Neocons PUMMELED on Sun. morning shows

I should wait for the transcripts, but in instance after instance, the neocons were outed as morally bankrupt and criminally incompentent on today's Sunday morning jabber shows. I laughed out loud three or four times.

Meet the Press featured Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich. Biden's mouth can get ahead of his brain, and domestically he's in thrall to corporate masters. But he's been very smart and very direct on foreign policy, at least for the last few months. He's finally gotten it into his head that these clowns in the White House have no idea what they're doing. He was on point today, while Gingrich was his warmongering self.

He criticized US neglect of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he condemned how we've emboldened Iran (actually using the term Shiite Crescent!), he didn't wait ten seconds like General Schoomaker to answer the question "Are we winning in Iraq," plainly saying "No." He quoted Jack Kennedy by saying "You never negotiate out of fear, but you never fear to negotiate." And the coup de grace was this line, which I'll have to paraphrase. Biden was talking about how to deal with North Korea, where he called for bilateral talks rather than the six-party nonsense that hasn't worked.

I would sit down with them and say "Here's the deal, Jack." And I think we could get them to get verified inspections, a halt to nuclear activity, all for a promise that we would not take them down militarily. Now, of course, to a neocon (pointing to Gingrich), that would be like me as a Catholic denying the Holy Trinity.

Howls of derisive laughter. Howls.

It is important to cement in the minds of the populace that the neocons ALWAYS want war as a means to solve problems. There is no negotiation through anything but the barrel of a gun. This tradition has been with us for centuries. We now know that in the nuclear age this is a prescription for mass death. We also know through history that this neocon fantasy that projecting power in a vaccuum without any understanding of culture, sociology or the interconnectedness of foreign policy is disaster, pure and simple.

Newt, for his part, acknowledged that this government has no operation competence. It aligned with Eleanor Clift's statement on The McLaughlin Group that the difference between Vladimir Putin and George Bush is that "Putin is a competent dictator, Bush is an incompetent one."

Satisfied by this takedown, I strolled over to This Week, where apparently Madeleine Albright had taken Condi Rice to task, basically for not doing her job. I don't know whether or not there was a production of "Spamalot" going on in St. Petersburg that she had to attend, but the fact that there is a shooting war in an area of incredible strategic significance to our country, and the Secretary of State has not made a diplomatic visit to the region, and the President hasn't even called the Prime Minister of his chief ally, shows the wayward drift into irrelevance we've encountered as a consequence of this vomitous foreign policy. The lack of leadership is appalling.

In the roundtable segment, George Will called "neoconservatives... the most astoundingly misnamed group in history." Now, Will has a long history of combating with the neocons. He obviously thinks they've damaged his wondrous conservative brand. I will update with the exact quote when I find a transcript, but it was a really strident attack.

What we have here is neocon fantasy colliding with reality. The world is less safe, tensions are escalated, enemies are emboldened, and the policies of the last five years have failed. They must be changed.