When You Vote for Terror...

The title of this post comes from the title of tonight's piece on NPR's website--which they post with no sense of irony. NPR interviews Noah Feldman, a quasi-liberal apologist for US foreign policy (see his publications). As with other mainstream media outlets NPR continues the tradition of arguing that there are rules that should apply to everyone else in the world (except for the US and our closest allies) -- a particularly destructive form of American Exceptionalism.

There were two gems in this interview. Implicitly blaming the Palestinians and the Lebanese for being hammered by indiscriminate Israeli violence Feldman makes the following two statements:

• "...if you elect a government that's hostile to us or to our allies, we're just not going to deal with that government; we’re going to treat you as a hostile state. The message there is that democracy is just fine, but there's no excuse-making for the public when they've elected democratically a government that goes out and breaks international law or that violates the borders of its neighbors...."

• "people do not take responsibilty for what their governments do. They point the finger they say well my government did this but I don't support my government's policies or it's unfair to attack my country because we really didn't do this just our government did it but if you've actually elected the government then you have to be prepared to take responsibility for what it does. That doesn’t mean that civilians can be targeted—of course that's wrong—nobody should target civilians on either side and if anyone does it’s a clear violation of international law."