GI Joe’s makeover
More on this from the LRC blog

His name will become an acronym, and stand for "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer."

First a sensible thought from El Cid on war toys:

There is nothing wrong with children playing at war, so long as someone within the family explains that war is not simply a game. Playing with heroes and villains is an important part of a child developing into a man - so long, as I said, as they eventually come to see that the world is not so simple as all that.

The makeover is the sort of thing that would have had establishment ‘conservatives’ having kittens about 10 years ago.

(Remember US Army Specialist Michael New’s ‘sir, no, sir’ to wearing a UN patch on his uniform, saying he swore to defend the US Constitution not serve under foreign command?)

It’s still disturbing: the statist globalist dream.

That said, real conservatives like Ron Paul point that the real bad-guy ‘isolationists’ are Mr Bush and his minders flipping off the UN and world opinion to do things like invade Iraq, breaking their 2000 campaign promises (‘See, we’re not like that pro-abortion, queer-lovin’, intern-diddlin’ globalist Bill Clinton, no, sir — no intervention or nation-buildin’, we promise’... before 9/11 Changed Everything™, well, not really).

Arguably there’s a place for a real UN peacekeeping force to try and clean up the mess the US made there. On the other hand the ’90s conservative talking heads had a point about all that: in ex-Yugoslavia they just got shot at; both sides in a civil war just want them out of the way like they’d like to get rid of the American occupiers in Iraq. So be it.

Of course the neocons really have no problem with New Joe: not only in principle but it’s convenient propaganda for the Coalition of the Willing and all that rot.

Funny that the villain is a Scot. Might be a back-handed compliment really. The Scots have been screwed over by empire since Bonnie Prince Charlie lost, becoming human fodder in both the British and successor American empires’ overseas armies, and from the gritty Lowlands to the mountains of the American South (where they invented country music) they have a healthy distrust of it. The original James Bond, like his creator and the first famous actor who played him, was a Scotsman. What made him cool? He was a bit of a maverick. I’ve read in LRC that officers from VMI, in the South, are different from West Pointers because they’re taught to be independent thinkers.