Posted on the Huffington Post. Link to article and comments In a previous article I examined sociologist C. Wright Mills’ thesis that American foreign policy in the post-World War II era has been dominated by the crackpot realist. Briefly, Mills held that our foreign policy elites evince a groupthink, endlessly reverberated in the echo chamber of modern…
Syria and the Triumph of Crackpot Realism
Posted: 03/27/2013 in the Huffington post. Link to article More than 50 years ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his book The Causes of World War III, introduced Americans to a new socio-political concept: the crackpot realist. Crackpot realists are amoral men and women of worldly affairs who possess exceptionally banal minds. These are the “serious people” who populate…
America’s Three-Tiered Justice System
Posted Wednesday in the Truthout. Link to article and comments Big shots are above the law, the government now admits, but a three-tiered justice system has Congress churning out new bills to keep the prison industry booming. “Equal Justice under Law,” is the motto inscribed on the frieze of the United States Supreme Court building. Sticklers for semantics…
Iraq: 10 Years After, Have We Learned a Thing?
On the decennial of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the persons responsible have shown remarkably little guilt over launching an unprovoked war of aggression, even when the lamentable results might be expected to give one pause to rethink the enterprise. Marveling at the complacency about Iraq of America’s foreign policy elite as they are fawningly…
A country with bad political theater
Posted March 01, 2013 in the Washington Post “Opinions” Since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, a recurring theme of our political discourse has been how crazy Republicans appear to have become. Birthers, death panels, Sharia law, legitimate rape: The heretofore successfully repressed tendencies of the Reagan coalition blossomed like a noxious flower and have become…
Scientology for Rednecks: What the GOP Has Become
As with many religions, political parties have a tendency to start as a movement, transform into a business, and finally degenerate into a racket designed to fleece the yokels. One organization which has gone out of its way to illustrate this evolution is the Republican Party. And it has done so with a national scope…
Chuck Hagel and the American Empire
Hagel’s legislative record belies his potential role as bit player on the stage of the American empire, unlikely to wield the kind of influence suggested by the controversy over his nomination. Ideological elements of both the Left and the Right have inflated the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense to symbolize far more…