by Ana Marie Cox
Jonathan Chait at the New Republic offers an amusing precis on Chris Matthew's grade school vision of foreign policy. Of the "neocons" Matthews has said
When are we going to notice that the neocons don't know what they're talking about? They're not looking at this country's long-term interests. They're bound up in regional and global ideology, and they have had no experience--I'll say it again--in even a schoolyard fight.
Chait theorizes:
A more suspicious mind might detect in this some ugly insinuations, but I prefer to take Matthews's theory at face value. Maybe he truly believes that participating in schoolyard brawls is necessary training for the successful conduct of foreign policy. (Perhaps the young George F. Kennan formed the nascent outlines of his worldview in the elementary school latrine, while administering swirlies to the pencilnecks.)
Though, as we all know, it's the pencilnecks who know how to practice real diplomacy.