations, and then turns around and says that we should have been more vigilant protecting Bhutto in a foreign country.

—nuclear-armed Pakistan teeters on the edge of dissolution. Al-Qa’ida operates with increasing openness in remote tribal areas not controlled by Pakistan’s government.

Meanwhile, scenes of desperate Palestinians streaming out of Gaza into Egypt couldn’t help but remind anybody not blinded by propaganda of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The barriers may be temporarily back in place, but the Bush / Likud policy of treating the area like an enormous outdoor prison camp is clearly doomed to fail.

None of this is to say that the U. S. “homeland” is seriously endangered or ever was.

"No" "Gene", "don't" "start" "that" "again" "!" "!" "!"

From the numbers alone, it’s clear that no nation or group of nations on Earth aspires to threaten the U. S. by force of arms.

Oh! Well! That's a relief. Okay, guys, we can throw away all of your guns, bombs, missiles, subs, carriers, helicopters, and jets. Yep, just pile 'em there in the corner, the janitor will get them tomorrow. Gene says that nobody on Earth even aspires to threaten us. Thanks for everything, guys!

Even China’s estimated $ 65 billion military budget, the second largest in the world, is less than 10 percent of ours. (China has almost four times the U. S. population.)

Gene, unsurprisingly, doesn't link these two facts together. What's sad is that there are many more people who also won't link these two facts together. So let me help these people out by pointing out something that should be apparent to anybody "with both eyes open", as Gene himself said earlier in this column.
Nobody is going to threaten the U.S. by force of arms, because we have the largest military budget in the world. Do you try to drown a fish in an ocean? Do you kick-box a kangaroo? Challenge a blind man to read a Braille book in the dark? Race against a racecar in the quarter-mile with a donkey? Challenge a body-builder to a contest of lifting weights?
No.
You find their weak spot, and attack it there. And America's weak spot from day one has been the inability to believe that anybody would ever attack us here.

Equally clear, however, is that the United States cannot dominate the world by force. We wouldn’t have enough troops to fight on all these fronts even if Americans had ever bought into the imperialist idea, which they never have. Our vaunted nuclear arsenal has become the economic equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids: fantastically expensive, but useless. Maybe after George W. Bush is gone, we can talk about it.

So good to see you have an open mind about it, Gene.
Say, when did Gene ever make the case that Bush was unable to talk about changing this "imperialist idea" of us being an empire? Reread the whole column (go on, I dare you! P.S. only take this challenge if you have a lot of I.Q. points to spare, because you won't have them when you get back to this point), and show me where that case was made.

For the rest of us, we'll continue on...

—–––––•–––––—

Campaign has one too many Clintons
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008

In this time of strife among Democrats, it’s good to know that so many of the nation’s deepest political thinkers have the party’s interests at heart.

Sorta like how some people were lamenting over the demise of the Republican Party.
Not that I'm looking at anybody in particular, Gene.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan laments that “the Clintons are tearing the [Democratic] party apart. It will not be the same after this.” True, the same column contends that “George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party,” but that’s for another day.

In The Washington Post, Robert Novak warns that the primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “is fraught with peril for the Democratic party coalition because it threatens to alienate its essential African American component.” That would break Novak’s adamantine heart. On MSNBC, the brows of former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough and one-time “morality czar” (and casino habitué ) Bill Bennett are permanently furrowed.

On the same network, virtually every pundit who discussed the South Carolina primary did so in racial, or, if you prefer, demographic, terms. The Washington Post’s estimable African-American columnist Eugene Robinson started on the evening of the New Hampshire primary. He wondered aloud if Clinton’s surprise victory resulted from the “Bradley effect,” i.e., white voters speaking well of a black candidate, but yielding to racist impulses in the darkness of the voting booth.

(Uh, oh, “darkness.” Does the word indicate a hidden bias? A perverse need to associate blackness with evil? Altogether too many impressionable college students have been trained in this kind of linguistic alchemy, much as they were once encouraged to find hidden “symbolic” phalluses in the novels of Jane Austen. Recently, The American Prospect’s Web site entertained a passionate debate about a columnist’s “racist” description of Obama as “a fog of a man.” Fog, see, indicates not fuzziness or vague outlines, but darkness, ergo....

