The hawks of war have come out to play
They’re so excited about the prospect of a war.
Leah Finnegan
JAN—03—2017
01:49PM EST
The Politico published a piece on Sunday that really got people tweeting about Russia. “Make no mistake: Russia poses a gargantuan threat to America — and all we have stood for; hacking only a small part,” said former vice presidential candidate Mindy Finn. “Not sure how much of it to buy, but this is the most interesting thing I have read on Trump and Putin,” tweeted media thinker Jay Rosen. “Sharing this again: if you only, for some odd reason, read only one article this year, let this masterpiece be it,” said journalist Andrea Chalupa. Andrea… it’s only Jan. 3… are you sure…
The piece, called “Putin’s Real Long Game,” warns us that “the world order as we know it is already over” and basically declares some kind of war on Russia. It also talks a lot about “hard power” and how that is important, which, well. For some. The writer, Molly McKew, writes of sitting on porches and smoking cigarettes with her Russian and Estonian friends, idly discussing the war Russia is “waging against us” as proof it is happening. (These friends are conveniently not identified, raising the question: What constitutes a friend? What if a tree stump is your friend? And that tree stump declares war on Russia? Are we really at war? Idk I’m still working on my object permanence.) “The fight is the American way. When we stop fighting for our ideals abroad, we stop fighting for them at home. We won the last Cold War,” McKew writes, excellently embodying the voice of a dead WWII general. “We will win the next one too. When it’s us against them, they were, and are, never going to be the winner.”
Screech... Screech... Can you hear the hawks? They are circling, and they want WAR. Paul Wolfowitz has put on his bird suit, and he’s ready to go. Ahmed Chalabi gyrates in his grave. Judy Miller trots to her closet to dust off her WMD detection device (it’s a twig with a magnet taped to it). And Molly McKew calls her pals at The Politico: “Boy, have I got some opinions for you!” War really gets people going.
McKew was previously an adviser to former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a Putin enemy, and also worked for the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, so that clears up a lot (when Dick Cheney decides to bless people with a speech, he usually does it for the people of AEI). A good rule of thumb when reading “opinion” pieces is to immediately Google the author and see if they have an association with a think tank, because one of the most pernicious things news organizations like The Politico do is publish this kind of strident claptrap from agenda-driven wonks.
https://theoutline.com/post/831/leah-letter-the-hawks-of-war-have-come-out-to-play
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