After the recent death of their flagship magazine The Weekly Standard, the neoconservatives have come out with a new magazine called The Bulwark. Matt Taibbi reminds us of the history of the neoconservatives, opportunists all, who align themselves with any party that they think will best satisfy their bloodthirsty warmongering needs and have decided that Democrats currently fit that bill.

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.
…

The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

[Read more…]

Not only is there no end to the government shutdown in the US, there does not seem to be even any action at all on this front. But there is plenty of high drama in the UK where things are rapidly coming to a head over Brexit. Tomorrow there is a big vote in the British parliament on the deal that Theresa May negotiated with the EU. She is widely expected to lose that vote, and if so is then required to come up with a new plan that will be voted on next Monday. Note that there is a deadline of March 29 for any deal with the EU to be approved. If it does not happen by then, the UK would be faced with a ‘no deal Brexit’ (see below) unless the deadline is extended by both sides which seems likely to happen since few like the idea of a disorderly breakup.
[Read more…]

Iowa’s congressperson Steve King is not the stupidest person in the US Congress. That honor belongs to Texas congressperson Louis Gohmert. But King has been saying the most obnoxious things, especially when it comes to race. That King is a stone-cold racist has been well-known for a long time.
[Read more…]

People newly elected to the House of Representatives are usually considered political nonentities. Nobody outside their districts pays any attention to them, they get put on minor committees that deal with issues on the fringes, and have to slowly work their way up the seniority ranks before they are taken seriously. So the prominence of the new batch of Democratic congresspersons, especially the women, is something different. And of these, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the standout.
[Read more…]