Neocon David Brooks 23 years ago dismissing legitimate, reality-based criticism of Dubya's colossal Iraq war
fuckup as antisemitism (dead link because The Weekly Standard no longer exists):
It's Back
The socialism of fools has returned to vogue not just in the Middle
East and France, but in the American left and Washington.
...
AFTER JOE LIEBERMAN completed his unsuccessful campaign for the
vice-presidency, I pretty much concluded that anti-Semitism was no
longer a major feature of American life. I went around making the case
that the Anti-Defamation League should close up shop, since the evil
they were organized to combat had shrunk to insignificance.
Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my
voicemail, and in my mailbox. It transpired that I couldn’t have been
more wrong. Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its
epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite right, but on the
peace-movement left...
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do
admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and
an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on
most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the
focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred,
which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some
people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated...
Because they were never broken and flogged from the company of civilized humans, because they were never stripped of their right to ever again blat their martial nonsense in public without being buried under a hail of rotten vegetables -- because the entire Mainstream Media jettisoned any last pretense of being on the side of the public good in order to link arms and protect them at all costs -- American Neocons are still out there.
The Many Wars of Fred Hiatt: Mongering for the New Millennium
...Because of the last war for which Fred Hiatt shook his moneymaker, the influence that the United States can bring to bear on centuries-old internal conflicts in Iraq is slightly less than that wielded at the moment by the Carolina League. Our aid makes us one friend and makes for that friend a hundred enemies.
The problem is that Mr. Obama has offered only halfhearted support for his strategy. While 3,000 U.S. trainers and other support troops are now in Iraq, they are not allowed to accompany Iraqi forces to the front lines or identify targets for airstrikes—crucial tasks that proved decisive when the United States helped local forces overthrow the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
First of all, Afghanistan is not yet quite secured, even for Afghans. Second, OK, Fred, sending someone's kid to accompany Iraqi forces to the front lines is putting them at risk, and a pretty fair tripwire for a large scale intervention down the line. (See: War, Vietnam The). The only thing the Washington Post editorial board wants to kill more than a few thousand brown people is Social Security. What a weird place that must be.
If I thought it would do any good, I would remind Fred Hiatt of the words of the Imbecile He Backed To The Hilt Back in 2004 (from the first Presidential debate, September 30, 2004):
Bush: Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job.
And that's what we're doing. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year. That is the best way. We'll never succeed in Iraq if the Iraqi citizens do not want to take matters into their own hands to protect themselves. I believe they want to. Prime Minister Allawi believes they want to.
And so the best indication about when we can bring our troops home -- which I really want to do, but I don't want to do so for the sake of bringing them home; I want to do so because we've achieved an objective -- is to see the Iraqis perform and to see the Iraqis step up and take responsibility.
Bush: ...a free Iraq is going to make this world a more peaceful place.
Bush: ...And I'm optimistic. See, I think you can be realistic and optimistic at the same time. I'm optimistic we'll achieve -- I know we won't achieve if we send mixed signals. I know we're not going to achieve our objective if we send mixed signals to our troops, our friends, the Iraqi citizens.
We've got a plan in place. The plan says there will be elections in January, and there will be. The plan says we'll train Iraqi soldiers so they can do the hard work, and we are.
Bush: There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year. Yes, we're getting the job done. It's hard work. Everybody knows it's hard work, because there's a determined enemy that's trying to defeat us.
Bush: ...You can't change the dynamics on the ground if you've criticized the brave leader of Iraq. One of his campaign people alleged that Prime Minister Allawi was like a puppet. That's no way to treat somebody who's courageous and brave, that is trying to lead his country forward.
And [another characteristic of neocons is] never ever taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. They are the post-modern nihilists they accuse the left of being. Only much more shameless. But it’s worth repeating that they only appear on cable news because the brain-dead producers and editors decide they will. The blame for treating these congenital fantasists, hysterics and war-mongers as experts lies in part with the sheer laziness and cynicism of cable news bookers.
Except that is not strictly true.
For example, "This Week..." is not a cable news show, and neither is "Meet the Press". They are among the dung-spattered crowned jewels of two of America's most powerful, network news organizations, and yet both of them have repeatedly invited the absolute dregs of the Neoconservative cult onto the public airwaves and them let them get away with murder. Hell, "This Week..." doesn't just let Neocon goof run nekkid through the studio: they went out of their way to put one of the ringleaders of the cabal on the fucking payroll a full-time employee.
