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Original post by Chris Reynolds
No, the czars controversy is not "ginned up".
The "czars" controversy is completely ginned up. Republican Presidents began the modern "czars" trend and extended it. George W. Bush had 36 "czar" positions filled by 46 different people
[1]. Most famously, in 2007 he wanted to turn over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to "czars", but the generals he asked to help kept turning him down
[2]. If you want to learn more about Bush's "czars", there are a bunch of links to various news articles about them
here. Bush had five "czars" related to health care - a health czar, a health IT czar, a WTO health czar, an AIDS czar, and a bird flu czar. The right didn't make a fuss about "czars" then and it doesn't care about them now. It cares about making partisan attacks on a Democratic President. This makes it crystal clear that all of the right's bluster about patriotism and supporting the President is phony posturing.
Quote:
Original post by Chris Reynolds
People have a problem with Obama's associations, and these concerns are not exclusive to the Limbaugh crowd. From his own book, "Dreams of my Father":
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists." ... "At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy." ... "After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
So as an insecure young black man, he felt the need to embellish his racial identity with his peers (not a big deal, he was young and we're all insecure at this age), but I and many others find it hard to believe that he has parted from these ideologies.
And when it starts popping up that the czars he appointed share the same views as his friends from college, you start to realize even more-so that he may not be as detached from his past as he leads people to believe in his book.
That's all a continuation of the guilt by association tactics used during the campaign. They didn't work then but somehow they're supposed to work now. I suppose the lies just haven't been repeated enough for the conditioning to set in. It's quite ironic that the people who are the most paranoid about brainwashing are the ones gladly embracing their brainwashing! I see from google that those excised quotes from Obama's book are very popular on the right wing blogs. The trouble is that quote is misleading.
In His Own Words We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. His detractors would have you believe he's still alienated. They're playing you. To paraphrase from my post about the inflated DC crowd size -- Dishonest people who want to misinform you are telling you lies in order to exaggerate their power.
Here's an interesting read on the subject of neo-conservatives:
Irving Kristol, RIPQuote:
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This Strangelovian mindset permeated neoconservative circles in the Cold War years, but the collapse of the Soviet Union took them by surprise. At first, they excoriated Ronald Reagan, their former hero, for welcoming Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to make concessions: the whole thing was a trap, they said, and the Soviets would soon resume their dastardly ways. When the Soviet empire collapsed, it left a void at the center of a movement that was, in very large part, autobiographical. All these embittered ex-commies and renegade Trotskyists had nothing to direct their considerable ire at, and the post-Soviet era saw them largely dormant. Kristol and Co. kept busy, however, filling the rather large intellectual vacuum that constituted the "mainstream" conservative movement and kicking William F. Buckley upstairs at his own magazine, where he descended from time to time to utter an irrelevant homily.
At this point, the neocons held the organizational and financial reins of the American Right in their hands, and by the time George W. Bush was on his way to the White House, they had managed to inveigle themselves into the inner councils of the administration’s foreign policy team. They arrived with a firm commitment to a vastly increased military budget and an expansive foreign policy of "democracy-promotion" – by force of arms if need be. They were perfectly positioned, when the 9/11 terrorist attacked occurred, to take full advantage of the power persistence and providence had delivered into their hands. Their agenda had been set out years ago by Kristol’s son, William, in an essay co-authored with Robert Kagan, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," in which they summed up the goal of U.S. foreign policy in a single evocative phrase: "benevolent global hegemony." 9/11 provided the perfect context in which to launch a war to implement the neoconservative dream of world conquest. The results are all around us – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and beyond.
It’s funny, but to describe someone as a neoconservative is practically considered a hate crime in certain quarters – in neoconservative quarters, that is. The reason is that many of the original neocons were Jewish, and one major doctrinal pillar of the persuasion is fealty to Israel and its perceived interests. To call out the neocons, to even describe them as such, is therefore evidence of "anti-Semitism," as Jonah Goldberg once complained. Of course, now that conservatives are complaining that all opposition to President Obama’s policies is being caricatured as "racist," the neocons can hardly take this tack.
In any case, the lasting legacy of Irving Kristol is that he was instrumental in turning the conservative movement away from its radical anti-statism and toward an almost exclusive concentration on the moral imperative of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. His followers and epigones, who carry on the work in his wake, are the warmongers at the Weekly Standard and the Limbaugh-Hannity know-nothing Right, which sees every recognition of the limitations of American power – government power – as a "betrayal." This is surely a most unconservative – even anti-conservative – vision, a form of radicalism that resembles nothing so much as Trotskyism-turned-inside-out.
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"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." - the Laughing Man
