Rand Paul Draws Blood and Scares the Shit Out of the Neocons
By Larry Johnson on March 8, 2013 at 9:39 PM in Current Affairs
The warmongering chicken hawks that led us into an unnecessary war in Iraq are nervous as a long tailed cat in a room of rocking chairs filled with five year old boys. Their tails are getting squashed and Rand Paul is doing the damage.
My proof? Consider the following.
The Washington Post editorial board, which was a neocon bastion screeched the following:
AFTER SEN. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held the Senate hostage Wednesday in order to warn that American citizens could be targeted by drone strikes on U.S. soil, he was rightly taken to task for gross and irresponsible mischaracterizations of the Obama administration’s policy. We’ve got another complaint: Mr. Paul and his followers are distracting attention from the real issues raised by the administration’s secret warfare.
Want more proof?
Here is neocon John Podhoretz trying his best to adopt the tone of a disappointed friend in waving the red flag about the dangers of Rand Paul:
And yet, while Paul’s brilliant advocacy and command of the public stage were remarkable, in the end it is his opinions that matter. And they are highly problematic at best and genuinely worrisome at worst.
He began on a very narrow point — whether a president could order military drone strikes on unarmed US citizens who are not enemy combatants on American soil. The answer is obviously no — though for some reason Attorney General Eric Holder found it difficult to say those words in a hearing on Wednesday. (He finally said them categorically in a one-sentence letter yesterday.)
But as Paul continued to speak, he broadened his message. It wasn’t just the drone strike against al Qaeda leader Anwar al Awlaki, killed in Yemen even though he was born in the United States — or the drone strike a few weeks later that killed Awlaki’s 16 year-old son.
In point of fact, Awlaki’s membership in an enemy organization as an unconventional soldier stripped him of any and all due-process rights as it did, say, confederate soldiers fighting against the union in the Civil War. And we don’t know the circumstances under which his son perished.
But the real problem, as Paul made clear, isn’t the use of drones against US citizens on American soil; it is American foreign policy itself, under both this president and his predecessor.
His indictment was radical, sweeping, total, unconditional — and wildly overdrawn. Just to take one example, he said we are living in a state of perpetual and endless war, and used Iraq as an example — Iraq, from which we pulled out entirely in 2011. To listen to Paul, you’d think America was already a police state, and the planet its evil playground.
The fact that Podhoretz could claim Paul’s totally accurate statement, “we are living in a state of perpetual and endless war,” as “wildly overdrawn,” underscores the fright that Paul sparks in the soul of these crazed warmongers. They hinge their crazy statements on the hope that Americans have Alzheimer’s disease when it comes to remembering the propaganda they showered on America–e.g., Bin Laden was in league with Saddam Hussein, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to be unleashed on America, etc. So we went to war, got more than 4000 good American sons and daughters killed, and for what?
We turned Iraq over to Shia that had been funded and protected by Iran. Iraq has become a de facto puppet of Iran. And what do the neocons want? War with Iran.
We hear the same silly bullshit about Iran–e.g., Al Qaeda is in league with Iran, Iran is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons and we must stop them at all costs.
Rand Paul, so far, has not been willing to subscribe to this nonsense. The fact that his filibuster last Wednesday resonated so widely and deeply throughout America has now unleashed a coordinated pushback from those politicians and pundits who are keen on a perpetual war and who are more than willing to sacrifice your loved ones to achieve their pathetic, delusional fantasy.
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