The Republicans have been pedaling the WMDs were moved to Syria since nearly Day One after there shown to be no WMDs in Iraq, but I suppose the fact that it was debunked won't stop them from keepin' on, keepin' on
Anyone remember Michele Catalano, perpetrator of the Small Victory blog? She had a turnaround in 2005 and shut down the site, for which I must give her credit, because it sure as shit was an act most warbloggers should have committed around that time. But she also deleted the site, which kind of pisses me off, because some of the shit she threw at me and others at the time in her comments section -- basically, you don't care about 9/11 -- deserves to be shoved in her face, hard, right about now. Michele (who now has a gig at Forbes.com for chrissake; which not bad for someone who can't write for shit) has posted her own OK So I Was Wrong essay:
Shorter Michele: Stupid ol' me, I supported the war and as it turns out I shouldn't have but it's really not my fault for believing all that bullshit because Bush, and anyway it's not like I would have voted for Kerry.
If Michele had a scintilla of honesty (or shame) her essay would say instead: OK, so look, I wanted to be a famous blogger and jumping on the Republican bandwagon seemed like the best way to do it and anyway it's not like I had anything to lose because how could conservatives possibly fuck up a war?
I friended her on Facebook with the sole purpose of telling her she should go the fuck away and never write a fucking goddamn word beyond whatever shitty music she is currently bleating about, but disgust overrode my indignation. Fuck her, fuck 'em all. They'll just turn right around anyway and back Marc Rubio or whoever invades Iran in 2017.
Since the quasi-apologies of both Daniel Pipes and Ace of Spades amount to "We're sorry we didn't realize what crap the Iraqis are," one kind of wishes they hadn't bothered.
That's totally adorable that Brian Kilmede wants to push "the WMDs were moved" a decade later. He's like a 20-year-old that still believes in Santa Claus.
Tell him to look around--people from the NYT and NYMag and all sorts of great places got promoted; there's no reason to hide your being-fucking-wrong light under a bushel. As far as I can tell, the people whose reputations suffered were 1) everyone who was right 2) Bill Kristol. Basically, everyone who was wrong, but not as world-historically wrong as Bill Kristol, did fine.
They were all such enormous bullshit artists then that I don't expect them to now say, "we got pwned by our own right-wing superstars, Bush and Cheney!," or, objectively worse from their perspective, "the dirty fucking hippies were right."
So, they've generally jumped on the "right for all the wrong reasons" excuse. And, secretly, they know that confilicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Mali, and who the hell knows where else, will yield fruit for them a few years down the road. They'll be getting plenty of chances to thump their chests soon enough.
But, geez, you'd think that with his father incessantly egging on Reagan to launch a sneak attack on the Soviets, and the younger Pipes glowering and hissing at every Arab in the world, the foreign policy community would finally just put the pair of them where they couldn't do much mischief. No such luck.
I dunno, that reads like a pretty straightforward mea culpa to me, complete with "the hippies I laughed at were right" and everything. What are you looking for?
Seriously, they're actually going "Oh, you didn't like us killing thousands of you?!? WELL, SCREW YOU, THEN!.... *sigh* ingrates. Now, I wonder what's liberal on tv I can scream at like a Bozell-monkey."
Well, if "pity me" is english for mea culpa, but then again she is deeply confused: "with me as gay rights supporting, fiscally conservative atheist". And the business about the Big Tent. And oh, dear does she ever believe platitudes.
The worst thing is when they accuse those who were right of being smug and they're oh, so wounded by it that it justifies them. Smug? We put two and two together and got four. That's not smug-worthy. It's basic shit.
I admire your restraint, Roy, since my first and second impulse reading these bastards is often a string of profanity.
"The notion that Bush 'lied' about Saddam's weapons is itself a dastardly lie."
Ah yes, Rich Lowry said this verbatim on Left, Right, and Center last week. Robert Scheer responded that he had interviewed Colin Powell, who said he had been lied to. (Powell's hands are far from clean – see Jonathan Schwarz especially on that – but it was a nice rebuttal.)
This gambit reminds me of a moment after Gerald Ford's death. His old press secretary, Ron Nessen, insisted (unbidden) on PBS' News Hour that "there's never been any sign of a deal" between Ford and Nixon to pardon him, when of course Haig pitched Ford precisely that, in the form of two letters – a resignation and a pardon. Bob Woodward covered it (and seems to have forgotten some of it since), as did Seymour Hersh.
Anyway, it's just another reminder that no fight is ever over with these fuckers, and they treat 1984 as an instruction manual. They'll keep on trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Voting Rights Act and the New Deal decades after they've been firmly established and proven good, and they'll try to rewrite history in the meantime. I'll see Reynolds' Schadenfreude and raise him one Dolchstoßlegende. Both are lies, but since when has that ever stopped a conservative narrative?
Bonus: Two of my favorite statements on the Iraq War from back in the day, the first thanks to Johann Hari interviewing Norman Podhoretz on the National Review cruise back in 2007. Norman Podhoretz, delivered (emphasis mine):
…the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo" and that Bush is "a hero." He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.
"I keep telling people we are in World War Four," Podhoretz declares. He fumes at Buckley, George Will, and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He again declares victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though, thousands of miles away, Baghdad is not bleeding.
We'll liberate you, whether you want it or not! (Shout-out to William Tenn's "The Liberation of Earth," too.) The second bit, Bush in 2006, irked (as was Blair) that the Iraqis weren't showing more "gratitude":
"President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . .
"[T]he president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd."
Yes, even now, it seems astonishing, gobsmacking, really, that these putzes were so deeply enthralled by their own delusions about American exceptionalism that they were wholly blind to the fact that, at the time, a sixteen-year siege of the country, in which Iraq's important infrastructure had been utterly destroyed, twice, contributed to the deaths of half a million children, and left it with no electricity, little clean water and sewage running in the streets.
Call me crazy, but it's not exactly difficult to see why the Iraqis wanted us out of their lives as quickly as possible.
A corollary... a poll released in 2007 by Zogby/Lemoyne College (pollhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-zogby/on-a-new-poll-of-us-soldi_b_16497.html) which surveyed active duty personnel serving in Iraq revealed that 85% of them continued to believe that they were in Iraq to "avenge Saddam Hussein's role in 9/11". Now where do you suppose the troops got THAT bit of propaganda...
Conservatism Doesn't Kill Countries, People With Conservative Ideas Kill Countries This is what Our Little Fascists believe, which is why Iraq was used as the test case.
Let's not forget the Partridge Family of Foreign Policy, Robert, Fred, Donald and Kimberly Kagan -- all are still alive and well and enjoying their various sinecures at AEI and the Post. Just like bankers and hedge funders, there is no penalty for right-wing warmongers for being disastrously wrong, because what was lost as a result is just other people's money, or other people's lives. No biggie. The amount of actual sympathy shown by Roy's documented sociopaths for our own dead and wounded, no less the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is nil. It's all about losing extra special bonus war-points to liberals and damn it, this will not stand!
brandon, I guess you had to be there. (Maybe you were.) Michele didn't just disagree with or mock people on left, she vilified them -- including us, those who responded to her delightful blog entries -- as people genuinely unable to appreciate what happened on 9/11. We were naive and stupid. We were insufficiently patriotic and didn't care about cops and firemen. We were lesser citizens than she.
