And speaking of dumb, or perhaps I should say lying, Al Gore misrepresented his highly profitable sale of his television network to anti-American, Islamist al-Jazira by saying that Qatar, which owns al-Jazira, was the most pro-American country in the Arab world and that’s where the U.S. fleet in the Gulf was based. Of course, the fleet is based in Bahrain, not Qatar, and Qatar has been pro-Iran, pro-Islamist, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood, the most hostile against the United States of the Gulf Arab monarchies. Gore, of course, was vice-president and almost president.
Meanwhile, the current President has created a policy of helping empower the Muslim Brotherhood in order supposedly to moderate it and stop even worse Islamists (who are actually quite disorganized, bickering among themselves, and incapable of taking power) from taking power.
There is a deep malady of ignorance and very bad ideas in the American foreign policy leadership and it has lost the correction mechanisms of criticism from the mass media and academia. Hagel is really rather typical of this group but just not adept at pretending otherwise.
Yet Hagel is not some stereotyped cloistered academic who has learned everything from books. He is a Middle Western equivalent of a “good old boy,” a backslapping, genial sort who merely thinks of his own advancement.
And that’s why he is so scary. There is only one reason for Hagel to be so extreme: he has picked up on the game plan of the winning time, the dominant ideas of this era which he tries to copy in his dimwitted way like a country bumpkin trying to follow the latest fashions from the big city.
In other words, Hagel is the purest, most showy example that anti-Americanism, apologies for America’s enemies, the fixation that the United States has been an evil bully that must be curbed, and contempt for its courageous soldiers and foreign friends is the obsession of the “in” crowd, the decision-making elite. And if you want to be one of them those are the ideas one has to mouth, even if one doesn’t even understand them. Hagel’s brain is the mass market version of Kerry’s and Kerry’s is the collector’s edition of Obama.
Originally published at Rubin Reports.