"liberal hawks"

It's an oxymoron, like "military intelligence". Clancy Sigal:

...You have to sleepwalk, or be in serious denial, not to grasp the blood-link between union-busting in Madison, Wisconsin and bunker-busting in Tripoli, Libya. It's not subtle. We are no longer an infinitely rich country. Our bridges, dams, pipelines and roads are falling apart. Our people are on food stamps and can't find work. Spilling our money on the desert renders it positively reasonable to cut, slash and degrade – that useful military euphemism – help for the poor and middle class. Obama's $75bn foreclosure prevention programme is a bungle due to "lax oversight": translated, that means there's been too much sucking up the mortgage-holding big banks that evict homeowners often illegally. And Obama takes this very moment in our rising-poverty-so-let's-go-to-war crisis to cruelly, mindlessly, cut $3bn from LIHEAP, the federal government's energy assistance (heating oil and air conditioning) to the poor.

The arithmetic is brutal. Each Tomahawk cruise missile fired from a sub, ship or land costs roughly $1m, and we've probably shot over 200 of them onto Libya, killing Gaddafi's military, paramilitary, civilians, hospital patients and – now we learn – our guys, the rebels, too. That's a $200m bill, straight off. The Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Libyan operation costs the US between $100m and $300m per week, so we're heading toward the $1bn mark even if, as advertised, we pull back marginally. Let the jobless or disabled poor freeze their asses off this and next winter.

We on the left often accuse our ideological adversaries of "triumphalism" – a know-nothing superstition that America is and always will be "different", superior to all other nations, creeds and peoples. If we do it, it's right and moral because, well, we're Americans and we mean terribly well.

And if you believe that, I have a UFO I want to sell you.

You got to believe in that Hopey-Changey thing, and send money to the Laureate's re-$election campaign, pilgrims. If you want to ride that saucer, that is...