By Daniel McAdams - August 17, 2021 at 02:57PM
I admit I've always had a soft spot for the Washington Free Beacon. Not because I am attracted to their puerile content, mind you, but because I've always associated the name "Free Beacon" with "free bacon," a proposition I believe every American could get behind.
Unfortunately, porcine mis-associations are not enough to palliate the reader from the agony of reading the steaming pile of pig feces they shat out today, blaming the Quincy Institute for the sudden evaporation of the puppet Afghan government after 20 years, two trillion dollars, and thousands of lives lost.
Yes, these are the same people who urged the war to continue forever, who urged more trillions to be taken from middle America and shoved into the pockets (and helicopters) of corrupt elites inside the Beltway and abroad, who urged that just one more bombing run would bring us - finally! - a victory for US interventionism.
It's easy to understand why the Beaconers and the rest of the neocons are a bit sensitive about all of this. Their track record is something I'd be ashamed of: they're batting exactly...zero. There has not been one single US war, regime change operation, bombing run, sanctions regime, or any other intervention that they've called for or supported that has left the US or the recipient country better off in any shape or form.
They're lucky they have no shame. Most decent people would think about a different line of work when their incompetence - or more accurately malevolence - was exposed for all to see. Think of a surgeon who kept cutting off the wrong limb or a truck driver who kept delivering the wrong load to the wrong location.
But no, it's all Quincy's fault. Finally removing US troops from a 20 year open wound was "precipitous" wrote the Beaconers.
But what's funny is nowhere in their hissy fit is any bill of particulars laid out. It's simply a kid-in-a-sandbox argument: Quincy applauded the announced end of what seemed like an endless war, the war ended and predictably there was chaos in a country that had been occupied for decades by a foreign power, and it's now all Quincy's fault.
The Beaconers were tossing expensive chinaware around in a china shop, the Quincy-ites told them that would be a bad idea, they did it anyway, the chinaware broke, and the Beaconers cried all the way home that it was all Quincy's fault. Boo hoo hoo!
There is a reason "Ron Paul was right" was trending all day on Twitter as the Taliban took Kabul. Ron Paul warned about this 20 years ago when he saw a limited mission to avenge the 9/11 attack morphing in classic Washington-style into a mega-gravy train for the military industrial complex and its pens-for-hire at the think tanks and Beltway rags like the Free Beacon.
"Bill Kristol was right" never trends on Twitter because Bill Kristol is never right. And that goes for his neocon son-in-law, Matthew Continetti, who co-founded the Free Beacon.
I write this not as a Quincy partisan, but as one who has been critical of the Quincy Institute for a number of reasons. And indeed by trying to play footsie with the interventionists while making sure their statecraft is "responsible" they do bring much of this on themselves.
That is why our position is so simple and defensible: we are non-interventionists. The US government can't organize a free lunch here at home, yet somehow we are supposed to believe they can organize entire societies thousands of miles away about which they know nothing and whose language they cannot utter a syllable.
Nevertheless, I believe most of those associated with Quincy have their hearts in the right place and genuinely wish to see a more peaceful world.
That is why it is so hilarious to see the Beaconers convulsing uncontrollably as another one of their adventures has gone so catastrophically wrong. "I could have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you pesky kids" is not a viable argument to having one's mask removed.
from Ron Paul Institute NeoCon Watch
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