David Brooks Is Just Another Clueless Conservative Chicken Hawk
http://www.politicalgarbagechute.com/david-brooks-is-just-another-clueless-conservative-chicken-hawk/
The Republicans just want war. They may use platitudes about securing freedom and how freedom isn’t free and such, but in the end, they want war. They get off on it. They want to see all those fancy expensive war machines we’ve pumped obscene amounts of money into building used, and goddamnit we’re just not using them enough, in their estimation. Forget that the country is already sick and tired of wars of choice. Forget that most of us don’t believe we have a moral obligation to do anything other than be an active participant in coalition-style, diplomacy-first, economic sanctions next, and war as an absolute last resort. Brooks and his ilk just don’t believe America is at its best unless it’s terrorizing small brown people in small brown countries, and that’s why Obama — who finished Bush and Cheney’s mission in Iraq, will oversee the end of the Afghanistan War, and who ordered the raid on our number one enemy is “weak” in their eyes.
Look at how they are falling over themselves to kiss up to a former KGB thug like Vladimir Putin. It absolutely makes sense when you realize Putin is Russia’s George W. Bush of course. Neocons like Brooks just love leaders who eschew public opinion and do whatever the fuck they want. Now, if a chief executive wields his executive powers and delays small portions of a health care reform law that’s an impeachable offense and that man is a tyrant. But waving his country’s dick around and sticking it into the world’s mashed potatoes? That’s just how strong virile men run the world! So even though Putin is indeed a remnant of the USSR that they all seem to think still exists, the right-wing just can’t wait to line up to give Putin a handy.
Brooks went on to ask, “Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair, but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.” First of all David does not in fact feel the rap is unfair. Why? Because he made sure to ask the leading rhetorical question about whether Obama is strong enough to stand up to someone like Assad or Putin. It’s verbal chicanery at its most basic. The real message Brooks was putting out there was that Obama is in fact not strong enough to “stand up to” those two leaders. Then he tries to weasel off the hook by saying he thinks it’s unfair to say these things, only to sandwich that statement in more naked demagoguery of Obama’s skills in the realm of foreign policy by talking about the assumption — that I assure you is only prevalent in conservative chicken hawk circles — that Obama is weak in the Middle East.
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By my count, Obama’s foreign policy record — abhorrent drone strikes not withstanding — is pretty damned solidly better than Bush and Cheney’s. Zero wars started, one war concluded and another that will be done by the time he leaves office. He did want to start another one, but he bowed to the will of the people like good leaders do took the rebuffing in stride. The Republicans have no counter argument for a factual accounting of Obama’s record on foreign policy so they invoke Boogie Men like Iran’s nuclear program, Assad or Putin to scare the country into thinking war is at our doorstep and Obama is doing nothing to beat it back, meanwhile what they’d love more than anything is a nice, big, fat war effort to get the red, white and blue confetti bursting out of every seam in the fabric that holds us together.
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