We have no allies.

I’ve generally used them interchangeably. The measure of a real progressive vs. a phony “progressive” is in the actions.

Like with this health racket sham. We know there are almost no real progressives in the Congress because almost all who call themselves that will nevertheless support this vile mess. (And that’s even after they promised with great fanfare to oppose such a thing, calling themselves the “Progressive Bloc”. So they’re liars as well as cowards/traitors.)

That’s why we have to simply reject the existing “leadership” as a mass.

If rank and file activists want real action, we have to do it ourselves.

Yes, I saw the business about Diego Garcia. I’m not sure what to make of that. There are a number of angles on it. However, here is one “theory.”

Just today, a mere day after the Diego Garcia story broke, General Petraeus announced that the military was on course to pare US forces in Iraq down by half from 90,000 to 45,000.

My view is the military and those in The Executive
run the following con. It’s an oldie, but a goodie, as they say. Here ’tis:

The military discussed force reductions in promising terms, but somehow, someway, “something arises” that militates ( pun intended) against them enacting force reductions. I remember when Clinton was in office, the military lowballed their annual requests, thereby allowing the Administration to generously bestow more in the annual budgets.

It worked for everyone involved for obvious reasons.

I’m sure you get the picture. Long story short, beware a scenario that involves “The Guns of August”

The best I could come up with, at least for now, is that an actual “progressive” is willing to draw the line with the current health care bill and say that it is worth killing if it doesn’t have at the absolute minimum a weak public option. A “liberal,” on the other hand, will vote aye on the bill because… well, I don’t really know why, but they will.

By this measure there are hundreds of liberals in Congress but at most only a half dozen or so progressives. Which sounds about right.

(Though I might just be engaging in the stupid self-deception that caused many to claim that W. Bush wasn’t a “real” conservative.)

You’re sure correct about Eichmann being an uber-wonk. When he was tasked with studying Nazi options with regard to the “Jewish question”, his research included visiting Palestine and studying Hebrew. He came to be known as the SS’s top expert on the issue. That’s why they eventually put him in charge of the whole works.

His “banality of evil” as Arendt called it is often cited nowadays, and with good reason. That describes wonks and technocrats well. They’re prone to sociopathically serve any power structure they happen to find above them.

Expanding the war machine. We know he’d like to do it, and I suppose he’ll try within the bounds of economic possibility. Gates recently assured weapons dealers that permanently rising Pentagon budgets, just as such, for their own sakes (i.e. for the contractors’ profiteering sakes), are a top priority for the administration.

And I suppose you saw how they’re transporting bunker-busters to Diego Garcia. If so, they’ll be all set to start the next war at will.

“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”

Mere epithets do not begin to do Bela Pelosi justice.