Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, May 16, 2008

The other shrill Right

By Ron Beasley



When it comes to being critical of the Bush administration it wasn't the left that first called for the impeachment of George W. Bush.  It wasn't the left that first compared the Bush administration to the Nazi regime.  It was Libertarian Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.  His response to Bush's Knesset speech was as shrill as anything from the left.

On May 15, the White House Moron, in a war-planning visit to Israel, justified the naked aggression he and Olmert are planning against Iran as the only alternative to "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."



But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran.



Iran has not responded in kind to any of Bush�s warlike moves and provocations. Iran has not sunk a single one of our sitting-duck ships and has not given the Iraqi insurgents any weapons that would easily turn the tide of war against the US.



It is Bush, not Iran, who sounds like Adolf Hitler blustering and threatening. It is Bush�s American Brownshirts, the neocons, who express the view: "what�s the good of nuclear weapons if you can�t use them."



It is the US that is funding assassination teams inside Iran and using taxpayer dollars to fund dissident and violent organizations opposed to the Iranian government. Iran is doing no such thing here.



It is members of the Bush Regime and US generals who continue to lie through their teeth about Iranian support for insurgents, for which they can supply no evidence, and about Iranian nuclear weapons programs, for which the IAEA inspectors can find no sign.



It is the US print and TV media that serves the Bush Regime as propaganda ministry for its lies of aggression.



All the war crimes that are being planned are being planned by Bush and Olmert.



What would George Orwell make of the Bush Regime�s position that anything less than a direct act of naked aggression is appeasement?

This is why many if not most of the Libertarians will not vote for Bush clone, John McCain.  Dr Roberts used to be the darling of the right wing talk shows until about six years ago when he started speaking out against the Bush/Cheney/neocon cabal. 



2 comments:

  1. Utterly minor (but of significance to us libertarians) correction:
    that should be a small "l" libertarian, not a big "L" Libertarian. There is an important difference, particularly when you are referring to voting patterns. Big "L" Libertarians never voted for Republicans, only for LP candidates. Small "l" libertarians have historically voted Republican, but have largely abandoned the Republican Party in the last 8 years, although there are again an increasing number of Republicans who self-identify as libertarians. However, these so-called "libertarians" are really just conservatives who want to smoke pot and/or lower taxes, but who realize that conservatism is increasingly becoming a perjorative in much the sense that "liberalism" became a perjorative in the '80s and '90s. So defending on how you define "libertarian" or "Libertarian" you wind up with different results. Which is a long way of saying that if you mean small "l" libertarians with an actual understanding of libertarian philosophy, your analysis is pretty much correct. However, Obama's move to the left on trade issues over the last two months has caused a lot of us small "l" libertarians to reconsider our support for him...he has a lot of work to do to get my vote back, even though I still think he is worlds better than McCain.

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  2. Good info Mark, thank you
    I know there was a difference but I didn't know about the case thing.

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