NeoCons, encore.

Blogs are strange. You write things out there and send 50 people an email to alert them. You then tell 50 others as moments occur. The result is that three people read your blog steadily. So, you end up writing things to stimulate aggressiveness, sex, or anger in the futile hope that more people will respond and, therefore, read you, even out of some sort of prurience. I prefer politics and international stuff to these other things, and it also looks like none of that works anyway.

So, here goes: Yesterday, the “Oakland Tribune”, not the West Coast’s flagship paper, had an enormous editorial that came to the conclusion that U.S. policy in Iraq was a failure. Okay, Mr. Bush, they’ve got your number now! The citizens of Oakland and environs who read the editorial page now know that you’ve botched the war. Now the voices rise to speak about how the feckless Mr. Bush could have done things differently, but few are saying that the war was “unwinable” from the beginning.

There’s a certain sort of American who believes in war. We’ve been in so many of them that they’re hard to avoid. For that American, war is the first recourse. That American is George W. Bush, and there are countless, faceless others. In fact, Mr. Bush has changed this nation’s historic policy of waiting until we’re struck to strike back. Imagine the cowboy doctrine stood on its head. Instead of challenging someone to a duel and waiting for them to draw first, all it now takes is the inkling that the other guy’s carrying a gun and it’s slap leather! Isn’t that what Bush did? Didn’t he say that (1) we’re not gonna wait fer somebody to attack us. From now on we’re gonna attack them if they look like they’re gonna attack us; and, (2) Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. How Bush got from weapons of mass destruction to a threat to America (Homeland) is still a big puzzle, but Bush watchers seem to shrug when things like this are pointed out.

Mr. Bush is the sort of President who will send others to war, but the kind of personal coward who will not, himself, go to war. Oh, Bush is the kind who would take a swing at you when he was 20 and drunk, but that’s not the same. I’m guessing that ridiculous Cheney character is exactly the same, only without any remorse. Rumsfeld, as I recall, did serve in the military as a regular soldier or sailor, but he’s one of the few in that Administration who wouldn’t have used family privilege or lies to escape the battlefield. So what we have is a bunch of guys who are armchair soldiers making war because they have no clue what battle is like, but they revel in its glory. They’re throwbacks!

I was foolish enough to think that when Bill Clinton was elected everything would change in American politics. Out with the pre-Depression cats and in with the Baby Boomers. What I forgot was there was a YAF just like there was an SDS. And the heirs to YAF are the NeoCons, and the heirs to the SDS are stockbrokers. Where did I fail?