Comments on: Where David Cameron Is Now, the GOP Wants To Go in 2012

By: DrZen

DrZen — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:57:29 +0000

I think you’ll find that Cameron will prove to have lied through his teeth in most specifics. He is not decentralising anything. Far from it. He will pursue the same authoritarian policies as Labour with the same vigour.

By: masaccio

masaccio — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:31:24 +0000

I wonder how much of our dislike of McNamara is his willingness to admit that he was totally wrong, and that he knew it while he was serving, and said nothing, but kept working for Johnson. Long after, he sought some kind of redemption by confessing error, but we all know that he didn’t do anything when it would have mattered.

By: dakine01

dakine01 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:04:22 +0000

Book Salon a couple of flights upstairs with Charles Morris’s The Sages hosted by Nomi Prins

By: ART45

ART45 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:38:54 +0000

True, except McNamara proudly and smugly posed as all-knowing.

Cheney simply said, fuck you.

By: jloc

jloc — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:37:46 +0000

McNamara, Rumsfeld, Bush, Nixon, Johnson, Reagan, other powerful D’s and R’s alike, all love war. As in WAR, Inc.

Think of all the public money spent over the years on military power and yet on 9/11/01 what good did it do us. Thousands killed and our economy brought to its knees. Yet dare suggest that military spending be cut and you get ripped as being “soft.”

By: Teddy Partridge

Teddy Partridge — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:34:24 +0000

But Meg Whitman is all marketing and spin! Just because she’s not very good at politicking doesn’t make her a wonk — it makes her unelectable.

By: Badwater

Badwater — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:29:59 +0000

If that’s the case, McNamara could easily have fit in as a member of the Cheney-Bush Administration.

By: ART45

ART45 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:27:16 +0000

McNamara screwed up in Viet Nam not because he looked at numbers.

But because he willfully ignored the history, the cultures, and the languages of Viet Nam. He was ignorant about the place.

By: Stirling Newberry

Stirling Newberry — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:11:42 +0000

McNamara is a warning lesson in what happens to liberals who try and make unworkable conservative policies work. He should have known better than to look at Vietnam, and see Korea. I can point out a host of mitigating facts and circumstances, but in the end, to fail at the most important decision of his tenure means that he is a failure, and to that extent carved his niche in the wall of imfamy.

In the present one of the challenges of the left is to temper technocracy with democracy, to combat the right wing’s attempt to corrupt technocracy with demagoguery.

By: onehand

onehand — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:56:33 +0000

Malfeasance in the Democratic Party has always been subject to greater scrutiny than Republican malfeasance. It’s as though we expect Republicans to be overweening thugs, while Democrats who exhibit similarly loathsome conduct get their character minced in a public Cuisinart.

Such is the might of media.