John Kerry says…

…the US can’t be a “spectator to slaughter.”

Or, in other words, “If there’s gonna be any killin’ ’round here, it’s gonna be us who does it.”

Looney Tunes Media

If PJ Media didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it.  Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to.

Here are a couple of gems, one lamenting the “the great silence that envelops the sacrifice of the best Americans of this generation”—the “silence” referring to ordinary Americans’ apparent lack of interest in the never-ending war on whatever—and suggesting that if we were serious about this war, which we should be, we’d be thinking about how and when to attack Iran, which is evil incarnate because it declared war on us in 1979 for no particular reason at all.

The other is a tribute to Tony Scott, whose movies laudably extolled the virtues of tough guys and righteous violence.  And anyone who might laugh at such one-dimensional depictions of manhood are just fools who “are kept so safe by (mostly) macho men with guns in the military and our various police forces that they can feel free to pretend they are somehow better and more civilized, doncha know, than their protectors.”

No wonder they always caricature their political opponents as ineffectual “leftists” clinging to “discredited” beliefs.  It’s a lot easier to defend a cartoonish worldview if your opponent is also a cartoon.

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Freedumb

You know, this is after all a Fourth of July weekend. We’re celebrating freedom — not just for Americans but the ideal of freedom. And, right now, people in Arab world, including Syria, are fighting for their freedom. And Iran is doing everything it can, not only to suppress this freedom fighter uprising in Syria, but, of course, they have murdered and suppressed their own people in Iran.

So, I would say that a day of reckoning is coming for this extremist regime in Iran when the majority of Iranians who really yearn for freedom see that dream come true. And I hope we’ll do everything we can to make it happen as soon as possible.

Tailgunner Joe

Curiously, no mention of the Palestinians and their struggles for “freedom,” or the Saudi Arabians, or any other people who happen to be living under autocratic regimes that haven’t (yet) fallen out of favor with the warlords in D.C.  Spreading freedom’s a tricky business, I guess.  They’ll have to wait their turn.

Along with Herr Lieberman plumping for war with just about every country in the middle east, there was the always-reliable warmonger Lindsey Graham, fretting about whether Obama’s announced withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Afghanistan would undermine the “phenomenal progress” made so far in paying unemployed men to join the army and police forces.

Apparently, in addition to hot dogs on the grill and fireworks and little American flags, the 4th of July also means cheap political hacks peddling hollow slogans on TV.

Self-Hatred

Over at TNR, Andrew Bacevich writes what I think would be a fairly uncontroversial critique of the “withdrawal” from Iraq, saying, essentially, that it’s another political gloss job, much like the so-called surge, meant to obscure the fact that the war/occupation was a clusterfuck and to prevent the US as a nation from learning the right (or any) lessons—e.g., that maybe using military force to attempt to transform foreign societies into little Americas is a fucking dumb idea.

But anyhow, forget about the article itself, because as usual some dipshit in the comments section steals the show.  Here we have (dim?) bulbman1066, trotting out that tired neocon bugaboo, the self-hating liberal:

Saddam Hussein may have been a bad man, but he was anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel, which is enough to make the likes of Andrew J. Basevic regret his fall.

Whatever happened to the heroic Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, Acheson, and JFK? Today’s Democratic foreign policy is feeble, cowardly, cynical, utterly devoid of honor and decency. Its leitmotiv is the self-hatred of of the nabobs of academia and the mainstream media. Obama’s speech reflects this. You could see it in the bored, skeptical faces of the military personnel among those whom our pathetic excuse for a president was addressing.

Really?  Do people actually still believe this shit?  Did they ever?  I thought it was just a cynical ploy used by the warmongers to sell the ever-gullible American public on a war that had nothing to do with national security.*  But then again, I hate America (and Israel, too, apparently), so what do I know?  I have an idea, though.  Next time we decide to invade a country, let’s tie a bulbman1066 to the hood of every Humvee and Bradley Fighting Vehicle on its way in.

*Never mind the moronic nationalistic tripe that equates one’s feelings toward the country they happened to be born in with one’s feelings about him or herself.

The “Liberal Media” Plumps for War (again)

According to NPR, “experts” are “at odds” over how to deal with Iran’s alleged desire to acquire nukes.  On one side, we have former foreign policy advisor to John McCain and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Kori Schake, who thinks “military attacks on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure may eventually be necessary”; on the other, we have  self-proclaimed neo-con Michael Rubin, who opposes military attacks because they “would set back regime change” (which would be achieved by “supporting independent trade unions, setting up a clandestine communication system and recruiting defectors”) by causing Iranians to “rally behind their government.” 

“Anyone who says that the Iranian people might rise up and support bombing their country has never been to Iran nor talked to Iranians,” Rubin says.

I had no idea that a desire to not have bombs dropped on their heads by a foreign government is a character trait unique to Iranians.  But then, I’ve never been to Iran or talked to Iranians.  Having been to Iran and talked to some Iranians apparently also makes one uniquely qualified to determine what’s in the best interest(s) of the 70 million or so people who live there:

“We don’t know where the chips will fall if everything collapses,” Rubin says. “But we should at least have a discussion first about where we would like to see Iran, and then walk backwards from that in policy to determine what we can do to sort of push and nudge the Iranian people and any post-Islamic republic government in that direction.”

A third “expert,” Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests flaccidly that regime change might not work, pointing to Cuba as an example.  If he has any doubts about the efficacy (forget about the morality) of dropping bombs, the article doesn’t mention them.

So here we have NPR, the supposed epitome of all things despicably librul, telling us that the U.S. has only two options for how to deal with Iran: overt war or covert war.  And since the latter “might not happen,” it may just have to be bombs away by default.  Missing from the discussion, of course, is anyone who opposes meddling (of either variety) in yet another Middle Eastern/South Asian country.  Clearly no expert would take such a ridiculous position.