For what's the underlying implication of the "neo-cons über alles" meme? It's that hard-core, down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld--who have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus--are actually innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard Perle. It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry of William Kristol and Michael Leeden. It's that no U.S. administration would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we've seen in the last five years--unless they'd been tricked into it by wily Zionists and their ideological outriders. It is, in short, our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out in dissident drag.
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The reality is that Iraq was invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment--the Democrats, the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia--countenanced the crime. The belligerence and oppression of the hardline Israeli government in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned--and armed--support from the United States because this suits the larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance" faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing, and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical base.
It is the American elite-- pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege, heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people)--that bedevils us. The emergence of the cretinous neo-conservative cult is just a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant institutions and structures of American society. The body politic is rotting from the head.
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