Mitt and the PNACers

Who the hell are the PNACer's you ask? Well the New Yorker (what the hell do them eastern stablishment elitists know anyway?) has updated the file with an article yesterday. I've added the link at the bottom of my page cause I invite you to read what I learned about the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) and wrote more than 8 years ago. To wit,

The PNAC Gallery

July 1, 2004
Project for a New American Century

Awhile back the Little Woman figured out how to get my mind offa some things (her) and on ta other things. She bought me a computer and got the local dial-up guy ta show me how ta git on the Internet. Once I got the hang of it, among other things, I discovered Google and Google News (what a dang goofy-soundin name), and started enjoyin myself. Danged if I wasn't becomin an informed electorate!

"So," she told me with that look she gits, "you wanted to know what a neocon is? Well honey, paste this URL (www.newamericancentury.org) and click "go." 

So I did. I clicked, I saw The Project For the New American Century (PNAC), and I read. I even kept readin after I realized I'd spend my time in a better way by fishin or chasin after the Little Woman... 

Dang! I think PNAC must be one of them there Ivory Towers I've heard about from time to time. Only this tower don't even sound like ivory to me, more like some kinda fragile rose-colored glass. 

I read their declarations about what they think they know and what they think they stand for. And I read their letters to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush goin back to 1997. I read all their big plans involvin how we need to police up the trouble spots around the world cause we're the toughest thing next to the Almighty on this planet. 

These PNAC Galleryites seem to think that the world is like recess at grade school and the U.S. of A are the biggest toughest Sixth Graders than run the schoolyard. All them fifth graders and younger better do what we say. We only let them other kids play what we want em to play, where we want em to play and when we want em to play. 

PNAC'ers look like the kinds of intellectchals I could beat at Combat Scrabble. They'd be spendin too much time trying to put together eleven-letter words and I'd be cleanin up with my little threes or fours. 

And what they've been writin! I suspect that in order to get accepted into the club ya have to have credenchals - ya know - the kinda things that mean you're smart or know what yer talkin about. I'll bet you that you aren't even CONSIDERED to be worthy of joinin that club until you've played and won at least 10 games of Monopoly and 10 games of Risk. 

And the way some of em write, to win 10 games of Risk they had to play at least 100 times. That would explain all that high-falutin writing about economics and "America's Global Responsibilities." 

Whatever happened to our honorable thinkin that we don't start wars, we end em? 

About a year ago one them eleven-letter-word guys named Schmitt wrote about Shock'n and Awe'n and compared America to Marshall Will Kane in the movie "High Noon," as some sort of warrior who can't get the other townfolks ta help im. 

Made me remember a better movie to illustrate what America has stood for: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In that one, John Wayne got rid of the bad guy - Lee Marvin - and then minded his own business while James Stewart, the lawyer politician, cleaned up the mess and made the community a better place. 

I'm downright curious as to how many of them folks in that glass tower has actually wore a military uniform and got it dirty. They talk fast and loose about American military power wandrin about all over the world cleanin clocks and tellin tyrants how the cow ate the cabbage. 

Mr. Chaney says he had other priorities when he had the same chance during his prime manhood age to join up like a real patriot. I hear today that this real patriotic draft avoidin vice president is slanderin Mr. Kerry while Mr. Bush has been pretendin that he looked like Mel Gibson in Braveheart when he was young enough to become a real warrior. Makes me laugh even tho it ain't no laughin matter. Danged campaign commercials have gotten tedious and embarrasin. 

When PNAC'ers talk about it you get the idea that troops don't mean nothin more to them than the little red, white and blue wood blocks in the Risk Game or the little green plastic houses and red hotels in Monoply. Seems like to these guys livin breathin troops don't exist - only wooden blocks. 

Seems like to these guys people who lose jobs or try ta live without medical benefits are nothin more than little metal top hats, race cars and horses. 

These ain't the guys you'd want on a camp out, that's fer sure. Take them along and you'd have to chop all the wood, build the fire, help em put up their tents, and sing cowboy songs to em when it gets dark, quiet and scary in the woods. Probably have to bait their hooks, untangle their lines and hold their hands while they reel in a fish. 

Dang certain I'd have to gut the fish for em since there'd be guts involved. 

Their statements and their letters to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush were all signed (well, their names were at the bottom). In the 1990's those names included Chaney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle - all names I recognize from the news as PNAC members doin the thinking for Mr. Bush.

I'm tellin ya, these drug-store warriors ain't the ones we oughta be trustin. 

Well, I'm curious now. Think I'll go get Google to show me all the smart things Flush Limbaugh, Squawk Hannity, Factor O'Reilly and Anxious Coulter have said lately. It don't seem that any of them have yet qualified by winnin their ten games of Monopoly and Risk.

New Yorker on Romney and the PNACers

ROMNEY’S LIBYA BLUNDER REFLECTS LARGER FAILINGS

Well, it is widely thought that Romney’s political advisers aren’t the brightest bulbs—his entire campaign has been a litany of errors. What has been less remarked upon is the makeup of Romney’s foreign-policy team. For a former businessman who claims to willing to hire the best and smartest regardless of background, it is a remarkably unimpressive and ideologically driven group, consisting largely of washed up neocons and Cold Warriors, many of whom served in the Administration of George W. Bush.

On a day-to-day basis, Romney’s foreign-policy point man is Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the American government in Iraq, who wrote a book about Israel’s economy that Romney often cites. Senor, a longtime neocon, often travels with Romney. On Tuesday, according to a report from ABC News, he was travelling with Paul Ryan in order to brief him along with Reuel Marc Gerecht, another well-known neocon, and Jamie Fly, who worked at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. John Bolton is another important player in the Romney team. Often dismissed even on the right as a hirsute blowhard, Bolton appears to have persuaded Romney to take him seriously. A third influential adviser is Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who once worked for Paul Wolfowitz. Then there’s Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who is also said to have Romney’s ear.

Kristol, Bolton, Gerecht, Cohen, and several other of the people who are listed as informal advisers on Romney’s Web site are former members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that will forever be linked to the invasion of Iraq. Conspicuously absent from Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team are representatives of the less bellicose school of thinking that dominated Republican foreign policy before the neocons showed up. A few months back, in a piece entitled “Is There A Romney Doctrine?,” David Sanger, the Times’ veteran Washington correspondent, wrote this:

Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.