The Lifeboat News: Re: Elliot Abrams: A Human Rights Horror Show In Three Parts

Op Ed News -- [...][...] Trump's reliance on arch neocons John Bolton and Elliot Abrams and his connection to other villains of the past ... are disturbing signs of American decline.

We seem to be living through a political Night of the Living Dead, a veritable Zombie Apocalypse in which the architects of disaster and defeat rise from the graveyard of their ruinous policies and once again appear at the side of a US president.

[...] [H]ere we go again, sending Elliot Abrams to Venezuela to implement another regime change, seemingly with spineless Democrats falling in line, this after doing everything we can to destroy the Venezuelan economy with sanctions, the modern equivalent of a medieval siege.
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How is it that the same people keep showing up and even increasing their power in spite of repeated disasters like the Iraq war or policies in Central America that have sent refugees fleeing to our borders?

In what other line of work do repeated failures and catastrophic loss result in promotion? Do NFL coaches who can't win games get their contracts endlessly renewed?

I think that we need to face up to a harsh reality: Many of our nation's war mongers and the people behind them have goals that are the opposite of those stated as justification for their actions. Thus, failing at their stated aims, maintaining national security, supporting democracy, etc., is not really failure.

In the case of the neocons, for whom 9/11 was an event they openly wished for in their [PNAC] position paper "Project for a New American Century", the mayhem in the Middle East and Latin America supports their unstated goals: the control oil fields, Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land and water, and, most important of all, the diverting of money into the hands of the beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex.

John Bolton and Elliot Abrams and their neocon cohorts like Mike Pompeo, lapdog of the Koch brothers, will continue to succeed by failing until Americans wake up to the deceptions they promote.

At least Bolton openly admits that his aim is to gain control of Venezuelan oil. What these self-described war criminals are really engaged in is a Project for a Post Constitutional America and the subjugation of the American people by the the oligarchs of legacy industries that now threaten the very fabric of life.

They are the most dangerous enemies we have ever faced, and we the people are paying their salaries.

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Further quotes from Abrams:

QUOTES: Emblematic of Abrams' visceral right-wing politics was his statement following the murder of John Lennon in December 1980:

"I'm sorry, but John Lennon was not that important a figure in our times. Why is his death getting more attention than Elvis Presley's?
Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor.
And, therefore, he is being made into a great figure.
Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of it"
(Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, pp. 161-162).

QUOTES: Elliot Abrams: "Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population" (Free Press, 1997). Judaism, according to Abrams, demands "apartness" — not in the sense of confining oneself to a physical ghetto, but all necessary measures should be taken to prevent "prolonged and intimate exposure to non-Jewish culture."
Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no "disloyalty" to the United States, but at the same times insists that Jews must be loyal to Israel because they "are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people."