I see people starting to become concerned over Obama’s drone wars - to which I say, ah... took you long enough. I’ve always been highly sceptical of Obama’s end game here - I’ve been in several arguments with conservatives no less who in a state of neoconish confusion it seems fell prone to praising Obama’s aggressive use of drones, me remonstrating with heavy heart are you people nuts? do you not see what’s going on here? - and I’m not even talking about the extra-judicial abuse, which one guesses is something worth being disturbed by - certainly the duplicitous hypocrisy of it rankles since Obama is supposedly one of the bringers of light and therefore ostensibly can do no evil - David Brooks assured me of this - I’m talking about Obama’s plan to dramatically change the posture and mission of the American military so he [or an acolyte that follows] can eventually gut it. That’s what Libya was about, that’s what the drone wars are about - a hi tech police force, that’s the uber liberal dream of a downsized, neutered American military. Two positive outcomes from that if you’re ubered in your liberalism: one, the left views the American military as a force for evil, not good, and its size and power a seductive, jingoistic invite to imperialist [don’t forget racist] overreach - reduce its size and power and all the bad stuff magically goes away [if you're an idiot]; and two, money diverted from the Pentagon can feed the social welfare state, keep the ‘blue model’ alive and well [providing clever use of smoke and mirrors] in the earnest young hearts of the sentimental and wistful.
It’s this whole European thing, or a version thereof - cut back the military, jack up taxes on the most productive elements of your society, and then use that money [and, like I said, lots of smoke and mirrors] to subsidize a large bureaucratic state that hands out services to the least productive elements of your society in order to keep them ‘happy’, ie - placated. That’s what single payer, universal healthcare is about - it’s not about improving peoples lives - and it’s definitely not about improving healthcare - it’s about creating a dependent underclass that feels eternally grateful and therefore indebted to the state that cares for it and consequently can be relied on to keep the enlightened proto-autocrats who run the state in power until which time evil conservatives, outnumbered, wither and die and the proto-autocrats then flower into full fledged despots [but good despots you understand - imagine a president Angelina Jolie - something like that].
Of course problem is Europe got away with playing this sort of shell game, of cutting back it’s militaries to a dysfunctional smallness, because America was there to backstop any nonsense going on - Europe’s militaries are just show horses now - hell, the French can’t even do Mali without some American help, and Mali’s just a couple of thousand Islamists running around the desert - god help them should these hapless fucks pick up a bit of logistical support from their Jihadi friends in the form of IEDs, MANPADs and RPGs - not to mention a few motivated virgin seekers decked out in exploding underwear. And so the problem then is: if liberals have the same plans more or less for the American military, who will be the backstop then? Unilateral disarmament is it? Sure we can trust the Chinese to look after our interests.
Don’t forget Obama referenced Chamberlain in his inauguration speech - some thought it an oversight - I thought it was deliberate - peace in our time - China wants to become great power and it can’t do that, to its way of thinking, without controlling the first and I’m guessing second island chains - to do that it needs to push the US out of the way so that it can coerce, through economic or military force [or both], Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and etc etc into acquiescence, acceptance of writing on great wall - Obama announced an Asia pivot but then doesn’t make any move to pay for it, just the opposite actually - so merely rhetoric it was [as I said it would be at the time] - Chinese aren’t fools, they see what’s going on - they targeted a Japanese destroyer the other day, a rather astounding provocation - for Obama, Chamberlain wasn’t wrong, he was just unlucky with his history - but Dear Leader will be more favored, his minions and maenads verily testify to it - peace in our time - ironically Obama imagines getting there means first blowing stuff up with drones.
