06.20.11
About face!
From Ross Douthat at the New York Times, something to write in a bold song:
The country is weary of war, but the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is still tremendously appealing — the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.
This is a story that many conservatives — and many Americans — want to believe. Once, I believed it myself.
But that was many years and many wars ago, and now I think Rand Paul is right.
Douthat’s an easy target and Matt Taibbi rips a new asshole in him over the obvious — Iraq war cheerleader now turned “pacifist.”
This just in time to merge with Congressional House reluctance to go along with the President on regarding Bombing Moe as “not war.”
It’s not war, is the reasoning, if it’s by remote control.
Anyway, it’s not that they’re suddenly pacifists, it’s that they’re for any way to mess with Obama.
However, Moe stubbornly refuses to die or go away and Little Tommy Atkins and Co. have to keep re-ordering American smart bombs.
So the only difference taking the President out of the equation with some invocation of Congressional war powers is that it will only slightly slow down drone manufacturing and sales at General Atomics.
At this point the strategy of bombing paupers is not changeable. In fact, if the President were to suddenly advocate a draw down in the pauper-bombing mission planner, the Republican Party would quickly adopt a position for restoring the primacy of bombing the world’s beggars and pantywaists, or as Ross Douthat writes:
Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy … His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.???