Jeb? Hillary? Doesn't matter. We live in KAGAN COUNTRY.

Jeb Bush says that "our enemies need to fear us again." This may be the first time a presidential candidate has actually used a line that Stan Lee might have put into the mouth of a Marvel supervillain. Perhaps Jeb will call Hillary Clinton a "mewling quim" during the debates.

Actually, what he said about Hillary on this occasion was fairly accurate:

Bush added that he thought President Obama’s strategy abroad has been an “unmitigated disaster” thus far. Hillary Clinton’s would not fare much better, he said, should she get elected president in 2016.

“Hillary Clinton is not going to be the person to lead us to a more stable future,” Bush said. “She has her fingerprints on all these foreign policy disasters.”

The problem here, of course, is that any Republican not named Ron Paul would have gone down the same disastrous path -- in an even more disastrous way.

If Jeb Bush is elected president, he, like Obama, will undermine and attack the great Shiite powers, which happen to be the only forces making any headway against ISIS. In effect, the strategy will be pro-ISIS. Bush will continue to back Saudi Arabia and Israel in their murderous rampages. And he will, of course, continue to pursue our insane Cold War II policies against Putin.

So who is kidding whom, Jeb? The world is already scared of us, for the same reason I got worried about the crazy person who started screaming in the Rite Aid the other day. In terms of foreign policy, you aren't Hillary Clinton's opponent. You are Hillary.

Victoria's secret: Hillary. If you've been paying any real attention to world events, you already know that Victoria Nuland is the neocon manipulator who instigated the coup in Ukraine. Most of you know that she was once a close aide to Dick Cheney. Most of you know that she is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan.

The Kagan family, along with William Kristol, founded the Project for a New American Century, the neocon think tank which set us on course to catastrophe. Not only was Robert Kagan one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq invasion, he later pushed heavily for war with Syria, using the false flag sarin attacks as a pretext.

In a previous post, I've quoted Kagan on Hillary...

“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Mr. Kagan said, adding that the next step after Mr. Obama’s more realist approach “could theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table” if elected president. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he added, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

I say let's call a spade a spade.

Some of you may be wondering how Victoria Nuland got into a position of such power. Nobody elected her. Nobody seems to like her very much. Not one person who voted for Barack Obama did so out of the expectation that Dick Cheney's henchperson would be given the freedom to work mischief around the world. Yet there she is, overturning democracies and fomenting hellish wars, and either she or members of her family will be skulking behind the scenes no matter who wins in 2016.

Hillary Clinton bears chief responsibility for Nuland's rise within the Obama administration, although the sequence of events remains somewhat mysterious. This blog post was published four years ago, but it is still worth reading.

Earlier this week, Josh Rogin at FP and Eric Martin at Progressive Realist both flagged the curious appointment of Victoria Nuland as the next State Department Spokesperson to fill P.J. Crowley’s shoes.

Martin questions whether this has foreign policy implications, in particular the replacement of an anti-torture appointee with someone who served as Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney.

But why would Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration agree to appoint to this politically sensitive position someone who willingly served such a controversial figure in supporting and implementing the “war on terror” and all the baggage that comes with it?

The writer thinks that Strobe Talbott (friend to the Kagans, friend to the Clintons) has much to do with it.

Let us now switch our attention to this Nuland profile from 2013...

Following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, many Americans believed that the age of the neo-cons was over.

Nope. The White House may go from Republican to Democrat to Republican again, yet neoconservatism remains the great constant.

Nuland’s career has been one of ensuring that the underpinnings of the Cold War never completely died out in Europe. Her State Department career began as the chief of staff to President Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State and close friend, Strobe Talbott. It was under Talbott that Nuland helped completely fracture Yugoslavia and ensured that the U.S. slanted against the interests of Russia’s ally, Serbia. After helping to lord over the final end of Yugoslavia, Nuland moved to develop U.S. foreign policy for the former Soviet Union.

Clinton's Russia policy was horrendous -- the blackest mark against a presidency which was, in many other ways, quite admirable. I'm convinced that Russia would have fared at least somewhat better had George H.W. Bush won the 1992 election.

I'm sure you recall the way the Republican agit-prop machine whipped up hysteria over Benghazi. You may not know that Victoria Nuland played a key (albeit little-recognized) role in that strange affair...

Nuland would survive the controversy over the October 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission/CIA facility in Benghazi, Libya. Initially, many conservative Republicans criticized Nuland for her role in providing ambassador to the UN Susan Rice with “talking points” explaining away the failure of the U.S. to protect the compound from an attack that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. personnel. All it took was a tap on the shoulder from Nuland’s husband Kagan and his influential friends in the neo-con hierarchy for the criticism of his wife to stop.

The conservatives endlessly excoriated Rice for saying the words that Nuland gave her, but they would not go after Nuland herself. Sure smells like a set-up to me. Your nose may work differently.

But dominance of U.S. foreign policy does not end with Nuland and her husband. Kagan’s brother, Fred Kagan, is another neo-con foreign policy launderer. Residing at the American Enterprise Institute, Fred Kagan was an “anti-corruption” adviser to General David Petraeus. Kagan held this job even as Petraeus was engaged in an extra-marital affair, which he corruptly covered up. Fred Kagan’s wife is Kimberly Kagan. She has been involved in helping to formulate disastrous U.S. policies for the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fred and Kimberly have also worked on U.S. covert operations to overthrow the government of Iran. No family in the history of the United States, with the possible exception of John Foster and Allen Dulles, has had more blood on its hands than have the Kagans. And it is this family that is today helping to ratchet up the Cold War on the streets of Kyiv.

Who are these people? In 2007, a Kos writer published a fascinating look at Fred Kagan's CV.

So the question is, if Kagan is such an expert on military affairs and the Iraq insurgency, where did he get this expertise?

In fact, Kagan was never in the military, and the four rather inconsequential pieces he published in peer-reviewed journals had no relation to the Middle East, his claimed area of expertise. So why is this guy formulating Middle East policy for both Democratic and Republican presidents?

Here are a few related questions:

Why wasn't that "Fuck the EU" remark a career-ender for Nuland?

Why didn't the Republicans try to make political use of that outrageous incident?

Why did so few American journalists take note of the fact that Nuland's infamous intercepted phone call, placed on YouTube three weeks before the Ukraine coup, proved so uncannily predictive?

Just how did the Kagans become so influential? The comparison to the Dulles clan is fair but frustrating. We know how the Dulles family attained prominence: Writer Leonard Mosely has told the story, and although it is not pretty, it is very American. Whatever else you may say about them, John Foster and Allen Dulles were smart and hard-working, and they benefited from family connections forged over generations. They may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. (Eleanor was not a monster and might even have become a decent president, had she lived in less sexist times.)

The Kagans are different.

Where did they come from? How and why did America become Kagan Country? I honestly don't know the answer, and neither does anyone else. We all woke up one day and discovered that these ghastly people were leading us into two needless wars that cost us trillions of dollars. Even after the country turned against the Iraq war, we are still letting the Kagans tell us what to do in Ukraine and in the Middle East. The Kagans are always wrong about everything, yet they never lose credibility or clout.

Is there anything we can do to rid ourselves of these ghouls?