Washington Post Is Lost in Neocon Fantasyland

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


WPost Is Lost in Neocon Fantasyland
February 8, 2015

The neocons now control the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, a dangerous development for the American people and the world. Yet, the Post remains the more extreme of the two, pushing for more endless confrontations and wars, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.

By Paul R. Pillar


James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn provided in the current issue of The National Interest an extensively documented review of how the ever-more-neocon editorial page of the Washington Post “responds to dangerous and complex problems with simplistic prescriptions.”

The Post‘s most recent editorial about the nuclear negotiations with Iran is firmly in that same simplistic, destructive tradition. It is hard to know where to begin in pointing out the deficiencies in this effort by the Post‘s editorialists, but noting some of them can illustrate how the tendencies that Carden and Heilbrunn cataloged constitute, as the abstract for their article puts it, a crusade for doctrines “that have brought Washington to grief in the past.”

The current editorial offers a prescription that is so simplistic that it isn’t really a prescription at all. And that — the absence of any plausible proposed alternative — is its most basic shortcoming. Instead it is just a collection of ways of saying, “We don’t like where these negotiations are going.”

Even though the writers claim that “we have long supported negotiations with Iran,” the effect of their piece is to add to the negative background music to which those determined to defeat and derail any agreement with Iran — including Benjamin Netanyahu and confirmed deal-saboteurs in the U.S. Congress — dance and from which they derive energy. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/02/08/wpost-is-lost-in-neocon-fantasyland/

[TwilightGardener]

1. Washington Post is like Weekly Standard,

only with some token liberal writers.

[cilla4progress]

2. And when the earth is laid waste

in utter, nuclear destruction, what will these squawking mynahs have to say then? Who will they point at and blame, with sores and cancers eating them and all of us from the inside out?

I fear, truly fear, for our species, and what we are doing to all the rest of life on this planet. It seems we have a determination for self-destruction. We are intent on inserting poisons of one kind or another into our biosphere. We are heedless in our consumption and exploitation of our environment. We toy with death and destruction at our own peril, and that of all life that shares this small, beautiful planet with us.

I'm not so sad about the perishing of our species, for the most part. We've used our time here badly and are mostly a blight on all other life forms. I am sick for the young, who are the victims of our unbridled narcissism. My 22-year old daughter doesn't expect, at this time, to have children. I hurt for the myriad forms of life that we are taking dow with us; that were here to sustain us, really, or to simply co-exist.

We've really made a mess of things. Hardly anyone is accountable, or even adult enough to be honest. Our supposed dispassionate societal observers as described in this article aren't doing their job. I'm talking to you, too, Brian Williams.

[JHB]

3. To say "now control" implies a recent development...

...when they've been so for at least a quarter century.

[Fred Sanders]

4. Obama offers deep thought on the solutions, his critics offer only deep thought on the problems.

[LiberalEsto]

5. Post is owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon. n/t

[bemildred]

6. Yep. nt