Reprinted from Consortium News
With ever-growing hysteria, the Establishment is begging, cajoling and warning American voters not to elect a rogue President from the Right or the Left, neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders, but to accept instead one of the "sane" mainstream options. Yet, the unspoken truth is that the American Establishment has been off its rocker for decades.
It was, after all, Official Washington's Establishment -- led by the neoconservatives and their sidekicks, the liberal interventionists -- that embraced President George W. Bush's catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, as costly as that decision was in terms of blood and money and cascading chaos -- now destabilizing Europe -- the Wise Men and Women imposed virtually zero accountability on themselves or other chief culprits.
A "sane" Establishment, one that truly cared about the interests of the American people, would have undertaken a serious self-examination after the Iraq War. Yet, there was none. Rather than cleaning house and banishing the neocons and liberal interventionists to the farthest reaches of national power, the Establishment rewarded these warmongers, ceding to them near-total control of American foreign policy thinking.
If anything, the neocons and liberal hawks consolidated their power after the Iraq War. By contrast, the foreign policy "realists" and anti-war progressives who warned against the invasion were the ones cast out of any positions of influence. How crazy is that!
It was as if supporting the Iraq War was the new initiation rite to join the Establishment's elite fraternity of worthies, a kind of upside-down application of rewards and punishments that would only make sense at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice's Wonderland.
In a sane world, the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post would have purged their lead editorial writers who had advocated for the catastrophe. Instead, the Post retained its neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt -- and nearly all of its pro-war columnists -- and the Times even promoted liberal interventionist Bill Keller to the top job of executive editor after it became clear that he had been snookered about Iraq's WMD.
Similar patterns were followed across the board, from The New Yorker on the Left to The Wall Street Journal on the Right. Pro-Iraq War writers and commentators continued on as if nothing untoward had happened. They remained the media big shots, rewarded with book contracts and TV appearances.
The same held true for the major think tanks. Instead of dumping neocons, the center-left Brookings Institution went off in search of neocon A-listers to sign, like Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. The ultra-Establishment Council on Foreign Relations recruited its own neocon "stars," Max Boot and Elliott Abrams.
And what did this year's "sane" presidential candidates do as the deadly and dangerous consequences of neocon thinking spread from the Middle East into Europe. They pledged fealty to more neocon strategies. For instance, Establishment favorite, Sen. Marco Rubio, is advocating more "regime change" tough talk and more expansion of U.S. military power.
"Stay Sane"
Nevertheless, when New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks urges Americans to "stay sane," he is calling on them to support the likes of Rubio and reject the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the sanity to vote against the Iraq War, and billionaire Donald Trump, who also questioned the wisdom of the war.
Brooks lamented that his favorite Rubio had resorted to some populist rhetoric of his own recently, but added: "Marco Rubio has had a bad month, darkening his tone and trying to sound like a cut-rate version of Trump and [Ted] Cruz. Before too long Rubio will realize his first task is to rally the voters who detest or fear those men. That means running as an optimistic American nationalist with specific proposals to reform Washington and lift the working class."
Yet Rubio led the parade of dancing candidates who performed at the so-called "Adelson primary," seeking to win the favors of gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson by vowing to fully sync U.S. policies in the Middle East with positions favored by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whereas Trump refused to toe that line). And Rubio's warmed-over right-wing, trickle-down economic orthodoxy is sure to do little to help working- and middle-class Americans.
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