The decision by ABC to hire Bill Kristol did not leap fully-formed from the lazy mind of a booker, and whether the Neocon goof in questions appears on basic cable chamber-pot filler like "Guess That Soup!" with Shuck Todd or served by a network news corporation's on the fine china like "Meet the Press", the frequency and aggressiveness with which members of this tiny cult of liars and war pimps is shoved in our faces -- and then allowed to shart their insane twaddle virtually unchecked -- far exceeds the limits of any theory that ascribes this activity to laziness and stupidity.
However, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe it's all on autopilot.
Maybe everyone in teevee news' executive suites is dead, and in their last moments they programmed a clutch of little robots to make booking and hiring decisions for every teevee network in America by just clicking through the same 2002 Rolodex over and over and over again. But right or wrong, there is an easy way to test this theory because this is a question which is ultimately answerable.
All someone has to do is walk down the hall or drop by a cubicle or pick up the fucking phone and asking them!
Not me, sadly. No one returns the calls of trivial Liberals from flyover country. No one of any importance (and no one who interns for anyone of importance) answers our emails, responds to our tweets or pokes or pings. No one reacts to our posts. And when it comes to just getting our ideas in front of their audiences -- ideas that, time after time, have been revealed by brutal reality to have been absolutely correct -- remember that one of the final instructions to the Lonely Booking Robots from their human creators was obviously:
PROCEDURE DIVISION
Select-Guest
Read Next Record.
IF Condition = 'CONSERVATIVE', Then GOTO Book-Guest
IF Condition = 'LIBERAL', Then GOTO Select-Guest
IF Condition = "End of File" Then GOTO Book-John-McCain
...
However, my fellow 2008 Weblog Award Winner, Mr. Andrew Sullivan has been on most of these shows. Repeatedly. He is a denizen of D.C. He gets invited to state dinners. He has publishers who will publish and promote his books whenever he chooses. He has bookers. He has Arianna Huffington on speed-dial. he has Bill Maher on speed-dial. He has Tina Brown on super-speed dial. He knows people on the inside of the media business who will take his call, and he has a media platform big enough to disseminate their answers widely, even if that answer is "No Comment".
Pinpointing the individuals who keep putting Neocon liars and lunatics and war criminals on television and sharing the names and phone numbers and thought-processes of those decision makers with the rest of us rubes is clearly something that makes even the most Liberal members of the Mainstream Media deeply uncomfortable.
Ergo it is also a subject which this trivial Liberal from flyover country will continue to find intensely interesting.
To understand what a mindless rabid, overwhelming, pandimensional clusterfuck Conservatism has become, it is not enough to simply critique the make and model of the vehicle they happened to be driving when they drove this country off the cliff. It is equally important to understand the road they were traveling, and all the warning signs they had to blow past to get to the cliff in the first place.
For example, at this point pretty much everyone knows that, once upon a time, True Conservative Andrew Sullivan was an even more fanatical Iraq War cheerleader than Don Rumsfeld. Mr. Sullivan -- who evangelizes the prudence, caution and skepticism of his hero Micheal Oakeshott -- hurled himself headlong into full "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Invading Iraq" mode and, like virtually every other Conservative talking head at that time, used his media platform to slash and slander Liberals like me. Called us dupes. Fifth columnists. You name it.
And then brutal Reality interceded, incinerating all the gauzy nonsense and bile-soaked bombast Conservatves had used to fence their terrible ideas off from criticism and exposing all the armchair Shuck and Awe warriors for frauds and poltroons and lunatics and profiteers they had always been.
Which is the moment that Modern Conservatism reached a genuinely cladogenic moment where the fitful equilibrium of the already-delusional Right was violently punctuated, splitting most of the into roughly two, distinct but related species. As I wrote back in 2008 ("The Dolt-Stoss ™ ") both halves of Conservatism still reflexively hate Dirty Hippies, both still lies easily and often about their past and both still believe their "clade" of Conservatism -- the only True Conservatism -- failed because of an act of monstrous betrayal.
