Descent into Chaos, Introduction

Thoughts:

How did Bush ever get elected, yada yada yada - when did we just cease to care? I don't get the basis of conservatism, circa eight years ago. For a movement which wanted limited government interference, its members trusted the government on everything, once the movement gained power.

I've never understood what happened to the media after 9/11. Beyond the basis of questioning what the government was saying - where did any mainstream sort of investigative journalism go?

In a paragraph, here is the basis of American foreign policy when Bush was elected. For eight years after the end of the Cold War, the American foreign policy establishment searched for some strategy. The strategy was...to avoid strategy, to paraphrase Barnett. The criticism here falls, as it should, on the shoulders of Clinton. He listened to polls far too much, making each call of intervention as it happened, rather than orienting the United States on a path and working hard for support and education of his ideals. When Bush is elected, and the neoconservatives sweep into power, they also have no grand strategy, because they see a world where they can shape the reality. There is no need for a focused strategy because each action by the United States creates a reality which the rest of the world has no influence on.

So we end up here, eight years later, with a president who is much more in tune but also with a Congress still as idiotic and useless as ever, and a media which either lies, mischaracterizes
, or deems twitter and facebook postings important enough to show on the news (thanks, CNN, for being more useless than Congress!)