The mind of a neocon

Glenn Greenwald acknowledges that Thomas Friedman has value: If we listen to Friedman we will understand the way neocons think. We will understand their rage and we will understand how their rage tempts them to lash out indiscriminately. Here are Greenwald's words:

If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”
Here is the mind of a neocon in action (from a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose):

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What if our economic woes were really about something we can’t bear to consider?

What if our economic woes were something symptomatic about a deep dysfunction many Americans refuse to contemplate. What if Thomas Friedman has it about right when he suggests that our infinite growth model inevitably leads to environmental/economic hell?

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

Continue ReadingWhat if our economic woes were really about something we can’t bear to consider?