“There are moments when it really feels like nothing much ever changes, except perhaps the scale of our collective foolishness.”
Shawn P. Wilbur in Natural Gas Wars, Then and Now.
Kevin Carson takes on domestic spying and other bipartisan projects.
Foreign empire, likewise, is very much a bipartisan project. Lest you forget, most of the stuff that we currently indentify with run-amok Republicanism was originally cobbled together by Democrats. The Bretton Woods agencies that currently serve as enforcers for neoliberalism. The UN Security Council, or modern-day Concert of Europe, that “idealistic” internationalist liberals like Kerry prefer to use as a fig leaf for U.S. bombers raining death from the sky. The Cold War national security state. The domestic garrison state, including (among other things) the Smith Act, the McCarran Internal Security Act, and COINTELPRO. The Green Berets and SOA, the overthrow of Diem and the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Suharto coup…. Establishment Democrats go out of their way to emphasize that, had they known what they know now, they wouldn’t have rubber-stamped Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Maybe not; but isn’t blasting the shit out of Iraq in December 1998, and keeping the country under a murderous economic embargo for eight years, bad enough? The Lying Us Into War (TM) franchise came in pretty handy in Kossovo, didn’t it? And just last year we saw a Democratic presidential nominee, who had been a leading supporter of Plan Colombia, accusing Bush of being “soft on Hugo Chavez.”