Posted on 08/16/2014 6:18:50 PM PDT by crusher
As time goes by I find reading less pleasurable, mostly due to time constraints and my continuing fading vision. I find myself listening to more stuff on my MP3 player.
I also am finding those voices I want to pay attention to. For almost thirty years one of those people I listen to VERY CAREFULLY is Angelo Codevilla, whose insights into the nature of the political world are unerringly well thought through. His previous book, "America's Ruling Class," a bipartisan evisceration of the political establishment, ranks in my opinion with Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Vision," perhaps the most insightful secular book I have ever read.
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/07/28/achieving-americas-peace-a-conversation-with-angelo-codevilla/
In this interview he discusses his newest book "Achieving America's Peace is a hard-headed and sober minded review of foreign policy follies over the past 5, 25, 100 years. I listened to it twice and caught new nuggets every time.
In this interview he discusses the importance of a foreign policy pursuing "America's national interests."
In so doing he skewers the four major strains of foreign policy foolishness:
1. The effete elite kumbaya nuttiness that refuses to acknowledge that the rest of the world's cultures are not the same as ours
2. "nation-building" crackpottery of the neocons
3. paleocon isolationism (as Orwell said, "You cannot hide from war,it will come and find you")
4. libertarian non-interventionism
He also makes the observation that virtually all prominent politicians world wide have no interest in pursuing "national" interests, but rather are engaged in benefiting themselves or their tribe (or political party) even if to do so is damaging to their own "nation."
Well, it was an hour well spent. This is a fellow that had a few surprises up his sleeve. That it was the Carter administration that started Reagan’s arm’s buildup is quite a novel notion. I can’t say that I’ve heard that charge before. On the other hand, the revelations about the GHW Bush administration’s dislike for ANYTHING Reagan was not so surprising.
I like the "Tampa 912 Project" by the Tampa Tea Party Patriots https://archive.org/details/AudiobookConstitutionalConvention1787 as well as the The Claremont Institute with Charles Kesler presents The American Mind -- interviews with Professor John Marini of the University of Nevada at Reno.
I’ll pass the thanks on to Crusher who posted it.
Thanks for the post.
Codevilla wrote a couple of articles for The American Spectator four or five years ago, during the time when the Tea Party was forming, that crystallized our thoughts for a lot of us, and explained clearly why we felt such anger and frustration with the current political status quo in our nation. He pointed out that our country was being steered by elitists from both parties who did not have our interests at heart. These elitists had more in common with each other than they did with any of us outside the “club”.
Today, some of his insights have become second nature to conservatives, and it is hard to remember that there was a time when a lot of us did not yet fully understand the battle we were facing, and the nature of our enemies at home.
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