True Conservative Alpha: The Denialists. The past never happened. They were never wrong. Fox News never lies. These are the Wolfowitzes and Kristols. This is your Crazy Uncle Liberty. This is the electoral backbone of the GOP whose grand plans only failed because they were stabbed in the back by nefarious Liberals, their RINO stooges and the media they secretly control. These are the ones who, as I wrote in 2008, "...turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out.” (2 Maccabees. 12:42) These are the ones who threw themselves en masse into the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine the minute it rolled into town.
True Conservative Beta: The Both Siders. There may have been some misjudgment in their past, but Teh Liberals were just as bad! Why quibble about whether or not they were wrong because Both Sides! Fox News may be bad, but so is MSNBC! This is virtually everyone else on the Right, from David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan to Joe Scarborough and David Gregory. (I would include links to my own writing here, but since I have done +2,000 posts on this subject in the last decade, I wouldn't know where to begin.)
Of course there is still a lot of ideological bed-hopping between these two emergent species. They hate each other, borrow from each other, make temporary alliances of mutual convenience with each other. One day, David Frum is writing like a Liberal blogger, the next he straps on his Neocon armor to go forth and do battle with The Dirty Hippie brigade. One day David Brooks is extolling the virtues of humility, prudence and self-reflection, and the next he is shamelessly slathering a tanker-truck full of White-Out all over American Conservative history to make it turn out the way he wants it to turn out.
Which brings us back to Andrew Sullivan, who was an early adopter of Beta True Conservatism. It has led him to walk back his earlier ebullience about the Iraq War and the Bush Administration (which has been a good thing) and wander around the cultural landscape, pointing at every shiny, pretty object that catches his attention and yelling "Claim!" in the name of his True Conservatism like a Hunter from The Walking Dead (which has been an embarrassing and hilarious thing):
Because while I'm always down for a good, Neocon ass-kicking, that act alone is merely a cursory crash site investigation, and not nearly sufficient to explain the warped, intellectual path down which True Conservatism has raced in order to reach the cliff from which it defenestration itself. For a tiny example of what I am talking about, I refer you to the evolving utility of the works of Conservative philosopher Leo Strauss -- the modern architect of the "Noble Lie" on which so much of True Conservatism depends -- as seen in the writings of Andrew Sullivan.
Back in 2003, as the rhetoric of the Neocon's blood-drunk conquistador orgy was reaching a crescendo across the land, Strauss was a Great Man. Period. And his keen and subtle work was being slandered by the paranoid and ignorant "academic Left" from {THE TRUTH ABOUT LEO STRAUSS)
The attempt of some who haven’t even read Strauss (let alone read him as carefully as he deserves) to smear his legacy and denigrate those who learned from him is a pathetic display of paranoia and ignorance. No wonder it goes down so well among some on the academic left. Paranoia and ignorance are their strong suits.
I’m not the only one to be struck by the difference between what Leo Strauss actually wrote and what some have inferred from it – both on the paranoid left and the triumphalist right.
I was taught by a "Straussian," have known many and read more, and I could never understand the idea how the great man could be reduced to some kind of secret guru to "neoconservatism". There’s a section in my forthcoming book that makes this point about the inherent skepticism, mischief and seriousness of Strauss as a thinker – qualities that make him particularly ill-suited for being a secret mastermind to anything, let alone a total transformation of American conservatism into something like its opposite...
-- but also believed that Strauss wasn't just not one of the causes of Conservatism's problems, but was a big part of it's cure:
Last year, I sat down and read (or re-read) several of Strauss’s longer works and saw in him not a rival to my own inspiration, Michael Oakeshott, but a very different, yet somehow kindred, spirit. Between them, they represent a skeptical conservatism that certainly doesn’t amount to anything like a defense of what conservatism or neoconservatism has morphed into in the last decade or so. In fact, it’s my contention that Oakeshott and Strauss are the best guides to where current conservatism has gone deeply, horribly wrong.