You ask what I'm looking for, and I guess my best answer is for Michele to shut the fuck up about this subject. She had her fun. She got to hobnob with Ace and Malkin and Treacher and get her name out there, and for awhile she had the time of her life. I don't care that she feels bad about it now. I don't give a shit that she came to see the light and realized she was wrong, and boo-hoo, poor Michele got manipulated and used, sniffle sniffle.
The Pentagon might have needed nuclear-powered sparrow-fart detectors or the Fed might have needed to gold-plate Jamie Dimon's urethra. You never know.
Oh, I think Jamie's already had that done, on his own dime (that's small change, of course). Now, if the Fed were to offer to plate his anal sphincter, he might want to take them up on that.
He's all asshole, so the cost would be really, really high.
To me the real sin of Even The Liberal Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, et.al., wasn't in constructing an alternate reality, believing Colin Powell, or even, to the extent this might be the case, cowardice in the face of the mob. It was in betraying a complete and willful obliviousness to the nature of Cold War rhetoric and post-Vietnam historical rewrites. It wasn't just a matter of falling for Powell's performance (go back and watch it again), but of refusing to investigate one's own history when the conclusions are too unpleasant.
I don't find those polling numbers all that surprising (there was plenty of ridiculous shit that came down through official channels during the Vietnam years). That's sort of the way the chain of command works. It was, after all, one of the "official," public reasons, even if it was an outright lie, and it does work as a motivator--especially with an all-volunteer force that doesn't have to listen to draftees saying it's all bullshit and fucked up.
Does it go a ways to proving that the U.S. Army is the best-fed, best-organized clusterfuck on the planet? Sure.
Until quite recently, the American Forces Network was infested with conservative content, and when you're trapped in the desert with a radio tuned to one station, your world view is bound to get a bit, shall we say, skewed...
I can understand why you might still be pissed at someone like that, especially as her "punishment" is music blogging for Forbes. But, look at this:
On my blog I wrote about my growing sense of hopelessness and my warblogger friends responded with much of the vitriol and rage that they, we, had become known for. I was deserting them. I was a traitor. I had no idea what I was talking about.
She's owning that, despite it consisting of a grand total of two years' worth of blogging, eight years ago.
We learn with astonishment from Wikipedia that Sullivan is 49 years old.
The thing is that that works from either direction; Sully simultaneously maintains both the naivete of a teenage college freshman who can't believe that you're thirty years older than them but still have avoided reading Atlas Shrugged (true in my case, and which I believe the mere fact of wholly justifies belief in a Higher Power) and the credulity of your elderly aunt who forwards every cray-cray email she gets to everyone in the family, steadfastly ignoring your pleas to just fucking check Snopes on this shit. And, of course, the Dish is wildly successful, although so would the Car Crash Channel be, I think.
And let us never forget that the evidence AGAINST the case the administration presented was clear, overwhelming, and readily available at the time. Indeed, to buy into what Bush and crew were saying demanded an act of active ignorance.
Yet, I watched with horror as so many who should have been able to see that the case for war was complete bullshit bought it wholesale instead.
No amount of apology now can resurrect the dead. And the fact that none of these apologists will even consider calling Bush and company to account just makes their apologies completely hollow.
Catalano in 2004: "We know who most of America's enemies are. Now there is a new group to add to that list: the anti-war crowd." I don't care about apologies; asking for them is a dick move, and giving them is usually a last resort. But I will note she doesn't seem to recognize that, apart from being wrong, she was also calling her fellow citizens traitors for no good reason at all.
These same lovers of liberty can't so much abide a simple background check without seeing it as an act of tyranny demanding the immediate overthrow of any despotic government that would require it.
But having their country invaded, destroyed, occupied, and ruled by a foreign government with its own agenda? Whole neighborhoods and cities walled and turned mini prison camps? Entire sects stripped from government participation, death squads running at night, no electricity and little gas. Why the Iraqis shoulda been grateful for all that freedom!
How, exactly, did the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, come to be in Baghdad right when a big statue of Saddam needs to get pulled down?
"In the days leading up to the war, our thunderous cries of righteousness could be heard across the Internet. We waved flags, cloaked ourselves in patriotism that was nothing more than nationalism, fed off each other’s emotions and charged into war with nothing more than our words and need for vengeance."
I dunno; worse than John Cole, better than Little Green Footballs? (who only really quotes & agrees with the Catalano piece in the way of "WTF was I thinking 10 years ago"; that's still better than most pundits though)
Not that I would have voted for Kerry. Just because I was experiencing regret didn’t mean I was going to go running back to the left.
Too fuckin' late, honey. Kerry became a non-issue once he lost. Bush was wrong, you were wrong: own it. Why is she still trying to weasel her way out of that vote?
Actually, I seem to recall Constitution-shredding traitor Oliver North, who should have been dragged blubbering before a firing squad for his flagrant sedition, recently brainpuking that they've been moved to the Sudan. I guess they're expecting Assad's regime to fall, since the aftermath might demonstrate that Saddam's WMDs aren't there, either. And the horseshit shell game continues. I'm actually mildly surprised that they haven't seriously played up Saddam moving his WMDs to Iran, since "pig-fuckingly stupid" obviously never shut them up before.
Interesting how they can keep following the imaginary WMDs around from target to target, but are unwilling to fund projects keeping track of/helping dispose of Russian nukes.
I do pretty good at holding my tongue against most wingnut spewing IRL, but on the Iraq issue all bets are off. Whenever I hear anyone trying to say that it was the right thing to do, a good idea, something we had no choice about, etc, the gloves come off and I without apology remind them that among the primary reasons in the "case for war" that was presented us was a fantasy in which Saddam Hussein would have remote-controlled model airplanes to fly over our cities and spray us with anthrax, a scenario every bit as likely as Dr. Evil's sharks with fricken' lasers on their heads. I then inform them that if that claim wasn't enough to alert them that the entire "case for war" was constructed of bovine feces, then they should probably be assigned a legal guardian because they clearly lack the intelligence to make decisions for themselves or their families.
This has the desired effect in that it is so rude, uncompromising, and, let's face it, correct, that it concludes the conversation, and better yet, usually insures that I'll never have to engage in another with them.
I just watched the Vietnam-era documentary Hearts and Minds, and it was exactly the same thing. You could have flipped the two eras and exchanged everyone then for everyone now, and vice versa, and there would be no fucking difference at all. Except that the antiwar movement was actually acknowledged back then.
John Cole not only has consistently beat himself up over the years over how wrong he was, he has also blamed no one but himself for being such a dumb shit about the war. He has also, unlike Catalano, left every word of his warblogger past in place so readers can judge for themselves. He has also, unlike Catalano, redeemed himself by building a topnotch liberal blog and a solid community of writers and commenters and has made nothing but a positive, reasoned, and passionate contribution to our public discourse, such as it is.
I can't speak to the Footballs guy, I don't read his site.
brandon, please feel free to slap Michele on the back and say All is Forgiven. We can do this all day if you want, but I've said everything I can think to say about it.
The thing is that the lie about WMD (and the cynical/gullible/complicit Democrats who bought into it not withstanding) isn't even the biggest lie. I mean, what the fuck were we doing in Iraq to begin with? How the fuck did that happen?
Oh, because they wanted better optics in our "War on Terror". Which would be what? An optimism offensive? No! Shock and Awe on a country which had literally nothing to do with why we ostensibly going to war to begin with. Terror? Fuckin' eh, we'll show you terror, country two countries away from where the people who we are really looking for are. The strategy, then, was really to destroy and destabilize a country that would have massive stockpiles of WMD (according to everyone who was anyone, except for the people who were actually informed) because...Why again? Planes hit NYC and DC on 9/11?
