Bill Kristol is the Worst We Have to Offer

15 Comments

1. 

   Philo Vaihinger on March 21, 2014 at 12:00 pm

   Ukraine is not an area in which it makes sense for the US to lead.

   It is not an area where the US needs to even have a preference.

   We should be quiet as Guatemala about what happens on the other side of the world, in or near Russia’s soft under-belly.

   Got it?

   Cold War is over.

   US out of NATO.

   Yankee go home.

   You want to fight for Ukraine or the Crimea?

   Go sign up in Kiev.

   I hear they’re signing up LOTS of volunteers.

   • 

     BooMan on March 21, 2014 at 12:13 pm

     I kind of disagree. At least, a little.

     Obviously, we don’t want to get into a shooting war in Russia over Crimea, but we also want to prevent them from annexing more of Ukraine, which requires some thoughtfulness and leadership.  

     We are not Guatemala, and Europe looks to us to help them avoid becoming supplicants to Putin’s increasingly appalling anti-democratic, anti-western influence.  

     In this case, we pushed too hard and had our bluff called.  But we can’t take the position that Europe’s interests in Ukraine have no meaning for us.  

     We aren’t going to get in a fighting war over the partition of Ukraine (proper) either, but we might be able to prevent it from happening in the first place.  

2. 

   TarheelDem on March 21, 2014 at 12:19 pm

   Kristol’s just pissed that the US didn’t seize Sevastapol like the Nuland-Kaganate wanted (the equivalent of toppling Saddam Hussein).

   And Kristol’s family has been consistent in promoting war.

3. 

   euzoius on March 21, 2014 at 1:08 pm

   The are two aspects of imbecility on display here.

   First, the idea that if only Prez Rmoney (or some other “conservative” worthy) had been the one pulling this Neo-con Nuland shit in Ukraine, Putin would have been paralyzed with some sort of “fear” is something only an imbecile would believe.  We let some old neo-cons foolishly overplay a very weak hand and got slammed, watching Russian special forces deploy in Sebastopol.  

   Crimea will now be officially annexed, lock stock and barrel, Ukraine is more divided and politically frayed, eastern Europe is highly alarmed and the EU and America are diplomatically divided.  All this happens with dimwit Prez Rmoney as well, since Putin and his generals weren’t gonna pussyfoot around watching this sort of simple-minded interference in their long-standing sphere of interest.  Ukraine finally gets a democratic state, and we urge their citizens to flush their constitution, jeesus.

   The second level of imbecility is that a knee-jerk warmonger who should no longer have any credibility whatever about the reality of projecting American power and how it “works” is still jabbering his absurd baseless drivel coast to coast, still regarded as some sort of credible and reliable foreign policy “expert” by both braindead “conservatives” and the useless corporate media.  Kristol (and all the rest of the NextAmericanCentury Iraq war cheerleaders) would be the objects of universal mockery and derision in a responsible and serious nation.  If not facing actual retribution.  

   At the very least the bellicose neocon wing of “analysis” should be required to get some new faces to shovel their shit at the American boobs.  But we don’t even require a new cast of characters for the farce! I guess the idea is that we’re too stupid to learn new actors playing the old parts.

   • 

     Quentin on March 21, 2014 at 2:06 pm

     It’s very mysterious how this indiocy works. How can people be so wrong and at the same time be so ‘succesful’? Is this also something that makes the US exceptional?

4. 

   Death to Randroids on March 21, 2014 at 2:06 pm

   If you really want to maximize your chances of Bill Kristol reading your criticism of him, open your piece with something stronger than “drop dead” which might be interpreted as threatening language.

5. 

   Oui on March 21, 2014 at 2:35 pm

   Many moons ago I was optimistic about the I-P negotiations and mentioned the one event that could derail the Obama grand schema on Syria – Iran and I-P talks: worsening developments in Ukraine.

   So the Washington Neocon crowd managed to get deeply involved in the Maidan protest in Kyiv and color the revolution red. President Obama has hired advisers who are interventionists and propagate US world dominance: Tony Blinken (former deputy to VP Joe Biden), Susan Rice, Vicky Nuland, William Burns and Samantha Power.

   A bellicose attitude towards Russia, no intention to compromise and no courage to deal on a person-to-person level with Putin. Much of the foreign policy is managed contrary to Obama’s promises and statements made during his presidential campaign. I sense a major conflict between advisers inside the White House and foreign policy is not pronounced by a single voice. Joe Biden‘s remarks, William Burns, Vicky Nuland, William Burns, etc.

