Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Why do the neocons want to sabotage Iranian democracy?

I am curious about the GOP House leadership--Boehner, Cantor, and Pence--as well as many neocons (like Jonah Goldberg) who are now insisting that Obama take sides with respect to the struggle in Iran. For the record, I don't think they're stupid. They all know that, if Obama were actually to follow their instructions, the protests would dissolve pretty soon. These folks don't want our help and they sure as hell never asked for it.

No, these guys are doing exactly what you would expect them to do: they're making a bad faith argument in order to set themselves up as the real champions of democracy, and Obama as soft on it. At worst, they might be trying to push Obama's hand here because they want him to fail. You know, it strikes me that the neocons are actually better served by not having power--their idiocy still gets spewed by any network that will have it, their ideas aren't sullied by submitting them to real-world testing, and they will be difficult to dislodge from the prominence in the GOP because the only challenge to their worldview is coming from the left. And a party saddled with neoconservatism as its foreign policy need not worry about regaining power and thus reexposing the dangerous ideas at its core. Neoconnery isn't going away until the right cleans house.

The Man, The Myth, The Bio

East Bay, California, United States
Problem: I have lots of opinions on politics and culture that I need to vent. If I do not do this I will wind up muttering to myself, and that's only like one or two steps away from being a hobo. Solution: I write two blogs. A political blog that has some evident sympathies (pro-Obama, mostly liberal though I dissent on some issues, like guns and trade) and a culture blog that does, well, cultural essays in a more long-form manner. My particular thing is taking overrated things (movies, mostly, but other things too) down a peg and putting underrated things up a peg. I'm sort of the court of last resort, and I tend to focus on more obscure cultural phenomena.