La la la, I can't hear you!

I love this piece by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. There's no basic idea or unifying theme to the piece, which doesn't bother me one bit, because it gives just about the best description of the Republican foreign-policy decision-making process that I've ever read. Among the gems:

Those Republican voters, though, are a fairly pliable lot. George W. Bush ran in 2000 as a committed enemy of nation building who promised a more "humble" foreign policy. He railed against what he saw as an overstretched military and promised to treat our friends overseas as "allies, not satellites." Republicans lapped it up. Now he's done the opposite of all those things, and they're still lapping it up.

And:

The war didn't follow from the theory. The theory followed from the war...The Republican base bought into this theory mainly because President Bush said it.

And:

What did arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol have to say to this? In a Weekly Standard editorial, he blasted Fukuyama's essay [urging reassessment of our Iraq policy] but almost entirely avoided its substance. Instead, Kristol issued rousing calls for "resolve" against the enemy and denounced "dishonorable retreat." This is roughly translated as: "La la la, I can't hear you."

Hear that ring of truth? Actually, the Weekly Standard is a great barometer of Bush administration success. Unlike its big sister the National Review (which will criticize Bush with great gusto, knowing no one important is reading), the Weekly Standard simply shuts up whenever Bush makes a hash of things (i.e. about every other week). I should go and make a graph of Bush's approval ratings vs. the number of articles posted on the Weekly Standard web site. I'm sure they'd go up and down in unison.

READING GUIDE

In other news, France's government has, predictably, bowed to massive student protests against a new law that allows employers to...get this...lay off workers who are under 26 (all you 30-year-old geezers, you're still safe). Apparently, France's youngsters believe they have a national right to never be fired. Maybe that's why French companies are so reluctant to hire them in the first place...

Also, here's an interesting article about how Russia confuses even China.

And here's an interesting article by John Derbyshire, the Last Imperialist. After chillingly stating that "the spectacle of Middle Eastern Muslims slaughtering each other is one that I find I can contemplate with calm composure," he offers some surprisingly good reasons why Iraq can't be stabilized by U.S. forces, and why we should simply get out now.

Finally, I'd like to note that my last post, urging a purge of the Hard Left (socialism and anti-Americanism) from the Democratic party has nothing to do with the rantings of "people" such as bloviating commentator Bill O'Reilly, whose definition of "far left" is close to my idea of "moderate Republican"...read this bloviation to see what I mean.