How do you even parse the worst lie out of that? Lies born out of stupid military strategy, stupid political calculations, stupid punditry, and stupid, cynical/terrified people saying mystifyingly false things. Every last one of these morons should have been at least tarred and feathered. They either believed dumb, stupid lies or wanted to perpetrate them. And if it wasn't obvious to them at the time, if they now, finally, know, well, fuck them. They should still be tarred and feathered.
Oh, and a shout out to the GREAT Anthony Lewis and RIP. When the Times used to be good, he was the greatest. And, naturally, he was right about the adventure, the implications and the lies. That was in 2002. After he left the NYT. There are no more like him.
Jack, if years ago I used go into bars and punch people out for no reason, and now I tell you I feel bad about it, am I now cool to hang in bars again? And no, I don't feel like I was punched by Michele, but yes, I feel that behaving like a right asshole requires some amount of exercise in integrity beyond "owning" it. Michele didn't just accuse people who opposed the war of being traitors; she did it repeatedly, and gleefully, on a daily and hourly basis. It was a concerted and focused effort on her part, not a passion-induced misstep.
And as BigHank points out, around the edges you can tell she still thinks she's a badass punky Republican who may have been wrong but hey, fuck Kerry. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she didn't do yet another 180 if she thought it would boost her career.
Finally, I don't consider writing for Forbes as "punishment", I merely remark that it's a pretty good gig for a shitty-ass writer, that's all.
They're Christians (most of them). People of faith. It literally doesn't matter what's true. What matters is that you believe. Truth is just some junk out there in the fallen world. Belief is a "gift" and is proof of virtue.
Of course this line of explanation doesn't hold for the Jews. Maybe the analogue of belief, for them, is theory. The neo-cons and the PNAC-heads had (and still have) a geo-political "vision." It's not THEIR fault if real people, real stupidity, real corruption, real incompetence, and real life fucked it up.
In reverse order: yes, I agree (note my quotes around "punishment"); yes, I agree (see my response to BigHank); and, hey, if you want to hold onto that in lieu of some unspecified "amount of exercise in integrity", that's your call. But, speaking purely for myself (as I generally attempt to do), if someone I had gotten that pissed off at had volunteered even that much of a token acknowledgement that they'd been a dick to me and others, I'd be grateful; barring that (and I can't remember the last time that someone actually did so), I'd try to kick them out of my headspace so I didn't waste any more emotion fretting about them.
Also too, this whole monstrous affair should put the right-wing claim of "reverence for life" out of its misery. When an anti-choice activist--especially a man--bleats about his and his cohorts' "reverence for life," I want to ask him how reverently he supported the invasion of Iraq, in which a hundred thousand (minimum) actual living people were killed, a couple of which, we have reason to believe, were innocent children.
Yup. Back in 1998, PNAC super genius Paul Wolfowitz cooked up a plan that would, in the words of fellow PNAC super genius Bill Kristol, "establish a ‘liberated zone’ in southern Iraq that would provide a safe haven where opponents of Saddam could rally and organize a credible alternative to the present regime…. The liberated zone would have to be protected by U.S. military might, both from the air and, if necessary, on the ground.” It still enrages me that 10 years ago supporting shit like this meant you were a steely-eyed political realist while opposing it made you a delusional fantasist (at best) or an "Islamofascist" fifth columnist (at worst).
In the excellent documentary Hubris is a piece of video with Bill Keller explaining that "...the Times wrote a number of really bad stories, inadequately sourced, unskeptical stories particularly about Saddam's weapons capabilities, and those stories were rewarded with lavish front page display. The Times also wrote a lot of very good stories, more skeptical stories, and those tended to be buried on page A13..."
Ah, yes... the Bill Keller who was one of the most ardent supporters of the war, who was screaming for Colin Powell's head because Powell was pushing for more diplomacy... the guy who called Paul Wolfowitz "The Sunshine Warrior without a trace of irony... the guy who defended Judith Miller, and the guy who was rewarded with a promotion to Executive Editor in 2003... is now speaking in the passive voice about how those badly sourced, unskeptical stories just sort of appeared in the Times, and who knows how they got there except that there were a lot of reporters "looking for scoops". Christ... no wonder Anthony Lewis left. He probably couldn't stand the smell...
Well, your mileage may vary, as they say. And you set a good example, I'm sure you're much better at being gracious about these sort of things than I am. I stand by my words.
Projects to track and dispose of Russian nukes are often part of disarmament treaties, or sweeteners thereof. Such things are also known as "surrendering to the commies."
Well, I try, and in no small part because I think that holding on to anger is in some measure responsible for my high blood pressure; it's motivating to have a figurative gun held to your head. I also finished Iain M. Banks' The Hydrogen Sonata (the latest in his Culture series), which has some interesting things to say in the end about people going unpunished, or inadequately punished, for some very bad behavior. (See also his The Algebraist.)
I want to ask him how reverently he supported the invasion of Iraq
You need to realize the difference between the gleeful, wanton murder of children by abortionists, and Godly vengeance against those who attacked us on 9/11.
a couple of which, we have reason to believe, were innocent children.
Sorry, but this line of reasoning breaks at "innocent." Those Iraqi children should have chosen not to have been born Muslim**, which irrevocably taints them. See also Barack Obama.
**Yes, even the Iraqi Christian ones. Just like Palestinian Christians, Syrian Christians, Iranian Christians, etc, they're actually Muslims. See also Barack Obama.
Recalls one of Bill Maher's best cracks from the 2008 election: "John McCain never goes to church, which proves he a Christian. Barack Obama used to attend a church led by a hellfire radical Christian minister, which proves he;s a Muslim."
That depends on how less-than-perfect the apology is.
If it's in the vein of McMegan "I was wrong but for the right reasons" then hell yes, it's wrong.
If, on the other hand, it's a matter of a person who doesn't have much time to consume news simply believing the only things they were hearing on the "news," then it's a bit more forgivable. I've had to deal with that in my own family, from a sister who didn't know better than to believe CNN because it wasn't Fox. We had a very lively dinner a few months before the war started which consisted of my mother, her husband, and I walking Sis and her husband through the many, many reasons given as the "case for war" which had been debunked but glossed over by CNN and other media who were more interested in selling war than in informing their viewers/readers. For example, Sis and her husband had never heard that the aluminum tubes rationale had been shot full of holes within a week of being put forward - and this conversation was taking place a good 4 months later. We didn't manage to fully convince them at that dinner, but within two or three months of the invasion, they had come around and said, "you were right."
I did a fair amount of trolling the rightwing Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's letters to the editor section in the runup to and aftermath of the invasion. Every one of my pre-war letters drew the bloodthirsty bufords out of the woodwork, who would take to the letters section to patiently or screechingly explain to me my naivete. So, a few months after the invasion, when no WMDs were found and it had become glaringly obvious that none would be found, I wrote another letter generally ridiculing anyone who had been stupid enough to buy into the anthrax drones, open-air mobile bioweapons labs, & etc. This letter concluded with "although no WMDs have been found in Iraq, thank heavens no blue dresses have been found, either. Otherwise, we might have an impeachable offense on our hands." When it ran, the response was much less vociferous, though there was one brave buford who again, more in sorrow than anger, attempted to explain to me how stupid I was in failing to see what an imminent threat we had faced from Iraq. This, when the con was staring him full in the face. For the most part though, my final letter on the topic served to cheer others who had for much of the previous year been subjected to every kind of smear imaginable for the sin of being smarter than the people who simply believe whatever they are told.
