by Pat Lang
“DeLay is very different. He is the Republican paymaster, one of the authors of the K Street Project and the driving force behind a vicious, organised demonisation and attempted marginalisation of Democrats that for sheer, unabashed political animus is unlike anything else witnessed in an advanced democracy. Politicians fight their political foes by fair means or foul, but trying to exterminate them is new territory.” — Will Hutton in Sunday’s The Guardian.
It may come to be that in the end the neocon Jacobins and the merely megalomaniacal like Rumsfeld will be thought of as having been “taken for a ride” along with the rest of us.
Rumsfeld has a certain owlish appeal in his self-assigned role as the “Grinch who Stole Christmas.” One could learn to appreciate his doddering curmudgeonly figure as a “talking head” infesting the Sunday Newsathons.
The neocons? It seems increasingly possible that these intellectual poseurs, now mainly roosting at AEI and elsewhere, have been duped by the Iranians in the greatest intelligence coup since Felix Dzershinsky ran the anti-Soviet underground from Moscow as chief of the Cheka. “Curve Ball?” Hah! This curve broke straight through the “strike zone.”
No. History will probably reserve a very special and perhaps unique place in one of the lower circles of the Inferno for the folk of the “K Street Project.” They deserve it for poisoning the well of American political life. They will get “top billing.”
It is odd how many Texans there are in this mess. “Lawyers, bankers and oil men. Lawyers, bankers and oil men.” A Texan told me that these are the categories of men who run Texas in our time. Forget the cowboys. Forget the Comanche. Forget everything but the money and power. That’s what a lot of them have done. I think their time is coming.
I guess we should add a fourth category to the list, former “exterminators.”
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2