Starting with Age-Old Truths

Washington is 67 square miles, about as high as the Washington monument, and surrounded on all sides by reality. ~Arthur Hoppe

Get Out of Afghanistan is Richard Reeves’s bottom line, but he borrows three “age-old truths” about Washington, Wall Street and War to make his emphatic point: It doesn’t matter when we leave, the result in Afghanistan will be the same. There are pressures we can’t relieve and internal affairs that leave us with limited options.

The remaining truths are written by Republican Joe Scarborough here, where it’s interesting to note his comment on the new sobriety being shown by conservatives calling for foreign policy restraint. He calls it “a return to the conservative principles the Republican Party tossed aside over the past decade.” I might go a half step farther and say they have ravenously devoured their principals like cannibals, infecting themselves and spreading Mad GOP Disease that continues to cause most of our ills today. 

In Peter Juul’s thoughtful piece, A Conservative Crack Up on Foreign Policy, “an out-and-out war over the contours of conservative foreign policy is brewing within the ranks of the conservative elite”. He attributes the cause to neoconservatives and conservative nationalists finding their differences surface under Obama’s leadership. Aggressive policing by conservative elites over “wayward behavior and statements from conservative elected officials and candidates” could exacerbate the rift, and I would say, make 2012 that much more interesting.
DCKennedy