An article this morning from the IHT,
A leadership lesson via Shakespeare details the emergence of a management guru firm run by Kenneth Adelman and his wife, Carol. For the last two years, the U.S. Air Force has contracted with
Kenneth and Carol Adelman's newest corporate enterprise, Movers & Shakespeares, to "hone the preparation of its air force leaders." James Roche, the former secretary of the air force, said the Adelmans's program would fit in with the air force's larger effort. (Adelman is a long time right-winger. He was an executive committee member of the Committee on the Present Danger, now he is affiliated with PNAC.)
More below the fold...
The military seems to be concerned with the possibility of revolt from within, therefore, the attempt at using Shakespeare as proof of the bad decisions made by Brutus (et tu, Brute?) in the murder of Julius Caesar.
Kenneth and Carol Adelman are here to stop the decline of Western Civilization through their amateur, though expensive, interpretations of William Shakespeare's works. The U.S. military has contracted with the Adelmans' Movers & Shakespeares, a management guru firm with a novel way to advise the US military on neo-con philosophy.
The Adelmans "are amateur Shakespeare scholars and...they have marshaled their avocation and their high-level contacts into a management-training business...Although neither of the Adelmans is academically trained in literature, the programs are well steeped in Shakespeare lore and background...."
They have been peddling their services since 1995 and now conduct between 30 and 40 seminars annually...mostly for corporate clients (like Northrop Grumman, a global defense company), but also for government agencies. . . The air force pays the Adelmans $18,000 a session, a discount from their corporate rate of $24,000.
This means the Adelmans have leveraged their high-level government contacts into a “management-training” business of amateur Shakespeare analyses worth somewhere in the range of $720,000.00 - $960,000.00 annually.
Adelman … had little good to say about Brutus, calling "the noblest Roman of them all" a ditherer, "the epitome of a fuzzy-headed academic..." Those who would depose Caesar had, in effect, no exit strategy.
"Brutus is not an honorable man," said Lieutenant General William Looney, one of 20 or so senior air force officers and executives - mostly two- and three-star generals and their civilian equivalents - gathered at the Aspen Institute for a daylong leadership seminar here. "He was a traitor. And he murdered someone in cold blood."
And though Looney acknowledged that Brutus had the good of the republic in mind, Caesar was nonetheless his superior. "You have to understand," the general said. "Our ethos is to obey the chain of command." (Make sure to catch that famous phrase of Looney's in the above link about how we own Iraq and the Iraqi people and their oil.)
TPM had an interview with
Wes Clark about the neo-cons and the Project for the New American, as well as the
"raspy smack back" as Josh calls it from the
New York Sun.
TPM notes that in his interview with General Wesley Clark, " it showed not only a deep grasp of foreign policy issues but an equally canny sense of the informal and extra-governmental ways policy gets hashed out in Washington. More than anything it signaled an understanding that what we've been seeing for the last two years is part of a much longer history stretching back into the late 1960s."
"The point is that the CPD and PNAC advocacy were both cases in which outside pressure groups --- groups of neoconservatives --- basically B-teamed the given administration, getting around their flank by working congress and the media to force the administration's hand or make certain policy options politically unviable."
Seems there are so many of these threads which we have begun to pull and the invincibility blanket of the GOP is unraveling. See the latest update on Plame/PropaGannon Connect the Dots.