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That's how I feel. Chait, this Michele Whoeversheis, Cole, Friedman, Ezra Klein, Pollack, any and all of them. Just STFU and take up knitting, or something. You had your shot at being "foreign policy experts" or "pundits" or whatever and you flubbed it. Any notion of you as having anything of merit, or even interest, when it comes to important public issues is destroyed, Beyond repair. The most important question you will ever face in your "career" has already been asked you, and you got it disgustingly, tragically, wrong.
The first commenter on Klein's mea culpa may be overdoing it:
"Tell you what: go work at Starbucks. Never express a political opinion again. Don't vote. That, at least, would be penance." But not by much. I don't care where they work, as long as it is not in the field of opining about public questions. And, I suppose, it MIGHT be OK if they expressed a political opinion, if they did it strictly among friends and family. Nor should they lose the right to vote. But, yeah, basically. Go hide your head in a toilet. We are not interested in your "views" any longer. Take your "apology" and shove it. Apologies are acceptable for drinking my soda out of the cafeteria refrigerator; advocating for immoral and illegal wars? Not so much.
It's amazing what you can make Barack Obama responsible for. "If we didn't rack up a bunch of debt during this war, then the people wouldn't have elected Barack Obama, who would then have racked up the bunch of debt retroactively, because it was all his fault".
The war runup was a sight to behold. The decision was made and the entire media - minus a few print outlets nobody cared about - came to the conclusion that the only opponents were dead end hippies trying to eat their bongs. No need to talk to anybody in the movement.
She hadn't already become Secretary of State? Unpossible. If she had made statements that weren't absolutely accurate about the violent deaths of thousands of Americans, as determined by 20/20 hindsight, John McCain and Lindsay Graham would have never let her nomination go forward.
The invasion of Iraq made nutless wingnuts feel like John Wayne. The failure of the Iraqi adventure has made them feel like Hamlet. Both are unbelievably irritating.
Hey, coincidentally, I finished The Hydrogen Sonata just yesterday! Yes to your point. (Actually, regret features in many of Banks' works, and not surprisingly, karma or the lack thereof.)
(I enjoyed The Hydrogen Sonata, but I liked Surface Detail better. I've read all of Banks' sci-fi except for Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background, and some of his "straight" fiction. Player of Games and Use of Weapons remain my favorites.)
Jennifer in a sub-thread: it's a matter of a person who doesn't have much time to consume news simply believing the only things they were hearing on the "news," then it's a bit more forgivable.
I can understand that not everyone had access to classified information... what sources from the field were saying about the existence or absence thereof of WMD.
But everyone *did* have access to the judgements reached by the people who *did* have access to all that information, i.e. the leaders of NATO, and of the UKUSA network. And of those leaders, Blair and Howard decided to join in with Bush's Excellent Adventure; and it was not exactly a well-kept secret that Blair and Howard were the kind of vile creeps who were the hangers-on of school bullies.
Everyone else looked at the info and said "Bugger that for a game of soldiers, this is a tissue of lies. And everyone in the US knew about those other countries' conclusions because you were being reminded of it, regularly, by your own media... "Look at those cowardly French, not feeling threatened by this menace in their own backyard, preferring to let us clean it up for them, even though they're asking us not to clean it up! Look at those cowardly Germans and Canadians and Russians and Kiwis!"
There is truth in what you say but....on CNN et al the lie du jour was pimped at a rate of about 2000% more than any, ANY contradictory information. Someone who spent 30 minutes a day watching news could well have missed hearing much, if anything at all, about what the French, Germans, and others were basing their opposition to the war on. If you sat down and watched 2 hours straight of CNN in the runup to the war, 1 hour and 45 minutes of that would have been devoted to why you should be wetting your pants over corroded aluminum tubes, with various "experts" sitting in to tell why you should not only wet them, but shit them as well. The remaining 15 minutes might go to bashing "Old Europe" without ever even alluding to the real reasons they had decided to sit things out. You'd hear about "cheese eating surrender monkeys" and so on and so forth - in other words, a lot of demonization - but probably nothing at all about the reasoning they had given for that decision. To get that info, you pretty much had to not only go to the internet, but go to the right places on the internet. So no, I still don't fault people who were spending so much time trying to hold their shit together and keep head above water for not knowing some of this stuff, because it was purposely made much harder to get than the constant bleating of the war pimps in virtually every established media outlet.
What I DO blame them for is for continuing to believe they weren't lied to, for those who cling to that belief. They've had 10 years now of being cock-slapped in the face with the truth - it's everywhere out there now, whereas it wasn't in the runup to war. If they continue to believe in the rightness of the cause after everything that's been revealed, well then, I believe they should be cultivated to a uniform 6" depth with a rusty Garden Weasel.
The Republicans have been pedaling the WMDs were moved to Syria since nearly Day One after there shown to be no WMDs in Iraq, but I suppose the fact that it was debunked won't stop them from keepin' on, keepin' on
ReplyDeleteThat was a really great survey of the topic. Thanks Roy!
ReplyDeleteThat's one kind of consistency, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteAnyone remember Michele Catalano, perpetrator of the Small Victory blog? She had a turnaround in 2005 and shut down the site, for which I must give her credit, because it sure as shit was an act most warbloggers should have committed around that time. But she also deleted the site, which kind of pisses me off, because some of the shit she threw at me and others at the time in her comments section -- basically, you don't care about 9/11 -- deserves to be shoved in her face, hard, right about now. Michele (who now has a gig at Forbes.com for chrissake; which not bad for someone who can't write for shit) has posted her own OK So I Was Wrong essay:
ReplyDeletehttps://medium.com/something-like-falling/f05a8010fac0
Shorter Michele: Stupid ol' me, I supported the war and as it turns out I shouldn't have but it's really not my fault for believing all that bullshit because Bush, and anyway it's not like I would have voted for Kerry.
If Michele had a scintilla of honesty (or shame) her essay would say instead: OK, so look, I wanted to be a famous blogger and jumping on the Republican bandwagon seemed like the best way to do it and anyway it's not like I had anything to lose because how could conservatives possibly fuck up a war?
I friended her on Facebook with the sole purpose of telling her she should go the fuck away and never write a fucking goddamn word beyond whatever shitty music she is currently bleating about, but disgust overrode my indignation. Fuck her, fuck 'em all. They'll just turn right around anyway and back Marc Rubio or whoever invades Iran in 2017.
Since the quasi-apologies of both Daniel Pipes and Ace of Spades amount to "We're sorry we didn't realize what crap the Iraqis are," one kind of wishes they hadn't bothered.
ReplyDeleteEvery ten years or so, we need to pick up some
ReplyDeletecrappy little wingnuts and throw them against the wall, just to show the
world we mean business.
Explains all those fuckin' hobgoblins, then.
ReplyDeleteThat's totally adorable that Brian Kilmede wants to push "the WMDs were moved" a decade later. He's like a 20-year-old that still believes in Santa Claus.
ReplyDeleteTell him to look around--people from the NYT and NYMag and all sorts of great places got promoted; there's no reason to hide your being-fucking-wrong light under a bushel. As far as I can tell, the people whose reputations suffered were 1) everyone who was right 2) Bill Kristol. Basically, everyone who was wrong, but not as world-historically wrong as Bill Kristol, did fine.
They were all such enormous bullshit artists then that I don't expect them to now say, "we got pwned by our own right-wing superstars, Bush and Cheney!," or, objectively worse from their perspective, "the dirty fucking hippies were right."
