This is a well written and informative article.

One admires how “hate America firsters” can keep their sanity, with such inconsistent premises. If you don’t believe in God, then what is your authority to say that America is wrong to act in her interest?

Kicking Saddam’s butt, death toll neglible. After the fact nation building, death toll about 5 thousand (US).

Us neocons will blame the left, for making us stay in Iraq out of some “noble” sentiment that we need to “fix what we broke”, and worry about “what is good for the indiginous population. Along the way, we will note the hundreds of thousands that Saddam left lying dead in ditches across the country.

You Libs will blame the right, for some “desire to spread democracy”, thinking that is what has kept us in Iraq. You will attempt to credit the US with hundreds of thousands more left lying dead in a ditch, from the conflict that we are stuck in. “Kerry and Murtha style”, you libs will assume that everyone who dies in the area somehow has the US to thank for that.

Given this split, the pundit and pseudo-journalist class will feed off each other, self-congratulating and helping each other come up with names (for groups of people and situations) and theories, each angling for a sensationalist viewpoint, and heaping “snark” upon those who disagree.

Without a moment’s dissonance, you would argue that “the soviet bloc collapsed because life in the west is sweeter”, and the radical portion of the muslim word is at war with us because of the evil things we have done to them, as we spread our evil US-style democracy.

Try telling a teenager, “Do as I say, not as I do.” LOL. Good luck.

Try telling crooked politicians, of all political persuasions, to clean up their act and become more honest. But, we reserve the right to preserve our intellectual dishonesty, and our ability to demonize the personalities who disagree with us (have you heard RUSH is fat, Obama is BLACK, Palin is stupid, Barney is Gay and Godless?).

You prop up Bacevich by appearing to disagree with him, but insisting that his minor utterances are worthy of our attention.

Well maybe. But some people don’t have the fundamentals right yet.

Johnny calls this liberalism and it indeed has the touchy-feely, tendentious smell of same, but it’s no less George Bushist as well via essentially saying “they hate us for who we are.”

Very disappointing. Depressing in fact. Eight years since 9/11 and we are still on the trajectory of making ever more enemies in the Mideast instead of fewer, which I suppose is exactly what you’d expect when political correctness prevents anyone from observing that it’s our policies over there that make us so hated.

Could be vignette in a sequel to that movie “Idiocracy”: We’re so stupid we not only get mad when a dog that we endlessly taunt bites us, but we still don’t realize that’s why it bit us so we just keep on taunting it all the more.

“Sure, of *course* we aren’t going to stop subsidizing Israel’s expansion of those settlements. And sure, of *course* we’ll make sure that Goldstone report about Gaza is just buried away…. Why should our support of the stealing of Palestinian land and blocking investigations into war crimes against them have *anything* to do with how arabs feel about us?”

Yeesh; what idiocy.

As a citizen of a country which produced terrorists(Ireland), I can see firsthand why his position is nonsense. The IRA were thoroughly infiltrated by the Brits, lost public sympathy in Ireland after the early 90s bloodletting and American support after 9/11. The people from which the were sprung benefited from the British welfare state and were given makework public jobs on the Queen’s shilling, you name it. But all of this had nothing to do with why the IRA gave up. They gave up because they for the same reason they got in the terror business, they thought it was the best way they could make progress toward their goals, and they haveby entering politics. That crowd over there that doesn’t like you will turn its attention from America when it finds a greater Satan. If anything the rise of a westernised Middle East will increase radicalisation just as increased capitalism in the former GDR has increased sympathy for the far left.

That snippy little remark about Palin and Kucinich was unbecoming I would like to add.

Addendum. Eastern Europe didn’t embrace capitalism because they saw it on MTV and thought it looked good(Americans greatly overestimate the value of their cultural exports, everyone else is just as narcissistic as you are). They embraces it because it was what they had before Communism, which was an artificial system. State institutions always reflect underlying culture. Afterall, why is Central Asia so different from the Baltic states?