by Oui
Thu Jan 25th, 2018 at 12:41:47 PM EST
Amazing how widespread the anti-Russia rhetoric has become since 2008, the year of the second Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and the Georgia War with Russia started by Saakashvili. It was already clear then that the Republican right-wing were up to their elbows with recognizable dirty tricks in both affairs.
During the Nixon years, the GOP (Grand Ole Party) were in the big leagues with dirty tricks. It started off with the intrigues of a young Kissinger to derail the Paris peace effort between the Johnson administration and a delegation of North Vietnamese. The effort by the GOP was a shock therapy to continue the Vietnam War and mass destruction and loss of life for another six years. Of course somewhere during that period Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1973).
"Tricky" Dick Nixon became synonomous with the Watergate burglary and obstruction of justice for firing Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor.
The Saturday Night Massacre began when Nixon gave the order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a desperate effort to prevent him from hearing tape-recorded evidence that proved the White House's involvement in a conspiracy to obstruct the investigation of a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. Nixon's misuse of executive power backfired, immediately costing him two highly respected members of his administration: Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus, who both resigned rather than follow Nixon's directive. Third in command at the Justice Department was Solicitor General Robert Bork, who agreed to do the dirty deed and fired Cox.
Every 100 years it seems history repeats itself leading up to??
More below the fold ...
A bit of history when I searched @EuroTrib for George Marshall [w/o Fund] ...
In Search of a Foreign Policy Vision by Nonpartisan on Jan 28th, 2007
Woodrow Wilson was many things, not all of them good. He was a racist who re-segregated the civil service; he was ambivalent about woman suffrage and allowed its proponents to be jailed and force-fed during the war. He opposed [cached] free speech during wartime and sanctioned the infamous Palmer Raids which jailed thousands of conscientious objectors and suspected Communists.
But during the brief span of the Wilsonian moment [cached] -- from the armistice on November 11, 1918, to Wilson's collapse less than a year later -- Woodrow Wilson held in his hands the liquid fire of the world's hope. Wilson was not the originator of the concept of the League of Nations, but he had the audacity to stride into the halls of Europe and demand its creation -- and for that brief moment, all the peoples of the world looked to him with awe and expectation. America, as personified by Wilson, was the savior come to unite the stricken nations in one cause, one purpose, that of eternal peace through law and diplomacy.
The worldwide acceptance of American exceptionalism during the Wilsonian moment is every neoconservative's dream, and indeed Wilson's militarism and internationalism [cached] may sound suspiciously neoconservative to liberal ears.
Forever War and The New American Police State by Steven D. on May 17th, 2006
The Republican Party first began to fixate on the use of smear campaigns and charges of treason by Democrats and liberals at the beginning of the Cold War. What had once been a party of isolationist fervor, determined enough to deny President Wilson his dream of a strong League of Nations at the end of World War I, took the opportunity the Cold War handed it to create fear and generate the myth of Democratic weakness in the area of National Defense. GOP leaders who had once railed against foreign entanglements and international intervention now raised the specter of Communism as a cudgel to browbeat Democrats and accuse them of being soft, weak and ill prepared to defend America against the Satanic menace of an all powerful International Communist Movement.
Thus, we saw the rise in the GOP of smear merchants, fear mongers and rank opportunists like Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn, the House Un-American Activities Committee members and, most of all, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It is no surprise that the height of their power came during the Korean War when many innocent men and women in the State Department and elsewhere in the Federal Government had their careers ruined through the judicious use of slander, innuendo and outright lies by these political assassins. Even the great General George Marshall, the man who had successfully led our armed forces during World War II, and then conceived and executed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe was accused of being a traitor and of assisting the Communist drive for world domination.
For the next 40 years, it was a standard refrain of the Republicans that Democrats could not be trusted to protect our National Security from the monolithic and monstrous enemy of International Communism.
'Military Humanitarianism' in the Twilight of Empire by Jacob Freeze on Nov 3rd, 2007
"Military humanitarianism" is a phrase coined by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian to describe the rationale behind the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Recent days have seen Dick Cheney and Tony Blair point belligerent fingers at Tehran, but both spoke in the slipstream of Bernard Kouchner, who a month ago warned the world that it should prepare for war over Iran's nuclear programme. "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," said the French minister of foreign affairs. The swell of rhetoric - which culminated in President Bush's assertion last week that a nuclear-armed Iran could provoke a third world war - is gravely undermined by what Sir John Holmes, the UN's emergency relief coordinator, has called the "taint of Iraq", and the weapons of mass destruction pretext for invasion. Why should we believe the US and its allies now, when we were already so brutally deceived?
The United States is happy to reserve the privilege of "humanitarian war" for itself and Israel, preserving "universal human rights" against the threat of terrorism, but now that Turkey is claiming the same privilege to defend itself against Kurdish terrorists, "the community of civilized nations" has undergone a strange contraction.