   The stakes are high and Obama doesn’t show he is in control.

   ○ US ‘Diplomacy’ Dead-Ended In UN Security Council

   Far-Right Ukrainian Lawmaker Assaults State TV Boss

   (NBC News) – A lawmaker from Ukraine’s far-right, ultra-nationalist party has been filmed assaulting the head of state television in his own office before forcing him to write a letter of resignation.

   Igor Miroshnichenko visited the offices of First National TV on Tuesday evening and accused channel boss Oleksandr Panteleymonov of working for the Russian authorities after the station broadcast Vladimir Putin’s speech on Crimea.

   A video of the incident was posted online and the resignation letter was published on Facebook by the Svoboda Party‘s Press Secretary Aleksandr Aronets.

   “You lied to Ukrainians using their own money,” Miroshnichenko shouts in the video. (The physical assault comes about 4:40 into the video below).

   MofA: Ukraine: Just Some News Items II

   ○ Biden Warns Russia: U.S. Will Defend Allies

   • 

     Oui on March 21, 2014 at 4:03 pm

     .

     Robert Kagan Writes In Defense Of Slavery

     (MofA) –  Neocon Robert Kagan is writing In Defense of Empire. Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. The lunacy of his arguments can be show best when one substitute the object of his essay:

     In June 1941, during the festival of Shavuot, a mob of Arab soldiers and tribesmen led a pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad, murdering well over 180 men, women, and children. The pogrom, known locally as the Farhud (“looting”), was documented by the late Baghdadi Jew and Middle East specialist Elie Kedourie in his 1970 book The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies. Kedourie blamed British authorities for failing to protect the Jews, despite having taken over responsibility for Mesopotamia from the Ottoman Empire more than two decades earlier. He explained that the Jews could “cheerfully acknowledge” the “right of conquest,” whether exercised by the Ottomans or by the British, because “their history had taught them that there lay safety.” But the British failure to enforce the law and provide imperial order was the kind of transgression that ethnic and religious minorities could ill afford: traditionally, imperialism itself, most notably that of the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, had protected minorities from the tyranny of the majority. It wasn’t imperialism per se that Kedourie railed against, but weak, ineffectual imperialism.

     Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by slavery, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned in the interregnums. To wit, the British may have failed in Baghdad, Palestine, and elsewhere, but the larger history of the British slaveholdership is one of providing a vast armature of stability, fostered by sea and rail communications, where before there had been demonstrably less stability.
     …
     But slavery is now seen by global elites as altogether evil, despite slaveholdership having offered the most benign form of order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable minimum. Compared with slaveholdership, democracy is a new and uncertain phenomenon. Even the two most estimable democracies in modern history, the United States and Great Britain, were slaveholdership for long periods.

     …
     Ancient empires such as Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Mauryan India, and Han China may have been cruel beyond measure, but they were less cruel and delivered more predictability for the average person than did anything beyond their borders. Who says imperialism is necessarily reactionary? Athens, Rome, Venice, and Great Britain were the most enlightened regimes of their day. True, imperialism has often been driven by the pursuit of riches, but that pursuit has in many cases resulted in a hard-earned cosmopolitanism. The early modern empires of Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey were well known for their relative tolerance and protection of minorities, including the Jews. Precisely because the Hapsburg imperialists governed a mélange of ethnic and religious groups stretching from the edge of the Swiss Alps to central Romania, and from the Polish Carpathians to the Adriatic Sea, they abjured ethnic nationalism and sought a universalism almost postmodern in its design. What followed the Hapsburgs were mono-ethnic states and quasi-democracies that persecuted minorities and helped ease the path of Nazism. [Does Kagan give support to the Russian Federation and it’s imperial empire crossing the globe from Trans-Dniester to Vladivostok? – Oui]  

     All of these empires delivered more peace and stability than the United Nations ever has or probably ever could. Consider, too, the American example. The humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the absence of such interventions in Rwanda and Syria, show American imperialism in action, and in abeyance.

     ○ First Admiralty of Churchill : British troops landed in Mesopotamia in November 1914 to defend the APOC oilfields around Basra

     ○ Why Is Our Foreign Policy in the Former Soviet Union Being Run by PNAC Co-Founder Robert Kagan?

