Greenwald has one of the best deconstructions of Barry's Piece Prize speech I've read:
...the set of principles Obama articulated yesterday was such a clear and comprehensive expression of his foreign policy that it's now being referred to as the "Obama Doctrine." About that matter, there are two arguably confounding facts to note: (1) the vast majority of leading conservatives -- from Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich to Peggy Noonan, Sarah Palin, various Kagans and other assorted neocons -- have heaped enthusiastic praise on what Obama said yesterday, i.e., on the Obama Doctrine; and (2) numerous liberals have done exactly the same. That convergence gives rise to a couple of questions:
Why are the Bush-following conservatives who ran the country for the last eight years and whose foreign policy ideas are supposedly so discredited -- including some of the nation's hardest-core neocons -- finding so much to cheer in the so-called Obama Doctrine?
How could liberals and conservatives -- who have long claimed to possess such vehemently divergent and irreconcilable worldviews on foreign policy -- both simultaneously adore the same comprehensive expression of foreign policy?
How indeed, if there is any real difference between them.
Ian wants to blame it all on Parlimentary politics in a non-Parlimentary system, but I don't agree.
The double standard is particularly remarkable because it seems to work one way only.
Democrats working for social issues like single payer or even an honest public option get completely marginalized whether it’s a Democratic or Republican run Congress.
Supporters of the War on Terror get their funds as a given priority regardless of which side runs the Senate.
Like everything supposedly nuanced about our elected representatives, it’s only nuanced as long as the weasel words fit the bottom line.
This kind of thing seems surprising to some people. Gail Collins in Pravda today, surprised that the Companies run the Company:
... The biggest surprise was that the United States did not have its own soldiers guarding its Embassy in a war zone. We have been getting surprised like that a lot lately. Many of the worst stories involve Blackwater Worldwide, a private security contractor that changed its name to Xe Services after a series of mishaps in Iraq, one of which involved spraying bullets around a square in Baghdad and killing 17 civilians.
On Friday, James Risen and Mark Mazzetti of The Times reported that Blackwater employees had taken part in clandestine C.I.A. “snatch and grab” raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which suspected insurgents were abducted and taken away for detention and questioning.
This was, of course, in the past. In fact, on Friday, it was revealed that the C.I.A. director, Leon Panetta, had canceled a contract under which Blackwater loaded missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan — another activity that sort of came as a surprise when The Times first reported it last summer.
But Lord knows what Xe Services is up to.
What do you think Dwight Eisenhower would say about all of this? In his last speech as president, Eisenhower famously warned the country about “the potential for the disastrous use of misplaced power” if the military industrial complex got too big. That was back when defense contractors just sold the Pentagon fighter jets and wildly expensive widgets. Imagine how Ike would have reacted if they were driving the C.I.A. to snatch-and-grab dates.
When did we decide this was a good plan?
Who is this "we" you speak of, and what makes you think that "we" every controlled anything in the Corporate States of 'merika?
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