At this level of absurdity, honest debate becomes impossible. “Identity,” crudely construed, is all, and all is identity. Every political statement constitutes an affirmation of group loyalty. “Speaking as an African American gay woman” or “As a long-married white man....” —that’s supposed to be the end of the story. To disagree constitutes bigotry. No safe metaphors exist. )

Hey, welcome to the 1980's, Gene! Some of us were sickened by such stupid identity politics and fought against it. So glad you could join us!

Everything about Obama’s personal story stands in opposition to ethnic groupthink. It’s a repudiation of Americanism, one he denounces often.

I'm....not sure what Gene means by this. I think what he means is that group-think is a repudiation of Americanism, and Obama denounces group-think often.

But (like most of us) he has not always been perfectly consistent. He wasn’t in South Carolina. Many of his supporters, particularly among the media, want to have it both ways in pursuit of the great goal of humiliating Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Oh, boy. Here comes the "They're hunting the Clintons because they hate them" meme that Gene has made a livelihood out of for the past 10 years or so.

For the same reason that Noonan and Novak are crying crocodile tears, it’s a dangerously divisive strategy.

Let’s pass over the ensuing humbug over Hillary Clinton’s MLK / LBJ remarks, the “fairy tale” business and surrogates’ references to Obama’s youthful drug use. (Drugs are an inherently black problem? In the U.S.A.? Who knew? Has there been a presidential candidate since 1992 whose personal drug use wasn’t an issue? OK, Bob Dole. Anybody else?)

Don't look at me. I have no idea how Gene came up with the idea that drugs are an inherently black problem. I just make fun of the idiocy, I don't pretend to understand it.

Harkening to a theme that pundits had pushed since New Hampshire, MSNBC broke down South Carolina’s exit polls by race even before actual results came in. Every newspaper account I read stressed Obama’s winning 80 percent of the African American vote.

On TV, the usual talking heads—Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Margaret Carlson et al. —were partying like it was January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and the Clinton presidency was presumed DOA.

We must have had different TV stations, Gene. On this reality, the mainstream media only reported this little story only after some Internet site named Drudge started running the story. And it really only picked up steam once ol' Billy boy stood up in front of us, shook his finger in our face, and said,"I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Now you need to let me get back to the business of running this country."

So somebody sticks a camera in Bill’s face, asks him an insulting question, and he reminds them that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice, but never the nomination.

That set off racial sensitivity alarms throughout the media and even certain normally more sensible precincts of the liberal blogosphere. Bill Clinton had played the race card! Hands were wrung. Lamentations filled the air. Because as we all know, Jackson (who supports Obama) exists in only one dimension, blackness; therefore, any / all references to his political career constitute bigotry. Everybody else can spend hours parsing racial demographics, but not Bill Clinton.

Well, he was our first black president. He would be above that. *Mmmfft* *snicker*

Except Jackson himself didn’t object. Neither did Obama. I’m with Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford, who told Joe Scarborough: “I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media

Against the Clintons? I think Mr. Crawford mis-spoke there. I think what he meant to say was "the evidence-free bias for the Clintons in the media".

borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney, he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club.... [W]e’ve gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, ‘Well, where’s the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign?’ you’re accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons.”

Maybe Gene shouldn't have used this particular quote as a defense for the Clintons. After all, Gene IS a naive shill for the Clintons.

But I’d also say this: Somebody needs to put the Big Dog back on the porch. His attacks on Obama are unbecoming in a former president;

There's many things the Big Dog has done that is unbecoming of a president, present or former.

people are tired of the Clinton melodrama; and the bigger he looms, the smaller Hillary looks.

Wow, you never thought you'd read that, did you? That the bigger Bill got, the smaller Hillary is. I think that may be some kind of political pornography, but I really don't want to delve too deeply into that little mudpile. I'm just going to think on more pleasant things, like being gang-raped by 4 large black men with AIDS. It's never happened to me, and it never will, but it's gotta be much more pleasant to contemplate than that first mental image.