13 Views of a Neoconservative

Because the world needs to know what Wallace Stevens has to do with new Condi Rice deputy Eliot Cohen, what blackbirds have to do with neoconservatism, what poetry has to do with politics, what link dumps have to do with laziness, and so on.

"the only moving thing": Glenn Kessler, WaPo
"of three minds": George Buddy, Buddy's Bemusings
"a small part of the pantomime": Steven Clemons, The Washington Note
"are one": Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire
"which to prefer": Google Scholar: Eliot Cohen
"an indecipherable cause": Carol Gee, south by southwest
"the women about you": Grand Moff Texan, Moment of Triumph
"the blackbird is involved": Glenn Greenwald, Salon
"one of many circles": Follower of Basho, Iraq War News & History
"bawds of euphony": Jim Lobe, Asia Times
"a fear pierced him": Confidential Reporter, China Confidential
"must be flying": MWAW, Media Workers Against the War
"evening all afternoon": BooMan, Booman Tribune

You may now return to your regularly scheduled searches on Libby trial verdicts, CPAC embarrassments, global financial meltdowns, U.S. attorney purges, military hospital privatizations, and such like doings. Thank you.

[Update 3/9/07: Wondering what people think of The Smart Power Blog's recommendation of Cohen's book. Is there a site anywhere advocating "Responsible Power"?]

I accepted the invitation.

Abe Does the Old "Take One for the Team" Trick

As in Shinzo, not Lincoln. (For those keeping score, the current head honcho of Japan, not the 19th C US head honcho who did not quite equate dissent with treason, as those who do now had rather hopefully claimed, with their usual judiciousness, foresight, and concern for truthiness.)

You see, Abe-san claimed a few days ago that there's no evidence the Japanese military forced the "comfort women" of World War II into being repeatedly raped by its soldiers across East and Southeast Asia, sparking outrage in and rebuttals from both Koreas, China, and the Philippines. So why would he basically accuse the comfort women of being prostitutes now, as Japan gears up for bilateral negotiations with North Korea? This wouldn't be the secret hideout of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party if we couldn't link this burgeoning international controversy to WAAGNFNP wannabe Dick Cheney. Here's the way it works (I'd write this up as Completely Invented Dialogue, but I always turn the channel when I happen to see Bush or Cheney's face on the tee-vee these days, so my ability to do impressions has sadly atrophied from its so-called-peak Mr. "I pity the fool" T junior high school years).

The Dick Cheney Mordor Mystery Tour (coming soon to an undisclosed location near you) arrives in Japan not so long ago but gives a shorter-than-usual concert in which it does a terrible cover of the Abe administration's smash hit, "Our Obsession with North Korean Abductions of a Few Dozen Japanese Citizens a Few Decades Ago Trumps Your Obsession with Our Atrocities in Korea over the First Half of the Twentieth Century," leading many to wonder if the (I)rock criticism of Japan's top defense and foreign ministry officials a little longer ago had jeopardized the very special relationship between our conservatives and theirs (re: Gavan McCormack, known to me from his recent Japan Focus essay, read "client state," the title of his forthcoming Verso book on the subject). Behind the scenes, Cheney assigns Abe a little test, which amounts, as Maxwell Smart would have put it (and what is it with me giving Oaktown Girl more mockery-fodder in this post for my lack of pop culture taste?!--it's a good thing she hasn't caught my cleverly-disguised Knight Rider allusion yet, although to give her credit it may or may not depend on a mispronunciation of a certain cult Party's emeritus leader's name--d'oh! I've parenthesized too much), to "The Old Take One for the Team Trick."

Yup, Abe-san is trying to make the Cheney-Bush administration look good. It's a tough job (read JP's latest--and don't miss the comments--although certain commenters should follow his example and exercise the privileges of the Mostly Harmless author-function, since not even Floating Head Professor could get his regular readers to read comments at his more-virtual-than-thou blog, so don't expect "a 'insignificant microbe'" of a blog to get its even more virtual regular readers to do it...I'm talking to you, Silko!), but somebody's gotta do it (and I'm not talking about run-on parentheses, although somebody's gotta do that, too).

[Update: Just for Oaktown Girl, more fun with Star Wars, courtesy of generous linker robotnik, who really should do a Fulbright in Japan. And just for Adrian, more BerubeWatch (now with one link per word). You won't hear any "I told you so"s from Mostly Harmless. Nosireebob--don't look at comment #75. Nothing to see there. Move it along, people.]

Dick Cheney Precipitates near-Blogocalypse

 

"Three" Branches of Government for the clueless in their homes,
Two Houses of Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine Mortal Justices someday doomed to die,
One Branch for the Dark Lord on his darkened throne,
In the minds of neocons where the Shadows lie.
One Branch to rule them all, One Branch to find them,
One Branch to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the dreams of Cheney where the Shadows lie.

 

Officials at the NYBE (New York Blog Exchange) are breathing a sigh of relief now that the Senior Administration Official Dick Cheney WAAGNFNP Wannabe World Tour, which generated such boffo reviews in Afghanistan, Australia**  and elsewhere, has completed. The tour provided such a surplus of "pre-written" blog material that it precipitated a dramatic sell-off of blog futures.  Who could have imagined that events in Asia could have such an impact on the US blog markets? sighed one official. The sell-off was exacerbated by a technical glitch in Blogger and the effects of timezones which for a time masked the magnitude of the problem. Although cautiously optimistic, officials are keeping a worried eye on developments at CPAC, I don't think the market can hold up against another unfiltered influx of asshattery, said one.

Confronted about his role in the problem while on an outing with his daughter Mary, Cheney replied with characteristic multilingual wit: Après moi who gives a fuck, followed by What are you staring at, homo? directed at his daughter who was looking at him with unalloyed revulsion.

 

 [**See for instance, this letter to the Editor in the Sydney Morning Herald.]

City's empty streets mirror Cheney's empty rhetoric

Dear George,

Had a nice sleepover in this place called Sydney. They closed city streets and bridges and we could drive our cars real fast. Chatted to some really fine people and a couple of little guys with good and bad attitude. Most spoke American with an accent. We had fun.

Regards, Dick

Conspiracy Theory Weekend

Hey all, I'm off to Sendai in a little over an hour, but thought I'd give people a chance to respond to spyder's question from comments awhile back, "Who are we actually at war with in Iraq????" I want to broaden the question a bit: can anyone discern any rhyme or reason to Bush administration foreign policy? They seem to be pretending they haven't done a 180 on North Korea or on regional negotiations over the future of Iraq, but they're also amping up the threat posture on Iran. So is this just Condi winning out over WAAGNFNP wannabe Cheney in recent months, or what?

My own personal conspiracy theory is that they want to degrade Iran's military capabilities before their term is out, now that it looks like they won't get the client state they hoped for out of Iraq. And that short of that they want to keep Sunnis and Shiites off balance and at each other's throats, so the Middle East doesn't get its act together like East Asia seems to have done and tell the U.S., "Thanks but we don't need imperial overlords anymore. You can stop trying to Americanize the British Empire." So all the noise and misinformation is not about incompetence or insanity but a way of hiding the real strategy. Which can be summed up as YT's approach to the morning commute in the first chapter of Snow Crash.

Just sayin'.