For American neo-conservatives, Israel and the United States have always been the only "civilized nations," like a strangely disconnected Dual Empire surrounded by barbarian wilderness, and other nations could only attain a status of semi-civilization by slavishly endorsing every military adventure generated by the exigencies of American and Israeli politics. Tony Blair was the paradigm of a "good barbarian," and Zizek's homeland of Slovenia also enrolled itself under the banner of the "Coalition of the Willing."
Now the "Coalition of the Willing" is just a tattered memory, oil is selling for $96 per barrel, Turkey is about to invade Iraq for a much better reason than the United States ever had, and Russia has aligned itself with Iran against an American attack.
Of course as was predicted, the humanitarian incentive became real under the Obama administration as regime change under R2P militarism in the Arab Spring. Europe has suffered the consequences of a tug to the right in right-wing populist movements of anti-immigration and Islamophobia.
Obama's Legacy: Pushing the Iran Deal through US Congress
At The New Yorker, Connie Bruck (wife of a pro-Deal Israel lobbyist) says that Chuck Schumer's defection on the deal was calculated so that he could raise money for 2016: in a word, AIPAC. It was "implausible" that Schumer would oppose AIPAC, she says; and he will whip opposition to the deal, rather than layin low.
...
More on the division of the Israel lobby. Bloomberg's Josh Rogin says that Republicans have outsourced their foreign policy to the muscular John Hay Initiative, this cycle's version of the American Enterprise Institute. Founded by neocons Eliot Cohen, Eric Edelman, and Brian Hook (who doesn't like "neo isolationism in both parties"). Also including Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden. They're briefing almost all the candidates. Not a word about Israel in this article, but it's clearly an important matter to the Hay Initiative. Rogin says Roger Zakheim is part of the Rubio braintrust. Here's Zakheim saying that George W. Bush is a good role model after all. Who knew?
Finally, John Judis has an excellent piece up at Slate on the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the small pro-Israel thinktank that has become a leading opponent of the Iran deal, supplying three witnesses to a Senate Banking Committee hearing against the deal. FDD used to serve the Democratic Party, but increasingly it is serving Republicans, Judis relates. And there's this about donors.
When the anti-Trump coalition hardened their stance in March 2016, I wrote this timely diary @BooMan ...
War On The Rocks - McCain Surrogate/ PNAC/AIPAC
In BooMan's fp story - Neoconservatives Begin the Long March Back - not once was the magic word ISRAEL uttered ... just unbelievable. Look at the crowd of the first 93 signatories: the worst of the worst of interventionists, warmongers, pro-Israel, anti-Iran crowd over the past decades. Most worrisome if they see the Democratic Party under leadership of Hillary Clinton as their vehicle to extend Pax Americana.
The first names I picked out right off-hand were:
Daniel A. Blumenthal
Michael Chertoff
Eliot A. Cohen
Tom Donnelly
Daniel Drezner [update]
Eric Edelman
Niall Ferguson
Aaron Friedberg
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Robert Kagan
Philip I. Levy
Bryan McGrath
Everettt Pyatt [McCain Institute]
Michael Rubin
Randy Scheunemann
Dov S. Zakheim
Philip Zelikow
Robert B. Zoellick
This is so very obvious with numerous links to the U.S. Navy [incidents of fame or infamy: Bay of Pigs invasion, Gulf of Tonkin false-flag, George H.W. Bush] and U.S. Navy pilot John McCain. Just the name Randy Scheunemann should have been a red alert. None of these people are standard "conservatives" who were once rooted in the Democratic party and there should be no shelter for them by the Democrats in the 21st century. The legacy of president Obama would evolve into a wasteland of fear, terror and war. Who are we kidding for Christ's sake? A few persons are deeply involved in the 911 Congressional Investigation and cover-up of certain displeasing facts. Truth once again becomes the first casualty towards another global war.
In the letter of the group's declaration, obvious alert for major bullshit and 5 pinocchios award right off the bat:
His admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world's greatest democracy.
We the undersigned, members of the Republican national security community, represent a broad spectrum of opinion on America's role in the world and what is necessary to keep us safe and prosperous. We have disagreed with one another on many issues, including the Iraq war and intervention in Syria.
Not looking in the mirror, "national security" [thinking of Chertoff], all in agreement on policy in the Middle-East, staunch military support for ally Israel, patronizing friendly dictators and Gulf monarchies and a clear preference to bomb Iran. By definition these persons see in Hillary Clinton their favorite daughter to steer White House policy. Netanyahu has and would agree on all points.
Lo and behold, the War On The Rocks is linked to the Alliance for Securing Democracy of Clint Watts, the founder of ASD's Hamilton68 dashboard ... quite interesting. However, the symbolic pervasion of Putin and Russia as our enemy state has corrupted US politics. After Clinton's defeat at the hands of 'apprentice' Donald Trump, the coalition for National Security got into high gear in an attempt of a coup d'état or regime change if you will.
The enablers were readily found among the DINOs in US Congress and the pundits followed. McCarthyism, misinformation and censorship are now the new normal. I will cover this further in a Part 2.