By 2012, Mr. Sullivan was beginning to suspect that Strauss and Oakeshott may not have been (Spoiler!) boon metaphysical companions and brothers by another philosophical mother:
But the real trouble, I'd argue, is with Strauss's 1930s-driven lack of faith in modernity, his insistence that unimpeachable truths (not insights, eternal truths) about human nature could be gleaned by close reading of ancient texts by a few in the elite, and his followers' need to disguise their disdain for democracy and religion (making them insufferable cynics). It was hard to find a Straussian scholar who wasn't obsessed with domestic politics and who wasn't a neoconservative, itching for a new war for freedom somewhere (emphasis added):
America, alas, didn't have a Burke or an Oakeshott to craft its conservative philosophy. It ended up with the work of a German Jewish exile, whose political didacticism was as pronounced as his philosophical inscrutability. The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture.
Reviewing Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan, Kenneth B. McIntyre describes what keeps Oakeshott from accompanying fellow British philosophers into America’s intellectual canon:
[His] lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising,given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics. As he once wrote, “reputable political behavior is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.” Such behavior is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates.
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”
No, that was Leo Strauss’s metier. Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are where you end up.
Which brings us to 2014, where we find Mr. Sullivan finally facing the terrible abyss where Strauss's principle of the Noble Lie inevitably led his acolytes, and where the term "Straussian" has become fully integrated into the scathing and 100%-indistinguishable-from-a-Dirty-Hippie vocabulary he now uses to describing the paranoid, ignorant Right:
I tend not to hold the somewhat conspiratorial view that followers of Leo Strauss, the guru of the neocon intelligentsia, actively believe in deceiving the American people in the pursuit of statecraft. Strauss argued that many critical texts in Western civilization were written with an esoteric teaching for the intelligent few, while presenting a less radical and palatable public doctrine for the masses. Hence the Straussian penchant for a noble lie – one that is good for the people to believe but which the elite knows is bullshit. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Straussian support for public religion, while the bulk of them are atheists. For them, religious faith is entirely instrumental – a way to lie your way to social order and cohesion.
In the case of the Iraq war, several untruths were told. Among them: there is no sectarianism in Iraq; it will cost next to nothing; it will be over in months; there are WMDs everywhere; Saddam and al Qaeda are joined at the hip. It’s hard to tell which of these untruths were sincerely believed by men like Wolfowitz and Kristol, longtime Straussians both, and which were a function of them not knowing anything about the country that was to be their text-book case of “creating reality”. But when a disgraced architect of that war goes on television to argue that the public needs to be told now that ISIS is al Qaeda, even though he knows that they are separate organizations with separate ambitions, I tend to withdraw whatever benefit of the doubt I give these men with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.
...
This is a rare moment in which a Straussian actually comes out and says: yes, we’re deliberately lying by conflating all sorts of different things in the Middle East – the Sunni-Shia divide; the hostility between ISIS and al Qaeda – in order to concoct a simple and terrifying message to the American people that will enable us to get into another war in order to advance our goals in the Middle East. Yes, we know this is a lie – just as our insinuation that Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots before 2003 was also a lie. But it’s a noble one, and that’s all that counts...
As I said, these two, main branches of post-Dubya Conservatism -- Denialists and Both Siders -- may contend mightily with each other, but they're really very much products of the same DNA and whelping box.
Both lean heavily on Imaginary Dirty Hippies to justify what they say and do.
Both have very sketchy relationships to those parts of American history that makes their academic theorizin' look stupid.
Both claim they were betraaaayed!
And -- most hilariously -- while neither Denialists nor Both Siders feel any compunction about telling as many "Nobles Lies" as necessary to get them though the night, both Denialists and Both Siders are also adamant that the other guy can't be a True Conservatives
'cause he doesn't smoke
The same brand of lie as me...
And finally, I suppose this is as good a place as any to belatedly ease into my June fundraiser, so if you are inclined to support work like this, here you go!
*Across the Liberal blogosphere (and in a few precincts of the True Conservative ™ blogosphere still trying to play catch-up with where Liberals have been all along without wearing the tee-shirt), the same question: What the fuck is a disgraced, war-mongering sociopath (and disgraced former World Bank President, because every Neocon has got to get paid!) like Paul Wolfowitz doing on teevee? And why the fuck is he being treated like an "expert" on anything except how to lie and fuck up over and over and over again in ways that cost this country thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and get away with it?
And so, once again I feel compelled to gently (and, to be honest, uselessly) remind my fellow Dirty Hippies that this is the wrong question.
