Shadow Elite: March to War -- The Neocon Playbook, Straight from the Soviet Bloc
As a social anthropologist, my focus is not on whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, but rather how that decision was made, who made it, and what mechanisms of power and influence were used to make it. Paul R. Pillar, a veteran CIA officer in charge of coordinating the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq, described the march to war to me this way:Poll: ‘Anti-socialist’ Tea Party activists want government to create jobs
There was no process. . . . No one has identified a single meeting, memorandum, showdown in the situation room when the question was on the agenda as to whether this war should be launched. It was never discussed. . . . That is the respect in which this case is markedly different from anything I've seen in the past. . . . There's well established machinery for this . . . For the decision to go to war in Vietnam there was meeting after meeting, policy briefing after briefing. The Iraq war was qualitatively different in that there was no such process. . . . In Iraq such machinery never got used.
From my vantage point, the actions of the Neocon core should disturb Americans of any political stripe. By acting more like the cowboys of the so-called Wild East of the post-Communist era, these power brokers perfected this new system of influence, subverting the standards of accountability and transparency that a healthy democracy demands. Americans were left almost wholly in the dark about the most important foreign policy decision a nation can make: to go to war. And when I asked Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson how that fateful decision was reached, he echoed Paul Pillar: without hesitation, he said, "I don't know."
Signature Teapot Poll: Anti socialist Tea Party activists want government to create jobsTea Party sympathizers are against government "socialism" except when it comes to their own jobs, a new poll has found.
Seventy percent of those who identify as Tea Partiers -- a platform that strongly decries government intervention in public life -- want an interventionist government to create jobs, and only about one in three believe Medicaid and Medicare are "socialist" programs, according to a new Bloomberg poll.
"Tea Party activists, who are becoming a force in U.S. politics, want the federal government out of their lives except when it comes to creating jobs," the wire notes wryly.
"More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level," it adds. "At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation."
The ideas that find nearly universal agreement among Tea Party supporters are rather vague, J. Ann Selzer, the pollster who created the survey, is quoted as saying. You would think any idea that involves more government action would be anathema, and that is just not the case..
And it turns out when it comes to putting money in Americans' pockets -- Tea Partiers aren't so opposed to government intervention, or tend to look the other way.
"Fewer than 10 percent say the Veterans Administration is definitely socialist, 12 percent identify management of national parks and museums, and 36 percent say expanding Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and Social Security amount to socialism," Bloomberg notes.
Even 35 percent don't see Social Security as socialist: 65 percent said Social Security was "either definitely or sort of socialism." But 47 percent still wanted to keep it under government control (and just 53 percent supported Social Security privatization).
