http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5673334Squeaking sounds can be heard as the realignments, tossing of hot potatoes, denial of having ever been anywhere near the place that (I predicted would) follow the break of the NSA case and the failure of the PATSY Act to win universal acclaim would appear to be starting. The first one I've found is the above, where neocon luminaries are signing on to advocacy groupings funded by billionaires which seek to address energy dependency and global warming. One might give them the benefit of the doubt and conclude that as smart people and shrewd politicians, they have concluded that moving the American giant into the Mideast to secure oil supplies and profits was not such a long-term strategy, because the damn oil wasn't there. Or you could be cynical and conclude that as smart people and shrewd politicians, they're thinking that their press isn't so good and that they've identified the new "right" side of various issues to be on and are rushing there to secure their backs, and to be prepared to manipulate the new-energy movement as it inevitably arises.
A third alternative is that they intended to get America mired in the mideast, seeing it as a win-win solution from the standpoint of blunting Islamic cultural vandals, improving Israeli security prospects and reshaping the power balances in the mideast, and are now moving on to step 2 in their activities. As one of their chippies (Ann Korin) put it she “couldn’t care less” about global warming or protecting the environment from oil drilling. “I’m involved in this because most of the world’s oil reserves are owned by countries that finance people that want to kill us, that finance radical Islam."
Whatever the motivations, it is worth noting the agility of these people. Apparently behind the above activities toward new energy are creatures like Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes, i.e. old-line PNAC neocon apparatchiks. Apparently, after finding a good application for American tax dollars and lives, they are now ready to plan our future in other venues as well.
By the way, I note that they are smart. Of course, it should be stated just to be sure that it's clear that that in no way equates to "ethical", or in fact that they have well-developed and mature ethics (even were they to produce the very different results these folks get for geopolitical questions compared to normal people). In fact, their behavior indicates to me that they operate on the basis of believing that they are superior in capability and preparation for guiding public affairs to all other players on the scene (which would be in line with Strauss' affinity for ruling elites), and can with an only mildly contemptuous smile guide their inferiors towards ends which they (the neocons) have identified. This would however appear to be one of their fundamental flaws - the need to retain fairly high in their consciousness the notion that they are superior, and that they differentiate themselves from and elevate themselves above the allegedly cruder players on the world scene means that the content of their formulations is not enough to convince them that they will succeed. In some sense they seem to fit the profile of the typical (for the US) gifted child of an educated household, with superior training in certain types of intellectual activity, but an insufficient integration with their sense inputs so that they can really match their cognitive activity to conditions actually at hand and respond to them pertinently. Instead, they refer to their intellectual conditioning (in their case their ideology) and use it to answer the question, what do we do in this situation. This produces the defective results we see in Iraq and in the global free market economy they promote, i.e. in the externals of their programs, and it also implies that there are limitations to their smartness which inherently reduce the quality of their output, and also offer venues for attack and neutralization. Let's use those.