Because Paul Wolfowitz does not get on "Meet the Press" or "Guess That Soup!with Shuck Todd" by wandering in off the street and grabbing the chair. Actual human beings at NBC/MSNBC with phone numbers and addresses are making affirmative decisions to put this disgraced, war-mongering sociopath on the air over and over again, while other actual human beings at NBC/MSNBC with phone numbers and addresses are making other affirmative decisions not to ask this disgraced, war-mongering sociopath anything remotely like the most basic, substantive questions which any actual journalist would ask.
It's Back
The socialism of fools has returned to vogue not just in the Middle East and France, but in the American left and Washington.
11:00 PM, FEB 20, 2003
...
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated...)
So since some actual human beings with enormous power and a fuckton of money are getting Paul Wolfowitz on teevee and then protecting him once he is there, let me wearily repeat what I wrote back in March (which basically is a 20th generation mimeograph copy of what I have been wearily repeating on this site since the day I started blogging):
...Rachel [Maddow], yell about Paul Wolfowitz all you want. Hell, I'll join you. But until you start taking your blowtorch of truth to people like David Gregory and Joe Scarborough and Arthur Sulzberger -- the people who, day in and day out, keep making affirmative decisions to never demand any accountability from the likes of Kristol and Tom Friedman and David Brooks but instead just hand over huge public media platforms to unreconstructed Iraq War demagogues -- you're just bouncing the rubble around.
I am quite sure that the most fascinating and appalling aspect of the "What the fuck is a disgraced, war-mongering sociopath like Paul Wolfowitz doing on teevee?" story is happening right now, behind closed doors at 30 Rock. And I am equally sure that since the answer to that question would reveal just how deep into the bones the corruption and rot of our media has spread, the one institution whose holy mission is supposed to be reporting hard truths about the powerful without fear or favor is the very institution which will never tell us what is really going on.
Comes now another anniversary. A different, quieter, more shameful, slower-rolling anniversary, which will feature no eloquent speeches by the great and the good, and which most of our media will not cover with vintage archival footage and panels of eloquent experts but will instead dispose of using the same, battle-tested method that abusive drunks have been employing to great success since the dawn time. The same method that battle-tested drunk Peggy Noonan once advised us all to deploy in the face of revelations of torture.
Denial.
No, honey, Daddy never hit Mommy...because...Hey!...Who wants pancakes!
But of course, somewhere way down deep, most drunks and junkies and abusers and their enables know that however quickly they whistle past the graveyard, the graveyard is still there. And as the tenth anniversary of The War To Pretend That The War In Iraq Is Going Great (tm) slouches into view, the dead are still there. The maimed are still there. The widows and the widowers are still there. Those we tortured are still there and their torturers still walk free. The parents who had to bury their children are still there, as are the children who had to bury Mom or Dad. And the waste, the unconscionable waste, still hangs over us Trillions that could have been spent caring for our sick and elderly, feeding our hungry and educating everyone, pissed away into the Iraqi desert. A fragile national sense of purpose and tragic unity that could have been cultivated and used to great and good things, used up and thrown away on the folly of idiots and madmen.
All still there.
You know what isn't there? The peaceful, grateful, liberated Iraq that, 10 years ago next month, at (where else) an American Enterprise Institute luncheon keynote address, Richard Perle promised us was juuuust over the horizon --
"And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation."
-- back in the day when Perle was every-fucking-where. Back in the day when, on any given day, you could find an up-and-coming Neocon careerist like David Frum humping Perle's leg like a puppy while at exactly the same time you could also find up-and-coming Neocon careerist David Brooks using his newly-inherited New York Times job-for-life to insist that the existence and influence of the Neocons was largely an ugly myth invented by antisemitic "full-mooners":
The Era of Distortion
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: January 06, 2004
Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality? I started feeling that way awhile ago, when I was still working for The Weekly Standard and all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of ''neoconservatives'' at the magazine had taken over U.S. foreign policy.
...
The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.
We'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up.
In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for ''conservative'' and neo is short for ''Jewish'') travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.
It's true that both Bush and the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace. But correlation does not mean causation. All evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions independently. Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a sentence that starts with ''Neocons believe,'' there is a 99.44 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.)
Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything.
...
Improvements in information technology have not made public debate more realistic. On the contrary, anti-Semitism is resurgent. Conspiracy theories are prevalent. Partisanship has left many people unhinged.
Welcome to election year, 2004.
Good times!
History records that after Iraq went tits-up David Brooks managing to snag a part-time teaching gig at some Learning Annex somewhere as he sank quickly into ignominious obscurity, but little is know of what became of him after that. Does anybody know if he's on LinkedIn? Because while I'm glad to see him gone, from time to time I do find myself idly curious about what happens to such a person after every single one of the toxic ideas they championed so loudly for so long blows up so emphatically and spectacularly.
Iraq, on the other hand, never went away, and ten years after Perle's bold predictions about grand squares and liberation, we can actually check in on the Project for a New American Century's grandest Project of all.
Where Iraq's Maliki pins the blame for Baghdad bombings Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says the Syrian war has awakened dormant Sunni-Shiite tensions. A series of bombs ripped through Baghdad on Wednesday morning. At least 30 people were killed and 170 injured, according to a ministry of interior official. Attackers coordinated at least 14 car bombs, two roadside bombs, and one suicide bomb between the early morning and 11:00 am. The explosions targeted predominately Shiite neighborhoods during rush hour. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks yet, but similar attacks have been carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. The attacks continue an upward trend of violence in Iraq that has brought a level of bloodshed not seen here since 2008. Last month alone 1,057 people lost their lives and another 2,326 were injured in violent attacks throughout Iraq. This year more than 4,000 Iraqis have died and more than 10,000 have been injured by attacks like today's. Baghdad has suffered more attacks than any other area of the country. In a weekly televised address shortly after Wednesday’s bombings, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki directly linked his country’s deteriorating security to the conflict in Syria. “The internal situation in Syria is playing a major role with what’s happening in Iraq,” he said. ...
But as deep a scar as our Iraqi Adventure has left on the world -- and as sober a reminder as it should be from now until the end of days to any American president who is contemplating the making of war in that volatile neighborhood -- I'd give Cubs-win-the-pennant odds that none of the millions of miles of video that were shot or thousands of barrels of ink that were spilled during The War To Pretend That The War In Iraq Is Going Great (tm)will make it back into the conversations around any of the tables at the Sunday Morning Gasbag conclave.
Because some of life has to be mysterious.
And the rest of life apparently has to be vermouth.
Hey look, it's Tom Friedman! Hey look, it's Peter King! Hey look, it's Liz Cheney! Hey look, it's Paul Fucking Wolfowitz! Hey look, it's me giving up on American media!
Things about this Sunday's mainstream political television offerings that crossed my mind as I watched Western Civilization slip another few inches beneath the waves:
Peter King of "The Peter King Show with Special Guest, David Gregory" is very loud and lies a lot. About everything. Then again, Peter King voters are barely sentient, so garbage in/garbage out. In a healthy society, the minute Peter King started lying he would have been frog-marched off the set. Instead, David Gregory and his waxworks panel largely stared at their shoe tops and tried to be polite. It is the same tactic Newt Gingrich has deployed on "Meet the Press" over and over again: sling your bullshit loudly and bulldoze over anyone who gets in the way. It works because A) someone keep booking people like Peter King ang Newt Gingrich on these shows and, B) David Gregory is a simpering weakling who lets wingnuts use him like an Ottoman. Clearly David Gregory thinks "Conservatives who lie" is a distinct constituency that deserves lots and lots of teevee time. If all you knew of America was Peter King you would be forgiven for thinking we were a godforsaken bigot-ridden pesthole It was damn decent of Bibi Netanyahu to let David Gregory talk every now and then.
Bibi Netanyahu breaks out the Fox News "Some people say..." bullshit. David Gregory predictably lets it slide.
Tom Friedman has apparently bequeathed the "Friedman Unit" to Bibi Netanyahu.
I guess I missed the part of "Meet the Press" where David Gregory asked Bibi Netanyahu how many nukes Israel has in its stockpile.
