A Scheme Deferred
(American Conservative Blog) by Dennis Dale

Rush Limbaugh’s wistful musing about a military coup is more oblivious than devious: after a perfunctory, brief struggle, the coup is victorious (Of course, if the president had been arrested at West Point and replaced with a military junta, I’m not entirely sure Limbaugh wouldn’t find a way to justify it. Are you?). Under political duress, the president has accepted the role of conditional, if not yet nominal, Commander-in-Chief, surrendering an authority he doesn’t want and wouldn’t know what to do with anyway. Now he bites his nails and waits, like the rest of us.

But it’s not the president’s prerogative to divest himself of command over the armed forces to avoid its political consequences–elite convention notwithstanding. The extraordinary executive power over war itself remains, insulated from legislative or judicial interference, nominally vested in an elected president, wielded by a cabal. This is dereliction of duty of the highest order. The Commander in Chief has abandoned his post to cower in the rear while his mutinous subordinates take command.

But okay, this is all retrograde and simplistic, I know. Just the sort of thing to set elite eyes rolling, like taking the Constitution and sovereignty too seriously. Let’s crassly accept the “political reality” and acknowledge the asymmetry between the White House and the the military establishment :

The Pentagon dictates policy directly to the Republican Party, Fox News, conservative radio and Internet, while fighting to a draw in the contested middle that is the the unallied media.
Obama, on the other hand, leads a party divided on the war and has a more conditional alliance with a media complex–MSNBC, NPR, etc.–that is both less powerful and less subservient than their adversaries. It’s no great boast, but the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character. The difference casts in relief the decadence of the Republican Party and its staunchest media organs...CONT'D...LINK
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Chris Moore Comments:

"the liberal media and Democratic Party have, on this issue, shown superior independence and character”

The Democrats were voted in to office by Americans to dial DOWN the wars, not escalate them. They are doing the exact opposite, and their partisan media are not saying a word about it.

To me, that’s not an exemplar of “superior” anything, let alone “character” and “independence.” By running and winning on dovish posturing, and then selling out those who voted for them to appease the various warmongering lobbies actually makes them worse than the GOP and its partisan media, who don’t even pretend to be dovish.

Americans are all being sold out by two lethally cynical parties and their partisan media that are all corrupt to the core.
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The GOP and the Dems are like an old dog that can't learn new tricks. The GOP has played the "national security" card for so long, as the Democrats have played the "race" card, neither knows, nor is willing to learn, anything else.

Nearly all sensible conservatives and liberals understand, if only instinctively, that America is economically stretched to the breaking point. Yet the fools at the helm of both parties, and even most of the American establishment, suffer from a bad case of metaphysical Marxist-think: 'We create our own reality. The rules of history don't apply to us. We can continue our pampered lifestyles and maxing out the credit cards as we always have. Besides, in the end, we’re all dead, anyway.'

In the end, what Marxist-think actually amounts to is an intellectual rationale for maintaining ones own state arrested development and ignoring the problems that state of mind has created. It was really the perfect poison for the infantile Baby Boomer generation -- a kind of ready-made potion that allowed them to stay perpetually self-indulgent and selfish while at the same time looking down their noses at their Christian forebears, who built the country and its prosperity, as “backwards” and “intolerant.”

As it turns out, for all their "sophistication," they will have done more damage to the country and probably the world than any generation of Americans before them.