Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises.
So it's happening once again. Sohrab Ahmari:
Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!
Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.
One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.
2 comments:
The remark 'No matter who you vote for..' is true enough whether it's a sleazy politician who's named or 'the government'. It seems to us that on every level of public office from school boards to national authorities that story remains the same - say what you must to get elected then go ahead and do what you like.
I can't say I've paid enough attention to Bari Weiss to have much of an opinion about her, other than to recognize her as a hypocrite when she says her goal as the chief of CBS is journalism that tells the truth, that is fearless, fair and factual, that holds both parties to equal scrutiny. It sounds like she's attempting to channel Walter Cronkite or William Paley when CBS has become the name of the shop under the ownership of the Ellison family, a trustworthy bunch indeed. The glory years are long gone and Bari has neither the judgment nor the expertise to restore the objectives she touts.
I agree with you about Donald Trump's tragic flaw being incapable of saying 'no' to people who have more money than him but that's largely because he's inflexible. He likes to project the image of being intellectually brilliant but truly smart people know when to compromise. This time he determined he's more knowledgable that his generals and they had no choice but to let him have his way. Nevertheless, as you said, he did make that promise.
What was that Who song? Won't Get Fooled Again but it seems we're destined to keep trying to kick the football Lucy promises to hold still this time.
No doubt you're right, and the government always does get in regardless. Politicians know that the voters they're appealing to want something different from what they've been getting, and in many cases they're willing to promise something different. What they aren't willing to do is deliver on those promises. Understandably that leads to a certain amount of cynicism.
Weiss left The New York Times with the stated goal of bringing more viewpoint diversity to the news media. That's not really what she's been doing, though. Her ventures have promoted a fairly narrow strip of opinion. Badly mismatched with CBS if CBS wanted to live up to the legacy of Edward R. Murrow. Which, currently, they don't seem to want.
Trump likes to think that he's brilliant. His rivals like to think that he's an idiot. The truth probably lies elsewhere from both propositions. While he does have a gift for political tactics, he doesn't know the territory in the Mideast as well as his generals do. But of course they're not able to overrule him. This all seems like a new way to make a very old mistake.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" indeed. Charles Schulz created a very durable metaphor with Lucy holding the football while promising not to pull it away this time. It applies to a lot of different situations.
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