Sam Stein Seder filling in for Chris Hayes on "Up" doesn't quite cut it. Each of his "searching for just the right word" stutters that preceded each sentence fragment ran on about twice as long as it should've, and Mr. Seder unfortunately has a smirky affect that appears to be burned on his motherboard. Still, any given two minute stretch of "Up With Chris Hayes" or the "Melissa Harris-Perry Show" -- guest hosted or not -- is better than anything "Meet the Press" has done since forever.*
Every week, the American political debate is being framed by people whose names we often do not know. They decided to put some people and opinions on the public airwaves and exclude others. The decide to allow pathological liars and slander-mongers on the public airwaves without ever mentioning their lying, slander-mongering pedigrees to the public. They choose to let lots of obvious Conservative bullshit slide by unchallenged, but get very angry and defensive when anyone on the Left dares to point out the obvious fact that the blame for our nation's problem is not evenly distributed to both sides of the political spectrum. Each of these decision in an affirmative one, made by some person or group of people who want the dice loaded in a particular way. Each decision is allegedly made in our name, and each of these farces is broadcast over the airwaves that we own. It is long past time to know the names of the people who keep putting liars on television. It is long past time for them to be held publicly accountable for their decisions. * (The fact that Mr. Seder was kind of a dick to me at Netroots Nation in Chicago and at Netroots Nation in Minnesota has nothing to do with my review of his performance on "Up" :-)
Than today. In today's Washington Post you will find this "reportage" on Bill Clinton's speech from Alexandra Petri:
It was too big to fail. It was almost too big to check. It would be like fact checking a century. At dawn tomorrow, I am going to see the factcheckers off on their long voyage into miles and miles of wild, verdant speech. I expect them to write me every month to offer an update on their progress. Perhaps they will return by 2016 with a report. Then again I only dimly recollect the Clinton era. To me, it was a time of Pokemon and prosperity during which your fifth-grade teacher had to awkwardly explain specific sex acts. But everyone who was there in '88 assures me that his speech then was easily as long, if not longer...
Then, with a flick of your wrist, you can turn the page and find Jennifer Rubin bitterly complaining in column after column that Barack Obama hasn't been impeached yet for insufficient fealty to the whims of Benjamin Netanyahu being a power-mad, left-wing, baby-killing, media-coddled,Chicago-style-thug, Socialist...yadda-yadda. You know the drill. Basically all-the-usual-stuff that your Crazy Uncle Liberty emails you six times a day, minus the 88-point Railroad font, giant flags and American bald eagles-clutching M-16s:
The Democratic convention goes far left; media unaware By Jennifer Rubin
There is no mystery as to why media are smitten by the Democratic National Convention. Not only do they see nothing wrong with hours of abortion speeches and moldy class warfare rhetoric, but they agree with it and think that this is “mainstream” politics. I don’t think that more than a few recognize how far left they and their favored speakers are in the current political environment. They naturally also see actual centrist ideas as conservative and mainstream conservative ideas as extreme...
You know, once they get rid of all the toddlers like Ms. Petri who were weaned on "David Brooks' Big Whiz-Bang Book of Funny Humor Jokes"...and then chase out that scabrous nest of neocons who still dream their little "nuke 'em all" dreamy-dreams in hammocks spun from John Bolton's mustache hair and felted with Paul Wolfowitz's spit-comb...and sack the editorial staff who keep letting George Will and Bill Kristol butt-scoot their crazy all over it's pages...and change the name of the place...and raze the building to its foundations...and salt the Earth where it stood...and take a "Men in Black" memory-erasing thingie to everyone who has every had brain cells snuffed out in the service of reading their tripe... ...then the Washington Post might have a real shot at being whatchacall a "newspaper" once again.
A short, concise explanation of what Neoconservatism means and what Neoconservatives do.
See how many perfectly lines you can draw between Modern Conservative beliefs and the Neoconservative worldview and remember to factor in the fact that, when the are in power, the Right eagerly embraces-in-spades everything about Big Gummint that they profess to hate with a bright, white flame every time they are out of power.
On their own, most Conservatives are psychologically incapable of noticing when their entire belief system flips 180 degrees on its axis.
When you call it to their attention, well, fuck you, you fucking hippie fucking Saul Alinsky fuck, that's why!
Departing momentarily from the mechanical efficiency of his "Beinart says but Ross disagrees..." format, Andrew Sullivan ventures an opinion:
"I know Straussians. Straussians are friends of mine. David Brooks is not a Straussian."