ReplyDeleteSo, they've generally jumped on the "right for all the wrong reasons" excuse. And, secretly, they know that confilicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Mali, and who the hell knows where else, will yield fruit for them a few years down the road. They'll be getting plenty of chances to thump their chests soon enough.
But, geez, you'd think that with his father incessantly egging on Reagan to launch a sneak attack on the Soviets, and the younger Pipes glowering and hissing at every Arab in the world, the foreign policy community would finally just put the pair of them where they couldn't do much mischief. No such luck.
I dunno, that reads like a pretty straightforward mea culpa to me, complete with "the hippies I laughed at were right" and everything. What are you looking for?
ReplyDelete"No Iraq war and .... At least some of that $6 trillion in new debt may never have been
ReplyDeleteamassed."
May? May?! May?!!
Seriously, they're actually going "Oh, you didn't like us killing thousands of you?!? WELL, SCREW YOU, THEN!.... *sigh* ingrates. Now, I wonder what's liberal on tv I can scream at like a Bozell-monkey."
ReplyDeleteNice survey Roy. So much dissembling curse the internet and its remembering things!
ReplyDeleteWell, if "pity me" is english for mea culpa, but then again she is deeply confused: "with me as gay rights supporting, fiscally conservative atheist". And the business about the Big Tent. And oh, dear does she ever believe platitudes.
ReplyDeleteIt's true!
ReplyDeleteMy cab driver told me!
The worst thing is when they accuse those who were right of being smug and they're oh, so wounded by it that it justifies them. Smug? We put two and two together and got four. That's not smug-worthy. It's basic shit.
ReplyDeleteI feel obliged to forgive those who have made less-than-perfect apologies. Is that wrong?
ReplyDeleteI admire your restraint, Roy, since my first and second impulse reading these bastards is often a string of profanity.
ReplyDelete"The notion that Bush 'lied' about Saddam's weapons is itself a dastardly lie."
Ah yes, Rich Lowry said this verbatim on Left, Right, and Center last week. Robert Scheer responded that he had interviewed Colin Powell, who said he had been lied to. (Powell's hands are far from clean – see Jonathan Schwarz especially on that – but it was a nice rebuttal.)
This gambit reminds me of a moment after Gerald Ford's death. His old press secretary, Ron Nessen, insisted (unbidden) on PBS' News Hour that "there's never been any sign of a deal" between Ford and Nixon to pardon him, when of course Haig pitched Ford precisely that, in the form of two letters – a resignation and a pardon. Bob Woodward covered it (and seems to have forgotten some of it since), as did Seymour Hersh.
Anyway, it's just another reminder that no fight is ever over with these fuckers, and they treat 1984 as an instruction manual. They'll keep on trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Voting Rights Act and the New Deal decades after they've been firmly established and proven good, and they'll try to rewrite history in the meantime. I'll see Reynolds' Schadenfreude and raise him one Dolchstoßlegende. Both are lies, but since when has that ever stopped a conservative narrative?
Bonus: Two of my favorite statements on the Iraq War from back in the day, the first thanks to Johann Hari interviewing Norman Podhoretz on the National Review cruise back in 2007. Norman Podhoretz, delivered (emphasis mine):
ReplyDelete…the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 percent of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. "I don't much care," he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo" and that Bush is "a hero." He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.
"I keep telling people we are in World War Four," Podhoretz declares. He fumes at Buckley, George Will, and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He again declares victory. And for a moment, here in the Mexican breeze, it is as though, thousands of miles away, Baghdad is not bleeding.
We'll liberate you, whether you want it or not! (Shout-out to William Tenn's "The Liberation of Earth," too.) The second bit, Bush in 2006, irked (as was Blair) that the Iraqis weren't showing more "gratitude":
"President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . .
"[T]he president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd."
Ah, imperialism. It engenders such reflection.
The only ten-year festivities I'd be interested in would be a parade . . .
ReplyDelete. . . of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowiotz, Perle, Feith, and the rest of the PNAC crew as they're marched in shackles into the Hague.
Yes, even now, it seems astonishing, gobsmacking, really, that these putzes were so deeply enthralled by their own delusions about American exceptionalism that they were wholly blind to the fact that, at the time, a sixteen-year siege of the country, in which Iraq's important infrastructure had been utterly destroyed, twice, contributed to the deaths of half a million children, and left it with no electricity, little clean water and sewage running in the streets.
ReplyDeleteCall me crazy, but it's not exactly difficult to see why the Iraqis wanted us out of their lives as quickly as possible.
Every ten years? Every ten minutes at this juncture.
ReplyDeleteA corollary... a poll released in 2007 by Zogby/Lemoyne College (pollhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-zogby/on-a-new-poll-of-us-soldi_b_16497.html) which surveyed active duty personnel serving in Iraq revealed that 85% of them continued to believe that they were in Iraq to "avenge Saddam Hussein's role in 9/11". Now where do you suppose the troops got THAT bit of propaganda...
ReplyDeleteConservatism Doesn't Kill Countries, People With Conservative Ideas Kill Countries
ReplyDeleteThis is what Our Little Fascists believe, which is why Iraq was used as the test case.
Let's not forget the Partridge Family of Foreign Policy, Robert, Fred, Donald and Kimberly Kagan -- all are still alive and well and enjoying their various sinecures at AEI and the Post. Just like bankers and hedge funders, there is no penalty for right-wing warmongers for being disastrously wrong, because what was lost as a result is just other people's money, or other people's lives. No biggie. The amount of actual sympathy shown by Roy's documented sociopaths for our own dead and wounded, no less the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is nil. It's all about losing extra special bonus war-points to liberals and damn it, this will not stand!
ReplyDeletebrandon, I guess you had to be there. (Maybe you were.) Michele didn't just disagree with or mock people on left, she vilified them -- including us, those who responded to her delightful blog entries -- as people genuinely unable to appreciate what happened on 9/11. We were naive and stupid. We were insufficiently patriotic and didn't care about cops and firemen. We were lesser citizens than she.
ReplyDeleteYou ask what I'm looking for, and I guess my best answer is for Michele to shut the fuck up about this subject. She had her fun. She got to hobnob with Ace and Malkin and Treacher and get her name out there, and for awhile she had the time of her life. I don't care that she feels bad about it now. I don't give a shit that she came to see the light and realized she was wrong, and boo-hoo, poor Michele got manipulated and used, sniffle sniffle.
She hasn't changed a single scintilla, and she doesn't even realize it.
ReplyDeleteShit, we're going to run out of walls.
ReplyDeleteThe Pentagon might have needed nuclear-powered sparrow-fart detectors or the Fed might have needed to gold-plate Jamie Dimon's urethra. You never know.
ReplyDeleteI think that is actually a quite good mea culpa.
ReplyDeleteOh, I think Jamie's already had that done, on his own dime (that's small change, of course). Now, if the Fed were to offer to plate his anal sphincter, he might want to take them up on that.
ReplyDeleteHe's all asshole, so the cost would be really, really high.
A lot of WMDs in Syria and Assad isn't using them. Funny, that.
ReplyDeleteI'm still staggering around the idea that Petraeus invited them in to advise on day-to-day operations in Afghanistan.
ReplyDeleteThat's like Eisenhower letting Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curley plan the Normandy invasion.
Not unless you're asking the rest of us to.
