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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“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
This is a stunner:
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.
Comments?
Okay, I had more caffeine. That’s in reference to going to war on the intel provided by Curveball, right?
…to believe that the neocons were duped, you have to forget who they are. Many of them trained in Straussian political philosophy – and are believers in ‘the noble lie‘. We can scream ‘they were duped!’ all we want – and they’ll say, ‘yes – ok – we were duped’, and they’ll avoid what should be their actual fates – charges of treason followed by life terms in prison.
Scary people, these Straussians.
Check out the 3-part series, The Power Of Nightmares, for much more.
I tend to agree with the folks who, years ago, saw what the neocons might have been thinking all along – global democratic revolution.
I guess if the neocon philosophy explicitly calls for ‘global democratic revolution’, then we shouldn’t really be surprised when they attempt to carry it out, right?
I’ve heard of neocons as Trotskyites, but this is a first for the ‘neo-Bolshevik’ label. Funny. I’m not sure what they are – I prefer the label ‘a**holes’.
The Guardian article was an eye opener for me too. I never realized Delay was such a vital and evil cog in the republican machine. Until the indictment anyway. Everything he does from TRMPAC to K Street shows this man lacks a personal moral compass.
It’s a very tight rundown, isn’t it … and i hope the author is correct, that Delay’s indictment helps sway politics in both the U.S. and UK from the right towards the left.
Another good reason not to elect former exterminators —> to avoid the ugly irony when things go bad.
This is depressing:
grab power
become corrupt
get kicked out
lather
rinse
repeat
No wonder so many people don’t vote. What’s the point?
And that’s exactly why so many of us are demanding that Democratic office seekers stand for something other than just getting power. If all you want is power, then all you do in office is scheme about how to get more power or how to keep the power you have. That way lies corruption. The concept of actually doing something for the greater good is not even part of your thinking.
Perhaps this is too kind.
My intuitive take would be that the neocon policy planning group (I forget its precise name) in the Pentagon was responsible for pushing Iraqis into providing the disinformation to the “poseurs” and the CIA, and the CIA went along knowingly. This theory connects a lot of dots.
The histories of this period will be fascinating to read, provided we live through it.
Office of Special Plans.
And the Office of Special Plans wasn’t created to push Iraqis to provide false info. They already had Chalabi as an eager and greedy co-conspirator so they didn’t need to push anyone.
OSP was set up to receive the Chalabi bogus intel and the Ghorbanifar/Ledeen/P2 false intel and to bypass the normal vetting process in the US intel apparatus, instead stovepiping this fake info directly into the hands of the policymakers.
This was the only way they could advance their cause because they weren’t able to completely corrupt either the CIA or the DIA or the State Department’s INR, (Bureau of Intelligence and Research).
Yes. And in the formal authorisation, the agency provided the fig leaf to the WH and the INA provided the fig leaf to the Agency.
Tragically exact!
Delay laid out what his defense will be: this is all his lawyer’s fault. Over and over he says he ran things across his lawyers and they said everything he did was perfectly legal.
And, there’s this:
The Ethics Committee is investigating now a $70,000 trip you took to Britain in May of 2000. You stayed in fancy hotels, you went to “The Lion King,” you went on a side golf trip to Scotland to play at St. Andrews.
Did you really think that Abramoff, who you say was one of your close friends and a big-time lobbyist, who was along on this trip — did you really believe he had nothing to do with paying for this trip?
DELAY: Yes, because, again, we checked everything and double- checked and had lawyers check, and — can we do it?
Look, part of my job also, and what I love doing, is being involved in international affairs. I was raised in Venezuela. I was heavily involved in the Contra movement in Central America. I was heavily involved in defending freedom in Taiwan. I stand up for Israel and I fight for Israel.
I’m involved in the conservative movement overseas, too. I went there to meet with Margaret Thatcher and other high-ranking officials talking and working with them on how the conservative party can get back into power.
Sure, I enjoy myself. Am I supposed to be limited? I can’t go to the play that is right down the street? I can’t play golf? Golf is the only thing I do for myself. I love golf. I can’t play golf while I’m there? I can’t take an afternoon off and play golf?
WALLACE: You can do all those things. The question is, can you do it if it’s paid for…
DELAY: This was totally…
WALLACE: … by lobbyists?
DELAY: This was totally paid for, legally paid for by a conservative organization, and checked and double-checked. Abramoff helps this organization raise money. That’s legal. They go out and they raise money. They…
WALLACE: Well, supposedly, just before this trip, they raised some money, and the money went to this…
DELAY: No, no, no…
WALLACE: … policy center, and then suddenly you have this big trip.
DELAY: They raise money all the time. They have money, and they’re involved in the conservative movement overseas. They want to see it flourish because they think it’s good for those countries. And they want people like me to go over there and work with the leaders over there to help them build the conservative movement, and they pay for it.
WALLACE: Are you and Abramoff still close friends?
DELAY: Unfortunately, because of his trouble, we haven’t talked. Look, we were friends, just like I am friends with many lobbyists in this town. Jack Abramoff was a friend. I have no clue what his inner workings of his business and everything else is going to — I don’t ask a lobbyist to come talk to me about something and then grill them on how their operations run in town.
And people are trying to make me responsible for Jack Abramoff’s actions if he’s guilty, and I’m not convinced that he is.
The man has absolutely no conscience. He, Rove and Bush are the real Axis of Evil.
If only the Larry Franklin arrest would lead to the exposure of the Michael Ledeen gang, the neocon hijacking of US foreign policy would come to a halt in the same way that the Abramoff/Delay stink is going to undo the hijacking of the economy and the political process by those Grover Norquist type extremists.
We tend to lump them together but there are three disparate ideologies that merged to make the current GOP leadership:
Tom Delay belongs to the third group but his money raising schemes have empowered all three groups.
Note;
Before the neocons were “liberals”, they were for the most part leftist Trotskyites, or in some cases Leninists. And as such, these creatures never developed a true rerspect for Democracy, since their previous leftism depended on an authoritarian structure of government.
So, they never were “liberals” in the democratic sense of the term.
i think you might enjoy this piece about a k street lobbyist for whom the scales fell off after katrina.
it’s a hard rain…gonna fall.
this lovely:
…here is some background citing Elizabeth Drew, who wrote up a piece in the NY Review of books a few months ago.
This diary was lost in the crowd noice back then, but it’s a very important part of the corruption in DC.