Not like I give a damn which brand of perfume Mr. Sullivan wants to dab on this particular turd today, but card-carrying Straussian or not, Our Mr. Brooks certainly rutted happily with them during those all but forgotten (by Conservatives) Good Old Days when being blindly pro-Iraq War was a resume builder and to get in on the GWOT Media Gravy Train all one had to do was call out Liberals as filthy, America-hating fifth columnists a little bit louder than the rest of the mob.
Card-carrying Straussian or not, the fact that David Brooks and Strauss Superfan Bill Kristol (jump to the 5:00 mark)
each parlayed their fierce Yellow Elephant warmongering and lapdog loyalty to Operation Endless Clusterfuck into gigs at the "New York Times" was one of the most powerful lessons we filthy, America-hating fifth columnists learned during those ugly years.
Learned way down deep in our bones.
As with the Iraq War, most Conservative public intellectuals like Mr. Brooks maintain their place in the food chain by continually rewriting American history and the history of Conservatism through a series professionally-useful lies.
As with the Iraq War, these lies are repeated constantly and are virtually never challenged by the Very Serious People in the media, who also find them professionally-useful.
As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks freaks right out whenever reality penetrates the antiseptic fantasy of his carefully constructed Barbie's Dream House America.
As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks walls up his nearly aphenphosmphobic disdain for the real concerns of real people behind an unshakable faith in government ruled by Very Serious plutocrats and Neoconservative elites who all just happen agree with David Brooks.
As with the Iraq War, all of this is very well documented, including Mr. Brooks' famously full-throated support for the means and ends of Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, yet another Leo Strauss Superfan and poster-boy for the blind, smirking, catastrophic arrogance of the Cult of Neoconservativism (from March of 2005):
Giving Wolfowitz His Due
Let us now praise Paul Wolfowitz. Let us now take another look at the man who has pursued - longer and more forcefully than almost anyone else - the supposedly utopian notion that people across the Muslim world might actually hunger for freedom...
Mr. Brooks also saw fit to use this same column to call out anyone who stood in way of he and Wolfie's Glorious Cause as bitter, anti-Semitic babies:
Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.
Which would almost certainly have been a public bed-shitting of career-killing proportions for a mere mortal, but as has been amply documented time and again, year after year, there is literally no failure or fraud or fuck-up so spectacular that it can put a dent in Mr. Brooks career as America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual.
All we are given to know is that he is protected from his many flops and failures from on high by the Prince of Darkness and, as with the Iraq War, no one on the Right appears to care about it in the slightest because any-fucking-thing is permissible as long as as it pisses off those god-damned America hating Liberals, right?
Step 1: Follow Jonah Goldberg for a bit just to keep tabs on what one of the founding members of the Dick Cheney Fan Club is up to (nothing good) and to see if his writing has improved any (it hasn't: Doughy still makes a fine living selling his signature brand of stone soup out of mossy cultural cliches, beer jokes and reflexive Liberal hatred.)
Step 2: Note the above tweet as Jonah (Editor-at-Large of NRO, LA Times Columnist, USAT contributor, USA Today columnist, author of Liberal Fascism, visiting fellow American Enterprise Institute.) and Byron York (Chief political correspondent, Washington Examiner, Fox News contributor, author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy) share a hearty tweet-laff over how awful Ron Reagan Jr. is for not worshiping his father in a manner sufficiently idolatrous to meet the exacting standards of giddy, Reagan-fetishizing neocon chickenhawks.
Step 3: Send him a note explaining how I could "certainly understand why an ambulatory moral dumpster fire such as yourself would think that."
Step 4: Blocked.
Step 5:
As he bravely runs away, away.
Bravely runs away.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Panstload.
Because after all these years and all of their humiliating failures, that is still
Tucker (Carlson): ....you're apt to see hyperventilation. People hate Cheney on this visceral level. What is so hate-able about Dick Cheney?
Goldberg: I have no, I really...I truly have no idea. I like Dick Cheney. Love to have a beer with the guy---I think one of the things that bothers them is that he doesn't care! The opposite of love isn't hate---it's indifference....
As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.
But his sorry a** is still good enough for National Review Online?