ReplyDeleteTo me the real sin of Even The Liberal Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, et.al., wasn't in constructing an alternate reality, believing Colin Powell, or even, to the extent this might be the case, cowardice in the face of the mob. It was in betraying a complete and willful obliviousness to the nature of Cold War rhetoric and post-Vietnam historical rewrites. It wasn't just a matter of falling for Powell's performance (go back and watch it again), but of refusing to investigate one's own history when the conclusions are too unpleasant.
I don't find those polling numbers all that surprising (there was plenty of ridiculous shit that came down through official channels during the Vietnam years). That's sort of the way the chain of command works. It was, after all, one of the "official," public reasons, even if it was an outright lie, and it does work as a motivator--especially with an all-volunteer force that doesn't have to listen to draftees saying it's all bullshit and fucked up.
ReplyDeleteDoes it go a ways to proving that the U.S. Army is the best-fed, best-organized clusterfuck on the planet? Sure.
Until quite recently, the American Forces Network was infested with conservative content, and when you're trapped in the desert with a radio tuned to one station, your world view is bound to get a bit, shall we say, skewed...
ReplyDeleteI can understand why you might still be pissed at someone like that, especially as her "punishment" is music blogging for Forbes. But, look at this:
ReplyDeleteOn my blog I wrote about my growing sense of hopelessness and my warblogger friends responded with much of the vitriol and rage that they, we, had become known for. I was deserting them. I was a traitor. I had no idea what I was talking about.
She's owning that, despite it consisting of a grand total of two years' worth of blogging, eight years ago.
... the fact that it was debunked won't stop them from keepin' on, keepin' on.
ReplyDeleteIt never does.
This is pretty sweet:
ReplyDeleteWe learn with astonishment from Wikipedia that Sullivan is 49 years old.
The thing is that that works from either direction; Sully simultaneously maintains both the naivete of a teenage college freshman who can't believe that you're thirty years older than them but still have avoided reading Atlas Shrugged (true in my case, and which I believe the mere fact of wholly justifies belief in a Higher Power) and the credulity of your elderly aunt who forwards every cray-cray email she gets to everyone in the family, steadfastly ignoring your pleas to just fucking check Snopes on this shit. And, of course, the Dish is wildly successful, although so would the Car Crash Channel be, I think.
And let us never forget that the evidence AGAINST the case the administration presented was clear, overwhelming, and readily available at the time. Indeed, to buy into what Bush and crew were saying demanded an act of active ignorance.
ReplyDeleteYet, I watched with horror as so many who should have been able to see that the case for war was complete bullshit bought it wholesale instead.
No amount of apology now can resurrect the dead. And the fact that none of these apologists will even consider calling Bush and company to account just makes their apologies completely hollow.
Catalano in 2004: "We know who most of America's enemies are. Now there is a new group to add to that list: the anti-war crowd."
ReplyDeleteI don't care about apologies; asking for them is a dick move, and giving them is usually a last resort. But I will note she doesn't seem to recognize that, apart from being wrong, she was also calling her fellow citizens traitors for no good reason at all.
These same lovers of liberty can't so much abide a simple background check without seeing it as an act of tyranny demanding the immediate overthrow of any despotic government that would require it.
ReplyDeleteBut having their country invaded, destroyed, occupied, and ruled by a foreign government with its own agenda? Whole neighborhoods and cities walled and turned mini prison camps? Entire sects stripped from government participation, death squads running at night, no electricity and little gas. Why the Iraqis shoulda been grateful for all that freedom!
How, exactly, did the flag that was flying over the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, come to be in Baghdad right when a big statue of Saddam needs to get pulled down?
ReplyDeleteKristol's being punished for bringing Palin out from under her rock, not Iraq.
ReplyDelete"In the days leading up to the war, our
ReplyDeletethunderous cries of righteousness could be heard across the Internet. We waved
flags, cloaked ourselves in patriotism that was nothing more than nationalism,
fed off each other’s emotions and charged into war with nothing more than our
words and need for vengeance."
I dunno; worse than John Cole, better than Little Green Footballs? (who only really quotes & agrees with the Catalano piece in the way of "WTF was I thinking 10 years ago"; that's still better than most pundits though)
You misspelled "auto-da-fé"
ReplyDeleteIt's like Anne-Marie Slaughter saying Iraq was a political awakening for her. At age 44. After years in international law and relations.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but there's also this little gem:
ReplyDeleteNot that I would have voted for Kerry. Just because I was experiencing regret didn’t mean I was going to go running back to the left.
Too fuckin' late, honey. Kerry became a non-issue once he lost. Bush was wrong, you were wrong: own it. Why is she still trying to weasel her way out of that vote?
Funny, I thought it was spelled "pit of boiling tar."
ReplyDeleteActually, I seem to recall Constitution-shredding traitor Oliver North, who should have been dragged blubbering before a firing squad for his flagrant sedition, recently brainpuking that they've been moved to the Sudan. I guess they're expecting Assad's regime to fall, since the aftermath might demonstrate that Saddam's WMDs aren't there, either. And the horseshit shell game continues. I'm actually mildly surprised that they haven't seriously played up Saddam moving his WMDs to Iran, since "pig-fuckingly stupid" obviously never shut them up before.
ReplyDeleteThat's like Eisenhower letting Moe, Larry, Shemp and Curley plan the Normandy invasion.
ReplyDeleteYeah, and you saw how well that worked out ...
Interesting how they can keep following the imaginary WMDs around from target to target, but are unwilling to fund projects keeping track of/helping dispose of Russian nukes.
ReplyDelete"Iran & Afghanistan & Us," headlined Michael Ledeen in 2002; "We'll have to deal with the mullahcracy, sooner or later"
ReplyDeleteBy 2002, though, the damage was already done - that album came out in 1994.
I do pretty good at holding my tongue against most wingnut spewing IRL, but on the Iraq issue all bets are off. Whenever I hear anyone trying to say that it was the right thing to do, a good idea, something we had no choice about, etc, the gloves come off and I without apology remind them that among the primary reasons in the "case for war" that was presented us was a fantasy in which Saddam Hussein would have remote-controlled model airplanes to fly over our cities and spray us with anthrax, a scenario every bit as likely as Dr. Evil's sharks with fricken' lasers on their heads. I then inform them that if that claim wasn't enough to alert them that the entire "case for war" was constructed of bovine feces, then they should probably be assigned a legal guardian because they clearly lack the intelligence to make decisions for themselves or their families.
ReplyDeleteThis has the desired effect in that it is so rude, uncompromising, and, let's face it, correct, that it concludes the conversation, and better yet, usually insures that I'll never have to engage in another with them.
It's also like our then-Secretary of State saying that "no one could have foreseen" that airplanes would be used to attack buildings.
ReplyDeleteI just watched the Vietnam-era documentary Hearts and Minds, and it was exactly the same thing. You could have flipped the two eras and exchanged everyone then for everyone now, and vice versa, and there would be no fucking difference at all. Except that the antiwar movement was actually acknowledged back then.
ReplyDeleteJohn Cole not only has consistently beat himself up over the years over how wrong he was, he has also blamed no one but himself for being such a dumb shit about the war. He has also, unlike Catalano, left every word of his warblogger past in place so readers can judge for themselves. He has also, unlike Catalano, redeemed himself by building a topnotch liberal blog and a solid community of writers and commenters and has made nothing but a positive, reasoned, and passionate contribution to our public discourse, such as it is.
ReplyDeleteI can't speak to the Footballs guy, I don't read his site.
brandon, please feel free to slap Michele on the back and say All is Forgiven. We can do this all day if you want, but I've said everything I can think to say about it.
