to cast a "Carter-esque"patina over President Obama's foreign policy in today's Sunday Globe.
Aiyeee, it must be the end of September in a Presidential election year, because Former President Carter is coming in for his usual straw man drubbing.
Jeff's point is pretty shallow &hypocritical even for him, the rioting in the Middle East MUST be all President Obama fault cuz he is a weak leader etc etc etc.
Jeff is a neocon, and neocons despite a transparent veneer of bipartisanship are heavy traffickers in the needs of movement conservatism at the moment.
So of course out comes the Carter metaphor right on schedule...and just as suddenly the US Backed Fall of Colonel Khadaffi and the impending fall of the Supreme Opthamalocrat in Syria have become in the neocon mindset equivalent to the Fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
But then again I can recall with the simplest nostalgia back in 1998 or so when Colonel Khadaffi was being ginned up as a threat to National Security by the neocon right who in turn flung the charge of appeasement at then President Bill Clinton.
I don't think you have go far back into the neocon archives to find all sorts of blusterly editorials demanding the deposition of Col, Khadaffi, President Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein as rogue regional actors that are threatening the peace.
So of course fourteen years later, Khadaffi is dead, Bin Laden is dead, Assad's ne'er do well son totters and Saddam is worm chow and yet somehow Jeff Jacoby can summon the mental gymnastics to call that appeasement and failure.
It is a special sort of neocon mental gymnastics, as politicians are in the greatest danger when they listen to neoconservatives and faithfully go about engineering the downfall of Khadaffi, Assad etc etc etc.
We are deep into the murky territory of partisan cognitive dissonance when a US President who openly connived at the fall of Colonel Moamar Khadaffi can be called an appeaser by anyone left alone a partisan commentator.
Part of our problem in the region today is because the US more of less uncritically accepted neoconservative assumptions about certain regional actors from the git-go, admittedly this cuts across party lines in the USA pretty evenly.
And meanwhile those selfsame neocons have completely quit on their premises circa 1998 all in bid to tear down President Obama.
Well what can you expect in an election year? Hypocrisy front and center.
Me?
I would love to meet a neocon that could ever admit publicly or privately that they had made a mistake....