6. 

   gratuitous on March 21, 2014 at 2:39 pm

   First off, let me say that I’m a 55-year-old pacifist, and I haven’t yet seen a case during my lifetime where military intervention by the United States worked worth a damn. It’s expensive, wasteful, and doesn’t accomplish its stated goals. Continuing to believe in the efficacy of war and violence as practiced by the United States in the face of unrelenting factual evidence to the contrary should consign a person to the same fate as Jamie Coots.

   But let’s say, arguendo, that the U.S. practice of war and violence does have some use and that it can actually be applied to a situation to make it better. It’s in the frivolous application of war and violence that makes its non-frivolous use or threat of use all the less effective. Sort of like overusing antibiotics. Sooner or later, you’re going to take your penicillin and it’s not going to cure your infection.

   Iraq was a completely frivolous and gratuitous (npi) use of war and violence. Thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, even millions, of our citizens and others around the world (even a Pope, if memory serves) said so at the time of the invasion. For our trouble, we got called every name in the book and there were dark mutterings of trials for treason and summary execution for dissenters. Now, when military intervention once again looks like a good idea (and I’m assuming that only for the sake of argument), Bill Kristol finds he’s taken one shot too many, and nobody responds to his war-mongering like they did once upon a time. So very sad.

   But, like any true believer, Kristol isn’t going to let a little thing like total failure stop him or even slow him down: The fault for failure does not lie with the High Church of Redemptive Violence. No, it’s you dirty fucking apostate hippies who are to blame!

   Now, we can all cluck our tongues and shake our heads over the delusional man with the ghoul’s grin. But the question that occurs to me is, why does he keep getting a national platform, and Rev. William Barber II gets no oxygen at all? Are the popular media just doing their job (and doing it badly) by promoting Kristol, or do they endorse his message by featuring it?

   • 

     Marie2 on March 21, 2014 at 3:15 pm

     …why does he keep getting a national platform.

     Because he’s one of the USA-WarInc shills.  Like Reagan only not as good at selling the propaganda.

7. 

   Marie2 on March 21, 2014 at 3:12 pm

   Okay — one down —

   ‘Blow me, you monstrous, bloodthirsty fraud, you silly, stupid chickenhawk motherfker who plays army man with the children of people who are so much better than you are, and who would feed innocent civilians in lands you will never visit into your own personal meatgrinder to service your semi-annual martial erection.’

   and 9,999 more to go.  Every freaking neo-con and neo-liberal politician, staffer, lobbyist, “think-tank” employee, media employee, CEO that gets it wrong more often than a monkey with a dart board deserves to be treated like this.  

   • 

     Geov Parrish on March 21, 2014 at 6:10 pm

     Indeed. Pierce’s evisceration isn’t meant for Kristol. It’s meant to show everyone else the utter contempt in which he deserves to be held. As such, it’s a pithy masterpiece, marred only by the fact that it could be applied word for word to a depressing percentage of the bloodthirsty Beltway illiterati.

     • 

       Marie2 on March 21, 2014 at 6:36 pm

       It was specific to Kristol, but also an example of the style and language that is required when reporting on those like Kristol.  Including all his PNAC buddies such as Kagen.  The current crop of Elmer Gantrys and other snake oil salespeople like Palin.  The banksters, hucksters, and fear mongering propagandists.  Wayne La Pierre, Rand Paul, etc.  

8. 

   mainsailset on March 21, 2014 at 4:03 pm

   This Think Progress piece lays out what may be the genius of the Obama admin’s handling of Russia. Added in the announcement that Visa and MC are no longer serving Russia and maybe soon we’ll see Putin mumbling ‘never mind’.

   • 

     Oui on March 21, 2014 at 4:32 pm

     EU leaders agree new Russia sanctions

     (EUobserver) – Today, the EU will also sign the political part of an association agreement with Ukraine. The trade part of the EU accord, the bulk of the treaty, is to be signed after May. Similar deals with Moldova and Georgia – both of which contain Russian-backed “frozen conflicts” – are to be signed in June, two months earlier than planned.

     Amid the show of solidarity on Ukraine, France’s Hollande struck an awkward note. He highlighted that Crimea has important cultural and historical links to Russia and voiced hostility to Ukraine’s EU membership prospects.

     “We are now at the stage of association and the signature is only a partial one. I always thought Ukraine should be associated with the European Union but should not demand to be a member of the European Union.”  

     ○ Canada’s Harper and rush to war over Crimea
     ○ Limp wrist diplomacy?