Fuckin' a.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that the lie about WMD (and the cynical/gullible/complicit Democrats who bought into it not withstanding) isn't even the biggest lie. I mean, what the fuck were we doing in Iraq to begin with? How the fuck did that happen?
ReplyDeleteOh, because they wanted better optics in our "War on Terror". Which would be what? An optimism offensive? No! Shock and Awe on a country which had literally nothing to do with why we ostensibly going to war to begin with. Terror? Fuckin' eh, we'll show you terror, country two countries away from where the people who we are really looking for are. The strategy, then, was really to destroy and destabilize a country that would have massive stockpiles of WMD (according to everyone who was anyone, except for the people who were actually informed) because...Why again? Planes hit NYC and DC on 9/11?
How do you even parse the worst lie out of that? Lies born out of stupid military strategy, stupid political calculations, stupid punditry, and stupid, cynical/terrified people saying mystifyingly false things. Every last one of these morons should have been at least tarred and feathered. They either believed dumb, stupid lies or wanted to perpetrate them. And if it wasn't obvious to them at the time, if they now, finally, know, well, fuck them. They should still be tarred and feathered.
Oh, and a shout out to the GREAT Anthony Lewis and RIP. When the Times used to be good, he was the greatest. And, naturally, he was right about the adventure, the implications and the lies. That was in 2002. After he left the NYT. There are no more like him.
ReplyDeleteNew hires (since 2003) by no-apologies Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl at the WaPo:
ReplyDeleteBush Spokesliar Michael Gerson
Cheney Spokeliar and torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen
Neocon Harpie Jenghazi Rubin
Iran: It's just an "n" away!
~
It goes back to this. (Check the murderer's row at the bottom.)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
~
He was a family friend and a great friend of izzys. I saw the news and my heart just sank.
ReplyDeleteJack, if years ago I used go into bars and punch people out for no reason, and now I tell you I feel bad about it, am I now cool to hang in bars again? And no, I don't feel like I was punched by Michele, but yes, I feel that behaving like a right asshole requires some amount of exercise in integrity beyond "owning" it. Michele didn't just accuse people who opposed the war of being traitors; she did it repeatedly, and gleefully, on a daily and hourly basis. It was a concerted and focused effort on her part, not a passion-induced misstep.
ReplyDeleteAnd as BigHank points out, around the edges you can tell she still thinks she's a badass punky Republican who may have been wrong but hey, fuck Kerry. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she didn't do yet another 180 if she thought it would boost her career.
Finally, I don't consider writing for Forbes as "punishment", I merely remark that it's a pretty good gig for a shitty-ass writer, that's all.
Mine, too. 85, though, god love 'im. Thanks for the great work, Mr. L.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm not running for president of her fan club.
ReplyDeleteThey're Christians (most of them). People of faith. It literally doesn't matter what's true. What matters is that you believe. Truth is just some junk out there in the fallen world. Belief is a "gift" and is proof of virtue.
ReplyDeleteOf course this line of explanation doesn't hold for the Jews. Maybe the analogue of belief, for them, is theory. The neo-cons and the PNAC-heads had (and still have) a geo-political "vision." It's not THEIR fault if real people, real stupidity, real corruption, real incompetence, and real life fucked it up.
In reverse order: yes, I agree (note my quotes around "punishment"); yes, I agree (see my response to BigHank); and, hey, if you want to hold onto that in lieu of some unspecified "amount of exercise in integrity", that's your call. But, speaking purely for myself (as I generally attempt to do), if someone I had gotten that pissed off at had volunteered even that much of a token acknowledgement that they'd been a dick to me and others, I'd be grateful; barring that (and I can't remember the last time that someone actually did so), I'd try to kick them out of my headspace so I didn't waste any more emotion fretting about them.
ReplyDeleteAlso too, this whole monstrous affair should put the right-wing claim of "reverence for life" out of its misery. When an anti-choice activist--especially a man--bleats about his and his cohorts' "reverence for life," I want to ask him how reverently he supported the invasion of Iraq, in which a hundred thousand (minimum) actual living people were killed, a couple of which, we have reason to believe, were innocent children.
ReplyDeleteYup. Back in 1998, PNAC super genius Paul Wolfowitz cooked up a plan that would, in the words of fellow PNAC super genius Bill Kristol, "establish a ‘liberated zone’ in southern Iraq that would provide a
ReplyDeletesafe haven where opponents of Saddam could rally and organize a credible
alternative to the present regime…. The liberated zone would have to be
protected by U.S. military might, both from the air and, if necessary,
on the ground.” It still enrages me that 10 years ago supporting shit like this meant you were a steely-eyed political realist while opposing it made you a delusional fantasist (at best) or an "Islamofascist" fifth columnist (at worst).
In the excellent documentary Hubris is a piece of video with Bill Keller explaining that "...the Times wrote a number of really bad stories, inadequately sourced, unskeptical stories particularly about Saddam's weapons capabilities, and those stories were rewarded with lavish front page display. The Times also wrote a lot of very good stories, more skeptical stories, and those tended to be buried on page A13..."
ReplyDeleteAh, yes... the Bill Keller who was one of the most ardent supporters of the war, who was screaming for Colin Powell's head because Powell was pushing for more diplomacy... the guy who called Paul Wolfowitz "The Sunshine Warrior without a trace of irony... the guy who defended Judith Miller, and the guy who was rewarded with a promotion to Executive Editor in 2003... is now speaking in the passive voice about how those badly sourced, unskeptical stories just sort of appeared in the Times, and who knows how they got there except that there were a lot of reporters "looking for scoops". Christ... no wonder Anthony Lewis left. He probably couldn't stand the smell...
Well, your mileage may vary, as they say. And you set a good example, I'm sure you're much better at being gracious about these sort of things than I am. I stand by my words.
ReplyDeleteProjects to track and dispose of Russian nukes are often part of disarmament treaties, or sweeteners thereof. Such things are also known as "surrendering to the commies."
ReplyDeleteredeemed himself by building a topnotch liberal blog and a solid community of writers and commenters ...
ReplyDeleteI was with you until "and commenters."
Democracy! Whisky! Impotency!
ReplyDeleteWell, I try, and in no small part because I think that holding on to anger is in some measure responsible for my high blood pressure; it's motivating to have a figurative gun held to your head. I also finished Iain M. Banks' The Hydrogen Sonata (the latest in his Culture series), which has some interesting things to say in the end about people going unpunished, or inadequately punished, for some very bad behavior. (See also his The Algebraist.)
ReplyDeleteI want to ask him how reverently he supported the invasion of Iraq
ReplyDeleteYou need to realize the difference between the gleeful, wanton murder of children by abortionists, and Godly vengeance against those who attacked us on 9/11.
a couple of which, we have reason to believe, were innocent children.
Sorry, but this line of reasoning breaks at "innocent." Those Iraqi children should have chosen not to have been born Muslim**, which irrevocably taints them. See also Barack Obama.
**Yes, even the Iraqi Christian ones. Just like Palestinian Christians, Syrian Christians, Iranian Christians, etc, they're actually Muslims. See also Barack Obama.
She likes Faith No More, though. That's more than I can say for the rogues gallery you've got in the voice.
ReplyDeleteRecalls one of Bill Maher's best cracks from the 2008 election: "John McCain never goes to church, which proves he a Christian. Barack Obama used to attend a church led by a hellfire radical Christian minister, which proves he;s a Muslim."
