That's rather like saying Pravda was more reliable on Soviet affairs than the Daily Worker.

Meritocracy!? To merit being the elite means more than possessing degrees and earning high standardised test scores.

To merit remaining the elite means that the U.S. should have a sustainable foreign and economic policy.

If not morally, we can not economically sustain our foreign policy. We are broke. Our dollar declines monthly. Our NATO allies wont fight in Afghanistan. Our elites' children would never consider joining up.

Other than Weiss why wont other members of the "meritocracy" subject their own motives, biases to some serious scrutiny. It will be far better for the elite if they engage in some reform than to wait for events to force change upon them.

Zbigniew Brzezinski said:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention….We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

Tell me, what did the internal politics of Pakistan, a country born out of and into violence, forever at war with itself, product of ancient conquests, ethnic cleansings, colonialism, religious extremism, and more recently used by the United States to create resistance to pro-Soviet Afghanistan (it was the Pakistani ISI who founded the Taliban, with, ironically enough, then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto [where've I heard that name before...] interfacing with Brzezinski, above), have to do with ANYTHING about American politics? Or one immature American political faction or another being "right" about anything?

You think there's actually some maneuvering going on, some transformational political moment? Where is that happening? I gotta get me the cable! All I see Phil are the same ol' two state parties, their silly assorted publications in tow, all of them set on a militaristic, corporatist, imperialist, hegemonic trajectory for our country that increasingly costs all of us our sons and daughters and our freedoms and livelihoods, and increasingly pays dividends only to those possessing stock options or employment at (insert military contractor/megacorporation here), or named Richard Perle.

Bickering over the best way to achieve American military dominance over the rest of the world, they constrain American political discourse to infantile and fear-based narratives. One of them justifies it all with warrior Jesus and machismo, the other uses the haunt of another Holocaust and mommy. However you can see both unite, in perfect harmony, and with laser precision, should any little bearded university professor-turned-populist-president DARES (DARES!) to say what 90% of the world thinks, that maybe it's the American war machine (despite its earnest and talented cadre of propagandists who keep the "dark menace" black flame a burnin'), that is a threat to the planet, to civilization, to humanity.

There is more than enough "dark menace" horseshit on CNN and corporate Zionist media, Phil. Really. Are you getting paid now or something? Is this and the recent "two state" post your attempt to go mainstream?

Either we deconstruct this empire, or its debris continues to fall on all of us.

government is the result of culture, not visa versa, as the left and neocons continually attempt.

Get out of the region, get out of the middle east, let them stabilize.

We've given the Pakistan government 10 billion in the past 8 years. Couldn't that money have been better spent hunting down bin Laden? Like, how about a 1 billion dollar bounty, for starters?

Paki internal affairs should be left alone. We need to stop intervening overseas: U.S. foreign policy is like helicopter parenting, but with real helicopters, and far worse consequences.