John McCain will be speaking in a few minutes about Syria at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s been calling for arming the rebels.
Then CSPAN is airing discussants on his talk. Three of the five–Michael Rubin of AEI, Lee Smith from the Weekly Standard, and Ammar Abdulhamid of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies– are dyed-in-the-wool neocons. Though maybe it could be said that Abdulhamid parrots neocon talking points while working at a neocon thinktank. While another discussant, David Schenker, hails from the Israel lobby thinktank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Is this a real discourse? Can you get ahead in D.C. if you’re not for U.S. aggression in Muslim world? Let’s remember what the eminent Leslie Gelb of the New York Times and Council on Foreign Relations said about the necessity of maintaining one’s career by supporting the Iraq war 10 years ago:
My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media.
When is the media going to open up to leftwing and realist voices? For instance, Alex Pareene on the Senate’s three war-crazed amigos.
When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence.
You got a beef with C-SPAN, but then you refer to Leslie Gelb as “the eminent” – somehow I dont think you meant simply “highly visible”. This ass hat cheerleads for war because he wants to keep up his “credibility” with his “community” (funny how anytime someone refers to “community”, they’re usually talking about a bunch of assholes) and you give the guy his props. This is how clowns like the ones you mention end up on C-SPAN, because apparently, in your “community” Phil, everyone always maintains their Title, regardless of what they do.
Thanks for pointing this out Phil. There seems to be a real take over at Cspan although callers on Washington Journal have been pushing for the discussion to open up.
In a six week period Washington Journal had Barbara Slavin, Yoghi Dreazen, Anne Marie Slaughter (who push that negotiations with Iran have been exhausted) and then two individuals from WINEP http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts Micheal Singh and Ash Jan who were both pushing for a military attack on Iran and repeating totally unsubstantiated claims about Iran. This is fair balanced and accurate coverage?
Have not seen Flynt or Hillary Mann Leverett or any other experts on CSpan or Washington Journal who address the situation with Iran based on facts for a very long time
Tney did have Dr. B on awhile back
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/199604&timeline
RE: “When John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman join forces, you can be sure of one thing: It will involve state-sponsored violence.” ~ Pareene
MY COMMENT: Yes, but they are such “drop dead gorgeous” men! That makes them incredibly difficult to resist. Especially Lindsey, with his alluring, bloodshotten, baby blue eyes!
Be still my heart!
I completely agree that CSPAN has been airing neo-cons lately. This past weekend as I was just flipping through the channels there was Glen Beck on either C-SPAN or C-SPAN 2 and Jonah Goldberg on Book TV. No good when these people are given a platform to spew falsehoods while anything to the left of them is left out.
It’s really bad that you have to be a war-crazed thug to get ahead in DC. War pays big bucks, though. It expands the military-industrial-Congressional complex.
You can’t get ahead in DC calling for cutting government spending. Everyone wants to spend more, more, more. The war issue is symptomatic of the larger issue, which is that DC has become the new Rome, the new London, existing for no other reason than to continue to exist, greedy, bloated, sucking the countryside dry, leaving devastation in its wake.