MOYERS DIGS UP ANOTHER BRILLIANT RIGHT WING DISSIDENT

From PBS's Bill Moyers Journal:

BILL MOYERS: You intrigued me when you wrote that "The fundamental problem facing the country will remain stubbornly in place no matter who is elected in November." What's the fundamental problem you say is not going away no matter whether it's McCain or Obama?

ANDREW BACEVICH: What neither of these candidates will be able to, I think, accomplish is to persuade us to look ourselves in the mirror, to see the direction in which we are headed. And from my point of view, it's a direction towards ever greater debt and dependency.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that "What will not go away, is a yawning disparity between what Americans expect, and what they're willing or able to pay." Explore that a little bit.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think one of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system, or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years.

But, it's not the American people who are deploying around the world. It is a very specific subset of our people, this professional army. We like to call it an all-volunteer force-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

ANDREW BACEVICH: -but the truth is, it's a professional army, and when we think about where we send that army, it's really an imperial army. I mean, if as Americans, we could simply step back a little bit, and contemplate the significance of the fact that Americans today are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ask ourselves, how did it come to be that organizing places like Iraq and Afghanistan should have come to seem to be critical to the well-being of the United States of America.

There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain. But, it's really become part of what we do. Unless a President could ask fundamental questions about our posture in the world, it becomes impossible then, for any American President to engage the American people in some sort of a conversation about how and whether or not to change the way we live.

Click here to watch part one of the interview, part two here, or read a transcript of the entire interview here.

I swear, Moyers is really beginning to make me wonder what the differences between liberal and conservative in this country really are. Or rather, Moyers is doing a remarkable job of clearing out some real common ground between the left and the right, none of that pathetic shit Congress spews out called "bipartisanship."

This guy, Bracevich, is definitely a right winger, coming at our national fine mess from a decidedly conservative, capitalist, and pro-military perspective. He's a Vietnam vet, West Point grad, and professor of international relations at Boston University. And he plays the part well: really, his persona reminds me of some Aggies I've known over the years, not the beer-swilling redneck yuck-yuck "t.u." type, but more along the lines of the quiet, rational, Texas A&M engineering types I've known, conservative, but really fucking smart.

And what he says amazes me. Not because I've never heard any of it before, but because I've never heard it coming out of a conservative's mouth: at some point in the 1960s the US stopped being a production society and started being a consumer society; the entire political establishment has galvanized itself around the concept, and its inherent instability in terms of personal and public debt, as well as the military force needed to keep the whole scheme going, has created doom for America.

And almost nobody is able to admit it.

Right, I know. This is a true blue conservative saying this. You've absolutely got to watch this interview. It's almost a solid hour, but well worth the time. You'll be riveted almost from the first minute.

Go check it out.

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