{"id":181540,"date":"2016-05-25T19:45:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/25\/too-true\/"},"modified":"2016-05-25T19:45:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T00:45:00","slug":"too-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/05\/25\/too-true\/","title":{"rendered":"Too True"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at The Nation<\/i>, J\ufeffames Carden exhibits a shocking grasp of the obvious, and notes that Neocons are freaking out over Donald Trump because he represents a reduction in their influence, status, and paychecks<\/a>, not because they are deeply concerned about the future of the nation:<\/p>\n

The past year has been a difficult one for the leaders of the neocon right. First, their campaign to torpedo President Obama\u2019s nuclear deal with Iran came to naught. Then their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio, ran a lazy and uninspiring campaign and was easily routed by Donald Trump. And now, with Trump about to be crowned king of the Republican castle in Cleveland, the neocons are experiencing something of an existential meltdown over the prospect of a future Trump administration.<\/span>

<\/span>Last week, a Politico <\/i>piece surveyed the broken hearts among the neocon elite, in which they were described as being marooned on \u201cThe Lonely Island of Never Trump<\/a>.\u201d Just how lonely is that island, however, is open to question. If Politico<\/i> is to be believed, nearly the entire GOP foreign-policy establishment is ready to bolt and join Team Hillary.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Kagan, Cohen and Boot quite rightly denounce Trump\u2019s promise to ban Muslim immigrants. Yet their newfound concern for the well-being of Muslims is striking, given that they were among the most vocal supporters of the Bush administration\u2019s \u201cGlobal War on Terror\u201d and the Iraq debacle which, according to the Nobel Prize\u2013winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War<\/a>, has \u201cdirectly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Indeed. Are we really supposed to rue the possibility that the armchair warriors who\u2019ve done the yeoman\u2019s work of constructing an intellectual framework for endless foreign interventions and an overweening surveillance state might be excluded from the next administration?<\/span>

<\/span>It is hard to escape the conclusion that it isn\u2019t Trump\u2019s policies that are really bothering the neocons. Rather, it is the possibility that, come January 20, 2017, they could be frozen out of the corridors of power for the next four years. But what must really sting is this: Republican voters, given a choice between a neocon revival or Donald J. Trump went resoundingly for the latter. Deep down, I suspect, they know that they have no one to blame for Trump but themselves. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These guys have a hell of a racket:  They are wrong about everything, and the profiteers who benefit from this evil incompetence get them gigs at think tanks, and pay to publish their books.<\/p>\n

As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The Nation, J\ufeffames Carden exhibits a shocking grasp of the obvious, and notes that Neocons are freaking out over Donald Trump because he represents a reduction in their influence, status, and paychecks, not because they are deeply concerned about the future of the nation: The past year has been a difficult one for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,987,964,1039,978,977,1019,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-fail","category-foreign-relations","category-incompetence","category-politics","category-presidential-campaign","category-schadenfreude","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}