[Peace-discuss] sad display on DN

[jencart]

I heard it too, Carl, w/ same reaction......Klugman was no match for Perle.  It's hard to compete w/ a really articulate scumbag..... Jenifer
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I've just listened to a disheartening debate on Democracy Now between Richard Perle, the chief neocon, and Paul Krugman, the fiery liberal spirit of the NYT's op-ed page.  Perle won in a walk.  He was calm, principled in the sense of speaking for US hegemony, and specific.   Krugman was wooly, and his principal point was that the US *couldn't afford* to do the things Perle and Frum propose in their book, An End to Evil (which K. hadn't read).

P. also said he hadn't read Krugman's book, The Great Unraveling, a defense of Clinton-era policies -- which as Paul O'Neill said accurately enough today, weren't that different from Bush's in regard to the US empire.

I was depressingly reminded of debates between "liberals" and "conservatives" during the Vietnam War, when conservatives said that the US had to use force to show that its writ would run in Asia as elsewhere (the "domino theory"), and liberals replied that we didn't know what we were getting into (the "quagmire theory"), we couldn't succeed, and we couldn't afford it.  The liberals were wrong on all three points.  The conservatives succeeded, the "threat of a good example" was avoided and Vietnam -- begging for Nike factories -- is now thoroughly integrated into the US-run world economy.

Only those outside the limits of allowable debate in those days (sometimes called "radicals") were saying what the vast majority of Americans came to believe, that the US attack on Vietnam -- killing literally millions of people and wreaking vast ecological damage on a huge region -- was fundamentally wrong and immoral.  For a generation liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, and the ideological institutions have been devoted to erasing that view from the mind of the majority.   They have largely succeeded -- the "Vietnam Syndrome is over," said GB I after Gulf War II -- and the revolting spectacle today confirms that the the equally disgusting liberals and conservatives have resumed their accustomed roles.

It got so bad that Amy Goodman had to step in and ask serious questions, beyond Krugman's It'll-cost-too-much whine.

Read the transcript (with some creative spelling) and judge for yourself: <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/13/156244#transcript>.

In dismay, CGE


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