Read through any thread at Abu Muqawama, CTLAB or the Long or Small Wars Journals and you’ll begin to see the distinction between academic professionalism and wannabe fetishism, Full Spectrum Dominance nothwithstanding. And one can hardly find a field or discipline that doesn’t engage in arcane nomenclatures as a matter of course. I thought this was all made clear to most people before, (another peeve about blogs is you always have to school the never ending stream of FNGs). There is no substitute to the modern professional military in the modern age. There will always be a few horse’s asses in any herd. Don’t make me whip out Adam Smith on the standing army and professional military.

Speaking of Smith, you might enjoy this:

Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth

Gavin Kennedy

[...] modern economists took an isolated metaphor, used rarely by Adam Smith, and in his name invented a wholly misleading belief of how commercial markets function and how people in them necessarily and unintentionally work for public benefit, independent of the consequences of their actions. And they introduced a self-contradictory concept into economics, described as an ‘invisible hand explanation’, yet it does not explain anything close to the explanatory value offered by economics as a science, even where Smith left it. If anything, it obfuscates everything to which it is applied.

http://www.aier.org/aier/publications/ejw_wat_may09_kennedy.pdf

I’m sure it went over well at GMU when Kennedy first presented this paper.

I think I win this argument.

It’s like Nixon’s comic-opera palace guard, LWM. Taken individually, these things that Paul is objecting to may or may not be significant. Taken altogether, they’re a sad, and perhaps dangerous indicator of what’s very likely to come.

Nice long edit period. Thanks. I can use it.

Let me give you an example:

No, I Do Not Support “The “Troops”

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/05/no-i-do-not-support-troops.html

Not the worst but you’ve seen Jeremy Sapienza’s racist rant before.

Even Orwell would contend that Silber was “objectively” pro-terrorist. Silber would probably have been “objectively pro-fascist” in the 1930′s. I’m not suggesting that either you or Paul are like Silber. But just look at all the pushback Paul has gotten from that post, from “Liberal-Progressives” as Silber puts it while accusing them of “Non-Opposition”.

Unless you want to pretend that there isn’t a subtext at work here, or that we’ve misinterpreted it, I think we’ve made a reasonable case. If you’re going to indulge in kneejerk pieties in this day and age, it behooves you to know who’s jerking your knee.

Let’s not forget, Washington always showed up in his “flight suit”.

One point of clarification, though. I don’t think that Obama is the one doing the fetishizing, any more than the average Catholic is responsible for setting the crucifixion fetish up behind the altar. Like the average Catholic, though, he does feel obliged to genuflect, and cross himself, when passing in front of it. Why does he feel the need, do you think? It seems downright Unamerican to me.