Glenn Greenwald has a particularly cogent commentary today (click on it to bypass Salon’s homepage) at his new home on Salon. Yes I know it requires clicking through an ad (though it is quite painless) but for Glenn it is well worth the time.
Irving Kristol (Himmelfarb’s husband) has written in the past about the need to exploit religious and moral concepts in order to manipulate the masses, and his intellectual North Star, Leo Strauss, has advocated — as Strauss scholar Shadia Drury documented — that “those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit” — a view Kristol has endorsed. One can see that dynamic powerfully at work in the interaction between these neoconservatives and the President. They have seized upon the President’s evangelical fervor and equated his “calling” to wage war for Good in the world with the neoconservative agenda of endless wars in the Middle East.
And the more unpopular the President becomes as a result, the more of a failure these policies are, the more strongly they tell him to ignore all of that, that none of it matters, that his God and history will conclude that he did The Right Thing, provided that he continues steadfastly to pursue their agenda. And the President believes that. That is why nothing will stop him in pursuing the path he created years ago when, in January, 2002, he became convinced to name not only Iraq, but also Iran, as standing members of the “Axis of Evil” (even though our relations with Iran were rapidly improving at the time) and cited the 9/11 attacks in order to all but vow war on those countries, despite their having nothing to do with those attacks. The President’s “lessons” at the feet of neoconservatives continue, and he is as faithful a student as ever.
As incoherent and scattered as bush administration policy and implementation may appear to rational people on the outside looking in the fact is he’s been remarkably consistent on this approach from the beginning, using the Straussian “noble lies and pious frauds” to keep the less observant distracted.