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By Mark Heisler
$21.33
Todd Gitlin
$ 17.13
$17
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. House of Representatives
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As the year draws to a close, the U.S. government risks repeating the costly mistakes of the recent past by ratcheting up tensions with Iran, emphasizing risky sanctions over diplomatic negotiations and making fact-challenged claims about Iran’s nuclear program. Good thing Rep. Dennis Kucinich is on Capitol Hill to call Congress on its deadly war addiction.
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Though he gives credit to Christopher Hitchens’ exceptional talent, Chris Hedges remembers the newly departed writer differently from the way others might in this clip from CBC Radio. In an unflinching appraisal, Hedges recalls what Hitchens got wrong about religion, his biggest intellectual failing and what it was like to engage him in a debate.
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newamericancentury.org
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After a brief hiatus, which happened to coincide with the last phase of the presidential campaign season, the Project for a New American Century’s Web site is back up and running, thanks to Bill Kristol and his chums at the neocon think tank.
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John McCain has made much of his reputation as a “maverick,” but, as Reason magazine’s Matt Welch lays out in this clip, McCain the Neocon has emerged as the Republican presidential nominee’s dominant political persona and the one he’ll take into the White House if he wins.
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Congressional Quarterly investigates John McCain’s curious decision to pollute his maverick image by hiring a bunch of lobbyists to run his campaign. The list includes “campaign manager Rick Davis, senior adviser Charlie Black, deputy campaign manager Christian Ferry, congressional liaison John Green, senior policy adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer” and neocon chicken hawk Randy Scheunemann.
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John Stewart says it’s the “geopolitical equivalent of the fortune cookie [plus] ‘in bed’ ”: U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizad (above) trashing Russia’s aggression but limiting comparison to the Iraq invasion by adding a qualifier that tells us we’re talking about someplace that matters to civilized people. Follow-up questions for extra credit: Is Georgia really in Europe? And how many Americans are worried right now the Russians will take Atlanta?
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AP photo, Mary Altaffer / Irakli Gedeniedze, pool
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By Robert Scheer — Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
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Stephen Colbert is a feisty one, but he might have met his match in Huffington Post editrix Arianna Huffington, who came to his Thursday show sassy in lace and camera-ready with quips like, “You know what it’s like for John McCain to be endorsing torture? It’s like you becoming the president of the Grizzly Bear Fan Club.” In the nick of time, Colbert stole the show back from Huffington with his comeback to her best McCain zinger.
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Flickr / digiart2001
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There was the Jason Blair scandal, the Judith Miller WMD fiasco, the John McCain (yawn) brouhaha and the appointment of neocon “never-get-it-right” William Kristol as an Op-Ed columnist, to mention a few New York Times blunders. All that and a shareholders’ assault make the Sulzbergers’ lock on ownership of The New York Times seem not entirely impregnable, explains Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff.
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By Joe Conason — For a brief moment on Memorial Day, the U.S. and Iran set aside decades of hostility to meet and talk. That short rendezvous, although upsetting to neoconservative warmongers and their nefarious plans, holds real promise for American security and prosperity.
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Vanity Fair
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In the new issue of Vanity Fair, experts in and out of the government report that the groundwork for a war against Iran has already been set. “I’ve heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen,” a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist tells the mag.
Related: Check out a video of Bush’s disturbing Iraq-Iran parallels
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dailykos.com
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President Bush has been hemorrhaging allies recently, with Republicans upset over the loss of Congress and the neoconservative architects of the war scrambling to point fingers as Iraq spirals further and further into chaos.
UPDATE: Even Henry Kissinger says Iraq can’t be won militarily.
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Bill Maher delivers a stirring and passionate rebuke to the neocons who so tragically misplanned the Iraq war. (Video & Transcript)
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Check out this can’t-miss two-part interview between Bill Maher and Joe Scarborough. Maher ends the first segment with a uppercut knockout punch straight to Bush’s jaw; in the second part, Bill says “the jury’s in” on the “idiot” question.
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From Forbes FYI
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Humorist and former Bush I speechwriter Christopher Buckley, a once-staunch Republican, writes that he hopes his party loses both houses in November. And as for Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”? Buckley suggests it should be termed “incontinent conservatism.”
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Blogger “Surfeited” has a novel suggestion: “Whenever a neoconservative says something should be done ... you can finish the thought for him by adding three little words: by killing people.” Skeptical? Check out the samples.
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Politics trumped academic integrity, says Nation writer Philip Weiss, when a neocon network torpedoed the appointment of Mideast scholar and blogger Juan Cole to a faculty position at Yale.
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Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading neocon intellectuals who argued the case for the Iraq war, admits in a blockbuster N.Y. Times Magazine essay that it is “very hard to see how [the removal of Saddam Hussein, and a few spillover benefits] justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent.”
Andrew Sullivan, another leading pro-war conservative, echoes Fukuyama’s comment and points out three areas where neocons were tragically wrong.
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