The irresponsibility of people

As he unleashed dictatorial terror in Chile, Kissinger remarked that he didn't see why "we should have to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people". Kissinger was no liberal, but it is not difficult to find eager proponents among liberals of the idea of limiting the options available to the people, as evidenced by the character assassination of Dennis Kucinich by elements of the "netroots" (see entries in this blog for examples). Speaking about a Marine pilot who wrote with perverse glee at the killing of civilians in Iraq, Matt Taibbi (AlterNet: Why Can't We Talk about Peace in Public?) writes:

I believe that Marine pilot is driven by the same forces that render the presidential candidacy of someone like Dennis Kucinich impossible in America. A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them. If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table. Excepting the occasional Kucinich, no one in either party is interested in trying to change who we are, no matter how sick we become.

The "new progressives" may not find Kucinich's ideas of peace seditious, but they are on record with the more amusing claim that these ideas are "New Age pap". The Iraq war and winning elections, and setting the right "frame" in pursuit of these goals, are the limits of this new pragmatism, and what is good for the goose should suffice for the people.