Digby: Return of the "stab in the back?"

Of course, you could argue that "return" isn't the right word, since, following WWII, the tendency of the right to blame its foreign policy failures on treason from within has never really gone away.

Digby predicts that Georgia may be the next opportunity for conservatives to discover that their cherished theories have once again failed, for the only possible reason: Treachery from within, causing us to "betray" an ally (Georgia) against an age-old enemy (Russia).

That sense of betrayal is going to be used by the neocons as a rallying cry for their revitalized cold war cause. And they will be agitating and pushing the debate and coercing anyone who disagrees on the basis of a myth that the US abandoned a Democratic ally because it refused to confront an evil enemy. It's their most successful theme.

I fully expect to see a Committee To Liberate Georgia and a Washington Lobby formed by this time next year with a full blown push for a Georgia Liberation Act following not far behind. (I suspect they will also hope that an Obama administration will be too smart or too practical not to do what they want, the better to gain domestic political leverage as they refurbish the conservative image.)

The neocons and their hawkish buddies are not like other people. They don't learn from their errors or make any changes in strategy due to facts or experience or even embarrassment. They just keep repeating themselves over and over and over again, decade after decade, without any acknowledgment of their failures, simply changing the rhetoric to represent a different country on the Risk board.