The Union of Establishment Republicans and Establishment Democrats

It began in 2016, when neconservative war criminals formed an alliance with warmongering Democrats.

Illustrative of their emerging alliance, as Glenn Greenwald reports, is yet another Beltway foreign policy initiative: the Alliance for Securing Democracy....The Alliance’s advisory council includes Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser, and Mike Morell, acting CIA director under Obama. They sit comfortably with Kristol, Mike Chertoff, homeland security secretary under Bush, and hawkish former Republican congressman Mike Rogers. With a record of catastrophic foreign policy fiascoes, the establishment comes together to strike back.

It turns out that this was only the beginning.
The common enemy here was Russia, and one method of unity is the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI).

A group of neocon heartthrobs have banded together with an eclectic array of Russiagaters to form a visionary organization committed to protecting Western democracy....
Celebrated war cheerleader Max Boot, who serves on RDI’s board of directors, announced the creation of this highly original organization in a Washington Post op-ed.
... Unlike the dozens of other well-financed bastions of status-quo thinking, RDI aims to “unite both the center-left and center-right” by promoting “liberty, democracy and sanity in an age of discord.”

Also on RDI’s board of directors is WaPost writer Anne Applebaum who once wrote an op-ed entitled “Should We Assassinate Saddam?”
The organization’s president, Richard Hurowitz, is a member of the warmongering Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2018 a new alliance formed, this time between neoconservatives and neoliberals.

For several months, an alliance has been forming between the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP). It’s the sort of kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a decade ago.

A press release from CAP on May 10 blares: “CAP and AEI Team up to Defend Democracy and Transatlantic Partnership.” The same joyous tidings accompanied a public statement issued by AEI on July 31, which stressed that the alliance was meant to resist “the populist assault on the transatlantic community” for the purpose of “defending democracy.”

It's hard to tell what they mean when they say "democracy", but it's virtually certain that it isn't in the dictionary.
There's something pathetic and ironic about neconservatives and neoliberals joining forces to defend "democracy" when they are the biggest threats to democracy.
Now we have mainstream conservatives openly cheering for the Democrats in November.

Nor is Boot alone among neocon Never-Trumpers. Syndicated columnist George Will, who left the GOP after the election of Trump, is also agitating for a Democratic congressional takeover...

Another former Republican, MSNBC commentator and onetime congressman Joe Scarborough (also a current member of the Council on Foreign Relations), has set the standard for anti-Trump animus. His colleague at MSNBC, former GOP congressman and McCain presidential campaign chair Steve Schmidt, is yet another fiery Trump detractor rooting for the Dems.

This union of evil and evil comes from the Dems as well.
For instance, liberals new found love of warmonger John McCain.

Forty-four percent of Republicans surveyed in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday hold a negative view of McCain, while only 35 percent have a positive view of him. Meanwhile, 52 percent of Democrats surveyed now see him in a positive light.

When did so many liberals become worthless, pieces of shit?

The press and liberal groups gushed, and hundreds of headlines approvingly quoted the former president. “Why you should listen when George W. Bush defends the media,” declared a headline at the Washington Post. “George W Bush: a welcome return,” raved the Guardian, which went so far as to call him a “paragon of virtue.” The leftist site ThinkProgress ran a blog post titled “George W. Bush defends the Constitution to rebuke Trump.”

"Paragon of virtue"? Has everyone forgotten that he's a war criminal?
warcriminal.jpeg

Other establishment Republicans now backing establishment Democrats include:

Pete Wehner (former deputy speechwriter for President George W. Bush)
GOP strategist Steve Schmidt (a presidential campaign advisor for George W. Bush in 2004 and Sen. John McCain in 2008)
Right-wing journalist John Ziegler
David Jolly (who represented Florida in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2014-2017)

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all is forgiven

The White House said that Brennan used his security clearance to “sow division and chaos,” and lend a sheen of credibility to his public criticisms of the president. The White House looked into revoking Brennan’s clearance after he accused Trump of “treason” for meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.

Straight away, Democrats jumped in to defend Brennan’s character and to blast Trump for pulling his clearance. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that “In adding John Brennan to his enemies list, Trump demonstrates again how deeply insecure and vindictive he is.”

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) called the revocation “the weak, paranoid, authoritarian behavior of a dictator.”
...
Brennan’s thesaurus-heavy Tweets and self-righteous grandstanding have made him a hero to the anti-Trump #resistance. However, while Democrats are falling over themselves to pat the former career spy on the back, there was a time when Brennan spied on Democratic lawmakers compiling a report into his agency’s use of torture tactics – and got away with it.

