The Clipboard: Neoconservatives Are Crazy

From an article¹:

They act as if it were brave for a fat, pale-skinned journalist or commentator to advocate war that will be fought by other people's sons and daughters. It is the worst kind of moral cowardice to be for war if you yourself are not going to participate in the fighting. (link)

Charley Reese has a few choice words about the war hawks.

---

Complete text of the article, Neoconservatives are Crazy, by Charley Reese

The neoconservatives around George Bush are crazy. They actually believe the United States can run about the world, overthrowing governments by force and establishing democracies in their place.

This group of maniacs not only wants war with Iraq, but after that, war with Syria, Iran and North Korea. Any government that doesn't meet their standards of a modern, Western-style democracy is a target for America's military might in their warped minds.

This is a prescription for the decline and fall of the American Empire. Overextension — urged on by a bunch of rabid intellectuals who wouldn't know one end of a gun from another — has doomed many an empire. Just let the United States try to occupy the Middle East, which will be the practical result of a war against Iraq, and Americans will be bled dry by the costs both in blood and treasure.

This crowd has the gall to sneer at people trying to keep the United States out of war as being "appeasers," if not traitors. They act as if it were brave for a fat, pale-skinned journalist or commentator to advocate war that will be fought by other people's sons and daughters. It is the worst kind of moral cowardice to be for war if you yourself are not going to participate in the fighting.

There is one, and only one, justification for war, and that is self-defense when the country is actually attacked. For some two-bit politician with a third-rate mind to tell the American people that a Third World country is an imminent threat to the survival of the United States is ludicrous. The only threat to the United States that I can see on the present horizon is the folly of the Bush administration.

I was really wrong about that guy. I thought he was smart. He's not. Look at how he latches onto the bromides provided by his speechwriters and then repeats them over and over. Look at how totally unaware he is of the reality of the rest of the world, including the United States.

It's hard to see how the "world's worst leaders" can actually blackmail the United States with the "world's worst weapons," since the United States itself has more of these world's worst weapons than any country on the face of the earth except Russia. As a matter of fact, we might even have one of the world's worst leaders, at least as measured by competence.

As president, Bush ought to be paying close attention to countries that have the capability of destroying the United States, and at the moment, China and Russia are those countries. A lot is going on in Russia that does not bode well for the democratic people in that country. And maybe in the long run it does not bode well for us. If Saddam Hussein could get an atomic bomb, it would be in a crate in a warehouse. Every month, the Russians roll off the production line more of their mobile ICBMs. Not only can these missiles strike the United States, we can't even target them because we don't know where they are. Mr. Bush is like a hunter looking at an ant and not seeing the lion.

Bush showed us what a naive, out-of-touch-with-reality guy he is when, after meeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, he pronounced him a trustworthy friend "because I have looked into his eyes and seen his soul." I think you could look at a career KGB officer's eyes for a long time and not see anything he didn't want you to see. Bush even proposed a nuclear disarmament treaty based on a handshake, with not a word in writing. Fortunately, better heads led him away from that foolish idea.

It's unfortunate that he has surrounded himself with neoconservatives full of hubris. At their urging, he's acting like a little boy who suddenly fancies himself a soldier and emperor of the world.

reference=http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020927/index.php