William Sommerwerck wrote:

The neo-con's belief that bringing democracy (ie, unrestrained capitalism) to
the Middle East will make everything hunky-dorey is hopelessly naive.

I think it goes past that even. It is so transparently
false that no one with an education in such matters could
give it a moment's serious consideration.

That's always been the "big lie" method of governing or
propegandizing. There is something about whoppers so big as
to defy the logic of telling them that paradoxically makes
them credible. Go figure. I think it was Goebles and
Hitler who first came up with that and found it to be so
remarkably effective.

Tangent: I have a friend who was involved in the NLP (Neuro
Linguistic Programming) center here for a bit and she said
that the speech Bush gave at the convention might have been
borrowed from their course work (and will certainly be a
contribution to it.) NLP was an academic comet that fizzled
when researchers began to pull away from it because of its
real manipulative power and the way that it was starting to
be exploited by the less ethical. It is by no means
inactive but it is very quiet these days and the center
serves a well heeled clientelle very discretely.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein