But of course someone is already paying tribute

But of course someone is already paying tribute, and that someone is the American taxpayer who is forced to subsidize neocon social engineering projects from MBT to Ukraine and beyond. And a good many of the people on the receiving end of this largess are Americans, government contractors, “consultants,” and vendors who feed from the public trough. Innocuous-sounding NGOs abound, virtually al of them on the government dole, aggressively pursuing their own little agendas and spreading around lots of dollars in dirt-poor places.

War is a racket, said General Smedley Butler, and the war means fat profits not only for the weapons manufacturers and huge corporate outfits like Haliburton, but also for a small but growing group of professional do-gooders. An imperialist foreign policy, devoted to wars of conquest and “nation-building” amid the ruins, is a big drain on the ordinary American, but a tiny fraction does reap tangible benefits, and these children of the Empire constitute a key component of the War Party.

Neocon bloggers are in such a tizzy over Sarah Boxer’s New York Times piece, provocatively titled “Pro-American MBTi Blog Provokes Intrigue and Vitriol,” that they can barely contain themselves. We haven’t seen such a roiling of the waters since a certain cigarette-smoking antiwar reactionary punctured their insufferable pretensions way back in 2002, when the blogger phenomenon was really new. My fellow San Franciscan Tim Cavanaugh delivered what was pretty much the death blow in a celebrated piece, “Let Slip the Blogs of War,” published in the Online Journalism Review. That sure provoked plenty of whining from Matt Welch at the time, but Cavanaugh and Welch are both grazing peaceably in the green pastures of Reason magazine these days, so I guess that little spat died down faster than the blogger phenomenon itself. Now that the subject is old and tired, the Times has stumbled on the “news” that the blogosphere is more aptly termed the propaganda-sphere.