Francis Fukuyama, suck-up

Francis Fukuyama, another member of Bill Kristol's neoconservative Project for the New American Century, follows "Cakewalk Ken" Adelman onto the Obama bandwagon:

I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.
McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was highly irresponsible; we have suffered under the current president who entered office without much knowledge of the world and was easily captured by the wrong advisers.

Who are these "wrong advisers" who "captured" Bush? I think it safe to say that Fukuyama means "Advisers Who Are Not Francis Fukuyama." On the other hand, Fukuyama did not hesitate to call for acts of war against Iraq in 1998, when he signed a letter to President Clinton urging him to implement "a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power."

Fukuyama's attack on Sarah Palin is unjust, essentially making Palin the scapegoat of his disillusionment with Bush. But alas, before the "unnecessary war" started -- as the result of the ill-informed president being advised by Advisers Who Are Not Francis Fukuyama -- Fukuyama was busy scapegoating conservative and libertarian opponents of the war as "unrealitistic" and "isolationist."

When Fukuyama was in a position to influence events, he instead focused his attention on attacking rivals. And now that President Bush's failures have destroyed the credibility of his former friends, Fukuyama instinctively attacks Palin -- a target of opportunity, so to speak -- in the process of endorsing Obama, whose (alleged) superiority in "knowledge of the world" means more to Fukuyama than Obama's transparent sympathy for America's enemies.

He's just a suck-up, not nearly as clever as he thinks himself to be, and if the götterdämmerung of the Bush era has yielded no other benefit to humanity, we can at least be thankful that it has made Fukuyama entirely irrelevant.