You must read Spengler’s cold-eyed assessment of John McCain’s funeral, “A funeral for a world that never was,” at the Asia Times.
“Senator McCain served his country and suffered on its behalf as a prisoner of war, and deserves respect on the occasion of his passing,” he writes. “But the unctuous sea of self-congratulatory declarations of virtue embedded in his obsequies were enough to make the portraits in the Capitol rotunda puke.” It only gets better from there.
Spengler’s real target isn’t the late senator from Arizona so much as the illusory view of the world that he and so many others held in the face of harsh reality and at the expense of American power and prestige.
He recalls how McCain and others in the Washington establishment supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Egypt, and how outraged they were when the Egyptian military overthrew the regime of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 after millions of nearly-starving Egyptians took to the streets:
Senator McCain sadly denounced the military takeover as a violation of the democratic process. Technically speaking it was a coup against an elected government, although under emergency conditions and with massive and visible popular support. So beguiled was McCain with the prospect of a democratic Islamic regime that he never accepted that his illusion had vanished.
Sometime later I spoke with George W. Bush’s Director of Central Intelligence, General Michael Hayden. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”
“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!” “I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied.
He wasn’t joking. The ideological commitment of the Establishment to a new global order made facts irrelevant. If things weren’t that way, they should have been that way.
By all means, read the rest.
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