world.jpgNobody should be surprised that Dick Cheney made that hamfisted inbreeding joke in front of a West Virginia audience. Cheney is top dog of the Project for the New American Century, otherwise known as PNAC or Those Idiots Who Were Duped By Ahmad Chalabi, and they are the most arrogant and undiplomatic twits around. Unfortunately, they also run our foreign policy, at least until next January.

It’s a measure of how badly the PNAC Platoon’s reign — with its war of choice in Iraq and planned war of choice against Iran — has gone that the US, which once was respected and even loved in some quarters, is now treated as an international pariah state — and one that, thanks to being tied down in Iraq, cannot project its power anymore. Diplomatic negotiations that once automatically involved us are now set up to exclude our presence, as the PNAC Platoon’s idea of diplomacy (namely, that the U.S. doesn’t have to be nice to anyone because we’ve got the best weapons on the planet) is universally abhorred.

The irony is that Cheney and his fellow PNACers like Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and the like, were trying to reassert Corporate American dominance over the globe. Instead, they’ve nearly destroyed it along with our good name. Should the next occupant of the White House be Barack Obama, and this is growing ever likelier, then our image overseas will improve dramatically from the rock bottom it’s at right now. But he shouldn’t, and won’t, take this as carte blanche to behave as Bush and Cheney have.

"The New American Century" has been replaced by the New World Century, and not a moment too soon.