Endangered reptile, Dick Cheney, emerged from under a rock
somewhere sporting a new, donated heart and the same incredibly ignorant hubris
as always. He was at the Wyoming
republican convention endorsing Mitt Romney, and called Obama an “unmitigated
disaster” and he ought to know; he engineered and presided over the most
tragically wrongheaded series of foreign policy blunders since the Gulf of
Tonkin. His complete misunderstanding
of the potential outcomes in Iraq and the idiotic post-invasion policies
dreamed up along with Rumsfeld over cocktails at the Bohemian Grove is to blame
for, not only our continued disastrous involvement with Afghanistan, but the
tar pit from which Obama has been carefully struggling to extricate us since he
took office almost four years ago.
Being the empty headed vessel he is, Romney is also enthusiastically
casting aspersions on the Obama foreign policy, criticizing him in the wake of
the abject failure of the feared North Koren rocket launch, apparently not
realizing the US foreign policy and accompanying comprehensive sanctions have
starved the North Koreans of the technical resources necessary to achieve what
has to be considered as the monumental bluff that it is. Still, Japan clearly gets nervous every time some
addled Korean poo-bah decides he wants to join the space age, even if the
rockets typically pose more of danger to the North Koreans than they do Japan,
so it’s important that we have some kind of influence over their behavior. Romney seems to feel that talking to them –
and offering them food – only serves to encourage this behavior and we should
disengage, not give them anything and hope that teaches them the lesson we want
to impart. Fat chance, Mitt, but thanks
for weighing in with your opinion.
With Obama in Cartagena this week for a Latin American
summit, Mitt also apparently feels the time is right to re-state his solidly
1980’s-era advice – you know, right up there with his contention that Russia is
our main foreign policy opponent these days – and parrots the utterly
discredited but strangely pervasive notion that Cuba is a menace to us in the
Caribbean and should be treated with a firm “communist-threat-to-our-way-of-life”
hand until they allow freedom and democracy and cheap consumer goods to sweep
over the land. Never mind that Cuba has
a 97% literacy rate – higher than ours – universal medical care and are as
catholic as Rick Santorum. They play
that goddamn merengue music, smoke cigars and drink rum all night; they are
suspect and dangerous as long as that bearded freak Castro is alive.
No, Mitt is of the Dick Cheney / Jean Kirkpatrick / George
the Dull school of neo-conservatism that proposes that all foreign policy
decisions and policies arise from the seed of American exceptionalism and
entitlement. If a country doesn’t want
to play ball with us we need to ignore them or – in the case of one perceived
as a threat – park an aircraft carrier offshore. It’s a variant of the “nobody fucks with us –
you lookin’ at me?” testosterone-fueled belligerence that put George the Dull
into a bigger shit-storm than he expected when he decided to start bombing
people willy-nilly in the wake of 9/11.
It presupposes that other countries have no patriotic self esteem and
will roll over and piss themselves if we just threaten them with tragic enough
consequences for misbehaving.
That this has been a miserable failure for the last 50 years
escapes these donkeys. It’s either that
or the “Obama is wrong about everything” reaction that has characterized
republican policy making since 2008. They
think the way to calm down a pissed off Doberman is to hit it with a stick
rather than tossing it a rib-eye.
For his part the newly recovered transplant patient Cheney,
spent part of his night trying once again to justify water boarding, extraordinary
rendition and various other medieval enhanced interrogation techniques favored
by his merry band of fascists in front of the GOP movers and shakers in
Wyoming, the most republican state in the union, where he still has some sort
of reputation as a kingmaker in spite of his being shoulder to shoulder with
Bush the Dull during an administration known more for blundering ignorance and
malapropisms than any historically notable achievements. For me, I hope you do have Mitt’s ear as some
kind of twisted elder statesman, a la Henry Kissinger, and he trumpets his
fealty to the cause of incoherent foreign policy that is your stock in
trade. It would give people one more reason to vote
for Gary Johnson…
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