What small subset of the US national security state has been responsible for the series of stunning foreign policy catastrophes over the last 20 years?

Give yourself a cookie if you answered the neoconservatives.

As former investigative journalist par-excellence, Robert Parry, puts it: “There is a “little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly’ quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.

If the Palestinians and Lebanon’s Hezbollah persist in annoying you and troubling Israel, you target their sponsors with “regime change” in Iraq, Syria and Iran. If your “regime change” in Iraq goes badly, you escalate the subversion of Syria and the bankrupting of Iran.

Just when you think you’ve cornered President Barack Obama into a massive bombing campaign against Syria with a possible follow-on war against Iran Putin steps in to give Obama a peaceful path out, getting Syria to surrender its chemical weapons and Iran to agree to constraints on its nuclear program.

So, this Obama-Putin collaboration has become your new threat. That means you take aim at Ukraine, knowing its sensitivity to Russia. You support an uprising against elected President Viktor Yanukovych, even though neo-Nazi militias are needed to accomplish the actual coup. You get the U.S. State Department to immediately recognize the coup regime although it disenfranchises many people of eastern and southern Ukraine, where Yanukovych had his political base.

When Putin steps in to protect the interests of those ethnic Russian populations and supports the secession of Crimea (endorsed by 96 percent of voters in a hastily called referendum), your target shifts again. Though you’ve succeeded in your plan to drive a wedge between Obama and Putin, Putin’s resistance to your Ukraine plans makes him the next focus of regime change.”

Being such a small cohort, the neocons, in concert with the corporate media, have become adapt at pushing the noble lie. Indeed, in this milieu, where a sizable segment of Americans have been abandoned, a noble lie can be used to give a rules-based order a last gasp. Its inherent power can be harnessed to whip Americans into a war fever. After all, what better unifying force than the grand American project of war to energize one’s desire for a reappropriated national significance.

The noble lie is designed to obfuscate any notion of an American empire, the neocon plan to control the Eurasian landmass, the way in which Ukraine is the key to such control, the eastward expansion of NATO, how the US has trained and armed Ukrainian Neo-Nazi para-militaries to such ends, etc. Instead it’s simply the diabolical Putin and aggressor Russia attacking innocent, defenseless Ukraine, placing the liberal, international order in grave peril.

Even with 9/11 I have never seen the U.S. media so united in pressing a case–in this instance persuading the people that the expansion of NATO is not an aggressive thing, but that Russia is the aggressor.

During the Cold War the neocons demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. That is why they have resurrected the new, and improved Cold War against Russia. In our brain-addled, propagandized milieu, it’s child’s play

Understanding this dynamic helps explain the neocons antipathy towards Trump, who articulated an old-fashioned America-first semi-isolationism that was highly cautious of foreign adventurism. Although it’s hard to tell if he was serious, Trump campaigned on the idea of returning the USA to an “American first” outlook by cleaning up its own internal messes, extracting CIA operations from the military, cutting the USA out of the Big Pharma-led World Health Organization, defunded regime change organizations like NED abroad and returning to a traditionally American policy of protective tariffs were all extremely important initiatives that Trump put into motion, and set a precedent which must be capitalized upon by nationalist forces from all parties wishing to save their republic from an oncoming calamity. To the neocons, who at heart are very much interventionists and empire builders, these were fighting words.

Hence the attacks on him as a Russian puppet.

Indeed, I’ve come to believe that the events of the last few weeks are the culmination of Russia-gate, where the neocons destroyed not only Trump, but any of the semi-isolationist sentiments any of the MAGA supporters might still harbor. The neocons’ propensity to hurl treason accusations at anyone opposing their wars is part of what made them so despised before they were re-branded as liberal heroes of the #Resistance after Trump’s election.

The point here is not just what happens when these realities inherent in the neocons noble lie collide, but what happens when this hyper emotional, moralizing narrative is forced into full consciousness as having been wrong? To wit, while the US and NATO are winning the propaganda war, Russia is succeeding in its kinetic war. This is the break in the matrix problem brought about by taking the hyper-moralizing information dominance up to 11.

It poses a question. In what way will American public opinion turn if all the hype falls flat, and the “bad guys” win the game, especially as gas goes to $7 a gallon? Presently our neocon influenced politicians and corporate media have whipped the public into such a Russia-hating frenzy that I don’t see a way back. Will people turn against their present leaderships, or opt to double-down, demanding more “war” as instincts rebel against any the realization of failure inflicted upon settled quasi-religious convictions? The outcome to this psychic dilemma may determine whether we are heading to escalation and extended war, or not.

All of these machinations run the risk of nuclear conflagration, but the neocons and the always-war corporate media apparently think the risks are well worth it.

But we might remember what happened to the little old lady in the ditty, when she swallowed the horse.

She was dead, of course.