{"id":181665,"date":"2016-04-19T19:13:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T00:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/19\/f-me-i-agree-with-michael-fing-kinsley\/"},"modified":"2016-04-19T19:13:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-20T00:13:00","slug":"f-me-i-agree-with-michael-fing-kinsley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/19\/f-me-i-agree-with-michael-fing-kinsley\/","title":{"rendered":"F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.<\/p>\n

I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”.<\/p>\n

And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described \u201cforeign policy elites\u201d? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post\u2019s print edition on Saturday, under the headline \u201cForeign policy elites indecisive on Trump.\u201d The Post\u2019s Karen DeYoung reports<\/a> that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But \u201cforeign policy elites\u201d have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of \u201cforeign policy elites\u201d \u2014 or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general<\/a>, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite. <\/p>\n

What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to \u201cforeign policy elites\u201d has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That\u2019s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That\u2019s how long we\u2019ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and na\u00efve to use the Vietnam-era term \u201cquagmire\u201d to describe the United States\u2019 situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Perhaps what\u2019s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That\u2019s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what\u2019s so remarkable is that we\u2019re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian. I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”. And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent: Can our nation survive without …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1092,969,964,1166,1003,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-evil","category-foreign-relations","category-michael-kinsley-disease","category-philosophy","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181665"}],"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=181665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}