Dover Bitch

Friday, August 17, 2007

Seriously

Kevin Drum flags this steaming pile of crap from Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs:

The lefty blogosphere, meanwhile, has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the "foreign policy community." The funny thing is...hell, I'll just come out and say it: the netroots' attitude toward professionals isn't that different from the neocons'....

The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don't deserve to be listened to in the future. (Take a look at pretty much any old Jim Hoagland column and you'll see what I mean.) Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies — freedom-hating mediocrities at the CIA, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers' attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world.


Wow. Not unlike the pathetic whines of the traditional media, who think that they must be doing something right because they get complaints from "both sides," when the right-wing wants them to advance their agenda and the left just wants an honest discussion.

America's foreign policy is a disaster. The majority of Americans think the Iraq War was a mistake, wasn't worth it and would like to see it over with as soon as possible. In fact, the majority of people on Earth think that. By any objective standard, in fighting the Iraq War, none of the goals one would normally hope to accomplish in a war have been reached. Unless you see the Iraq War as a step in a desirable expansion of hostile actions in the region, which is, of course, the neocon agenda.

On one hand, a small faction of people who are complaining that the professionals are not helping them advance their narrow agenda.

On the other hand, everybody else, with countless different agendas, who have witnessed the disaster yielded by the neocons and complain that we turn on the TV every day to see only neocons and think-tankers calling us "unserious" and supporting that disastrous agenda.

Yeah, the netroots' attitude is just like the neocons'.

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