In 2014, as the Senate Intelligence Committee was compiling a lengthy report into the CIA’s use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ at its secret prisons, chair Dianne Feinstein (D-California) accused Brennan’s agency of secretly monitoring the committee’s computers and removing sensitive documents.

After initially denying any wrongdoing and rejecting Feinstein’s “spurious allegations,” Brennan quietly apologized to lawmakers after an internal review proved the senator right.

Despite being caught red-handed spying on his overseers, the Obama administration Department of Justice declined to press charges against Brennan, and he remained in charge of the CIA.

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WoodsDweller's picture

...if it bit them on their fat, hairy asses. The Left starts with those three little words that make my heart beat faster ... "Nationalize the Banks". It doesn't start with "microscopically left of the extreme radical far right". The rich old lady who says "impeachment is off the table" and "we're capitalist and that's that" isn't the freaking Left.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

Lily O Lady's picture

published by the John Birch Society. The Koch’s and their evil father are Birchers. I’m kinda creeped out.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

and they do it out in the open, and take pride in it. They are protecting democracy, from us. Like the economy, education, health care, democracy is reserved for the 1%. Too dangerous to leave it to us.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

George Will, who left the GOP after the election of Trump, is also agitating for a Democratic congressional takeover...

then I'm against it.

After all, why break a habit of a lifetime?

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

karl pearson's picture

IMO, neoliberalism and neoconservatism are dependent on each other. How can neoliberal policies be spread around the world without using neoconservative policies? That is why Bush can be popular with the "left". When I read this essay, this song came to mind:

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crazy tea party gets ambushed and loses control, establishment neolibs and neocons come into power en masse, all is well.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

k9disc's picture

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

A guy on DKos, AntonBursch, once told me he couldn't wait till they "purged all the Greens (which I think meant us) out of the Democratic party, so we can make an alliance with the center-right."

Not really sure what anyone means by "center," anymore; it appears to have something to do with money.

As Alan Grayson once said, "So that's what passes for centrist these days."

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Interestingly, one could interpret the illegal changing of people's registration data as exactly that: a purge.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

lotlizard's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal  
People were scrimping and saving and skimping on essentials for themselves and their loved ones in order to come up with multiples of $27 to donate to Bernie’s campaign, but he couldn‘t be bothered to defend his own supporters’ right to be registered correctly and vote in a fair primary.

Instead he went with the very cabal that had cheated him, and them.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
which I found 'telling'. I think his time is coming to an end.

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CB's picture

@mimi

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@lotlizard I don't like it either, but I'm sure plenty of people have been intimidated by the Clinton machine (which is now the Clinton/Bush machine) in the past, and this is no different. My read is that Bernie never intended to get into a serious combat with the Clintons, because he never imagined he would do as well as he did. And that's understandable: no conventional political wisdom would have suggested Bernie Sanders would become a household name and the new label for a resurgence of New Deal and traditional progressive policies (as in, the turn-of-the-century anti-corruption party). Everybody, including him, believed he would present no threat to Hillary. Whoops.

Once it was clear he did present a threat, because the American people were in a much different place than the powerful assumed, he had a choice of entering into not only a serious, but a mortal combat with the Clintons--or betraying his supporters. And when I say "mortal," I don't necessarily mean literally risking death: I mean risking a cataclysm of one kind or another visited upon one's life, much like the whistleblowers do. That's what happens when you seriously inconvenience the powerful these days. Bernie wasn't prepared to face that. Unlike the whistleblowers, who actually know what they're getting into, Bernie got into the dangerous position of threatening power without meaning to, and thus without preparing for the consequences. He did what most people do under those conditions, and beat an ignominious retreat.

Was it fair to his supporters? Absolutely not. Was it wrong to campaign for President when he didn't believe he could actually win? Possibly--it is a kind of false pretenses--but it's not a grave sin to run for President even when you think you can't win, because you want to put certain ideas in front of the populace. It's not like one can use the media for that purpose.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

mimi's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
may be it was a sign of 'open mindedness' and 'non-partisanism' over there /s

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@mimi Occasionally people open their mouths and spill out the actual truth of what they--or their leadership--are doing. That was one of those moments. Not only would they rather lose to a Republican than win with a progressive, they actually were looking forward to joining with the Republicans.

It garnered some attention from people on DKos more mainstream than me; DKos was, after all, conceived as an anti-Republican website, so having people talk about how much they were looking forward to getting close to the Republicans was a little outre.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver