Neocon Job Quote of the Day

When we see the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton and Kristol on gabfests, we'll remember this:

"...thousands of our fellow citizens would be alive and well today had we never listened to the neoconservatives’ fantasies, and Americans would be more popular abroad and more prosperous at home if their prescriptions from 1993 forward had been ritually ignored. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive too, and the Middle East would probably be in somewhat better condition (it could hardly be worse).

What, if anything, might reduce the neoconservative influence to its proper dimension (that is to say, almost nil)? I wish I knew, for if the past ten years haven’t discredited them, it’s not obvious what would. No doubt leaders in Moscow and Beijing derive great comfort from that fact: For what better way to ensure that the United States continues to lurch from crisis to crisis, and from quagmire to quagmire? Until our society gets better at listening to those who are consistently right instead of those who are reliably wrong, we will repeat the same mistakes and achieve the same dismal results. Not that the neoconservatives will care."  -- Stephen Walt, in Foreign Policy, via Balloon Juice (emphasis added).

One would have to start with a sense of self-awareness (the neocons have none) and shame (none of that either), with a good amount of decency (are you kidding?) to care about the ruinous situation they created, or about the lives destroyed in their path.