ReplyDeleteShe was National Security Advisor at the time, but yes.
ReplyDeleteThat depends on how less-than-perfect the apology is.
ReplyDeleteIf it's in the vein of McMegan "I was wrong but for the right reasons" then hell yes, it's wrong.
If, on the other hand, it's a matter of a person who doesn't have much time to consume news simply believing the only things they were hearing on the "news," then it's a bit more forgivable. I've had to deal with that in my own family, from a sister who didn't know better than to believe CNN because it wasn't Fox. We had a very lively dinner a few months before the war started which consisted of my mother, her husband, and I walking Sis and her husband through the many, many reasons given as the "case for war" which had been debunked but glossed over by CNN and other media who were more interested in selling war than in informing their viewers/readers. For example, Sis and her husband had never heard that the aluminum tubes rationale had been shot full of holes within a week of being put forward - and this conversation was taking place a good 4 months later. We didn't manage to fully convince them at that dinner, but within two or three months of the invasion, they had come around and said, "you were right."
I did a fair amount of trolling the rightwing Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's letters to the editor section in the runup to and aftermath of the invasion. Every one of my pre-war letters drew the bloodthirsty bufords out of the woodwork, who would take to the letters section to patiently or screechingly explain to me my naivete. So, a few months after the invasion, when no WMDs were found and it had become glaringly obvious that none would be found, I wrote another letter generally ridiculing anyone who had been stupid enough to buy into the anthrax drones, open-air mobile bioweapons labs, & etc. This letter concluded with "although no WMDs have been found in Iraq, thank heavens no blue dresses have been found, either. Otherwise, we might have an impeachable offense on our hands." When it ran, the response was much less vociferous, though there was one brave buford who again, more in sorrow than anger, attempted to explain to me how stupid I was in failing to see what an imminent threat we had faced from Iraq. This, when the con was staring him full in the face. For the most part though, my final letter on the topic served to cheer others who had for much of the previous year been subjected to every kind of smear imaginable for the sin of being smarter than the people who simply believe whatever they are told.
I love you haloween jack.
ReplyDeleteHello there, just became aware of your blog through Google, and found that it is truly
ReplyDeleteinformative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you continue this
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Ok, I went too far.
ReplyDeleteWHAT ABOUT ME SNIFF
ReplyDeleteThat's how I feel. Chait, this Michele Whoeversheis, Cole, Friedman, Ezra Klein, Pollack, any and all of them. Just STFU and take up knitting, or something. You had your shot at being "foreign policy experts" or "pundits" or whatever and you flubbed it. Any notion of you as having anything of merit, or even interest, when it comes to important public issues is destroyed, Beyond repair. The most important question you will ever face in your "career" has already been asked you, and you got it disgustingly, tragically, wrong.
ReplyDeleteThe first commenter on Klein's mea culpa may be overdoing it:
"Tell you what: go work at Starbucks. Never express a political opinion again. Don't vote. That, at least, would be penance."
But not by much. I don't care where they work, as long as it is not in the field of opining about public questions. And, I suppose, it MIGHT be OK if they expressed a political opinion, if they did it strictly among friends and family. Nor should they lose the right to vote. But, yeah, basically. Go hide your head in a toilet. We are not interested in your "views" any longer. Take your "apology" and shove it. Apologies are acceptable for drinking my soda out of the cafeteria refrigerator; advocating for immoral and illegal wars? Not so much.
It's amazing what you can make Barack Obama responsible for. "If we didn't rack up a bunch of debt during this war, then the people wouldn't have elected Barack Obama, who would then have racked up the bunch of debt retroactively, because it was all his fault".
ReplyDeleteThe war runup was a sight to behold. The decision was made and the entire media - minus a few print outlets nobody cared about - came to the conclusion that the only opponents were dead end hippies trying to eat their bongs. No need to talk to anybody in the movement.
ReplyDeleteYeah, see Saddam should have stopped the 9/11 guys before they got on the planes; that's the role they were avenging
ReplyDeleteShe hadn't already become Secretary of State? Unpossible. If she had made statements that weren't absolutely accurate about the violent deaths of thousands of Americans, as determined by 20/20 hindsight, John McCain and Lindsay Graham would have never let her nomination go forward.
ReplyDeleteThe invasion of Iraq made nutless wingnuts feel like John Wayne. The failure of the Iraqi adventure has made them feel like Hamlet. Both are unbelievably irritating.
ReplyDeleteOops, pardon.
ReplyDeleteDastardly? Gadzooks! Zounds!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, haven't any of these guys gotten out of the 19th century yet?
Hey, coincidentally, I finished The Hydrogen Sonata just yesterday! Yes to your point. (Actually, regret features in many of Banks' works, and not surprisingly, karma or the lack thereof.)
ReplyDelete(I enjoyed The Hydrogen Sonata, but I liked Surface Detail better. I've read all of Banks' sci-fi except for Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background, and some of his "straight" fiction. Player of Games and Use of Weapons remain my favorites.)
Jennifer in a sub-thread:
ReplyDeleteit's a matter of a person who doesn't have much time to consume news
simply believing the only things they were hearing on the "news," then
it's a bit more forgivable.
I can understand that not everyone had access to classified information... what sources from the field were saying about the existence or absence thereof of WMD.
But everyone *did* have access to the judgements reached by the people who *did* have access to all that information, i.e. the leaders of NATO, and of the UKUSA network. And of those leaders, Blair and Howard decided to join in with Bush's Excellent Adventure; and it was not exactly a well-kept secret that Blair and Howard were the kind of vile creeps who were the hangers-on of school bullies.
Everyone else looked at the info and said "Bugger that for a game of soldiers, this is a tissue of lies. And everyone in the US knew about those other countries' conclusions because you were being reminded of it, regularly, by your own media... "Look at those cowardly French, not feeling threatened by this menace in their own backyard, preferring to let us clean it up for them, even though they're asking us not to clean it up! Look at those cowardly Germans and Canadians and Russians and Kiwis!"
Other than the Woody Guthrie song I have never agreed with a philadelphia lawyer so much. This is so right.
ReplyDeleteThere is truth in what you say but....on CNN et al the lie du jour was pimped at a rate of about 2000% more than any, ANY contradictory information. Someone who spent 30 minutes a day watching news could well have missed hearing much, if anything at all, about what the French, Germans, and others were basing their opposition to the war on. If you sat down and watched 2 hours straight of CNN in the runup to the war, 1 hour and 45 minutes of that would have been devoted to why you should be wetting your pants over corroded aluminum tubes, with various "experts" sitting in to tell why you should not only wet them, but shit them as well. The remaining 15 minutes might go to bashing "Old Europe" without ever even alluding to the real reasons they had decided to sit things out. You'd hear about "cheese eating surrender monkeys" and so on and so forth - in other words, a lot of demonization - but probably nothing at all about the reasoning they had given for that decision. To get that info, you pretty much had to not only go to the internet, but go to the right places on the internet. So no, I still don't fault people who were spending so much time trying to hold their shit together and keep head above water for not knowing some of this stuff, because it was purposely made much harder to get than the constant bleating of the war pimps in virtually every established media outlet.
ReplyDeleteWhat I DO blame them for is for continuing to believe they weren't lied to, for those who cling to that belief. They've had 10 years now of being cock-slapped in the face with the truth - it's everywhere out there now, whereas it wasn't in the runup to war. If they continue to believe in the rightness of the cause after everything that's been revealed, well then, I believe they should be cultivated to a uniform 6" depth with a rusty Garden Weasel.