Jeb Bush Keeps Forgetting

That outside the wingnut bubble (and outside the Beltway Media bubble that enfolds it) not everyone has agreed to go along with the fairy tale that history began on January 20, 2009.

From CNN:

Jeb Bush heckled over Iraq at Iowa State Fair 

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN)Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's brother's legacy in the Iraq War continued to haunt his candidacy Friday, when he faced questions from an audience at the Iowa State Fair about his relationship to the policies of President George W. Bush.

One of the fair-goers asked the Republican presidential candidate during his appearance on the Des Moines Register Soapbox whether he was being advised by Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush's deputy secretary of defense and the architect of his Iraq War policy.

Jeb Bush tried to spin the question away from his legacy as the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, but he did so awkwardly.

"Paul Wolfowitz is providing some advice," Bush said. "I get most of my advice from a team that we have in Miami, Florida. Young people that are going to be ... they're not assigned, have experience either in Congress or the previous administration."

He continued: "This game, the parlor game that's played, you know, where you have 25, 30 or 40 people that are helping you with foreign policy, and if they have any executive experience, they've had to deal with two Republican administrations -- who were the people that were presidents, the last two Republican? I mean, this is kind of a tough game for me to be playing, to be honest with you."

...

It is only by the grace of God and the collective clout of the Washington establishment that Jeb doesn't have to talk to his brother and his brother's regent through bulletproof glass on visitor's day at Fort Lewis, and that Paul Wolfowitz hasn't been black-bagged and hauled off to the Hague.

So the idea that Jeb(!) can construct a paragraph which dismisses his professional and familial relationships with traitors and war criminals as a "parlor game" -- in front of teevee cameras and not just cheering wingnuts at CPAC -- and not realize how deep in the shit he just stepped is more evidence that maybe Dubya was the smart one after all.

This Is How They Win

Conservatives, that is.  

Whether they are Very Serious People, like David Brooks, or they work the back alleys of the wingnut dungheap, they never, ever back down.  Once they have decided a thing, no matter how utterly, pandimensionally wrong subsequent events show them to be, they never, ever admit they were wrong and they never, ever stop looking for excuses to re-litigate matters which reality has already settled beyond any doubt.

Take, for example, indestructible human trash-fire Paul Wolfowitz:

As the good Doctor Maddow points out so eloquently here, there is no matter of recent history more utterly fucking settled than the fact that "if you hear something clangingly, obviously wrong in America, look around. Paul Wolfowitz is somewhere near you."

Back in 2003, a greasy little neocon climber at The Weekly Standard named David Brooks was hard at work slandering critics of George Bush's Awesome Iraqi Adventure.  And of all the revolting Conservative claptrap Mr. Brooks cranked out on his way to fame and fortune at the New York Times, the method he used to champion the cause of scumbag Paul Wolfowitz was possibly the sleaziest of all. 

However since it appears that no onr in America but me remembers any of this, allow me to excerpt a small portion of Mr. Brooks' stirring defense of ol' Spitcomb McGee from almost exactly 12 years ago:

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.

Then, of course, it all turned to shit, which is when people like Mr. Brooks -- the recently anointed high priest of the Beltway's brand new "People Should Publicly Apologize and Atone and Shit" temple -- quickly scrambled to use the awesome media platforms they had been give to mass neuralyze the American public --

-- so the uncomfortable subject of everything fucking thing they had said and done during the Age of Dubya never came up again.

Then people Mr. Brooks went immediately back into the business of selling the same old, horrible ideas to the public, but this time slathered in a thick layer of "Who can really say who was right and who was wrong?"

Here, then, is David Brooks' stirring defense of ol' Spitcomb McGee 12 years later, on the occasion of Mr. Wolfowitz being appointed to Jeb Bush's foreign policy team (h/t Heather at C and L.  Also emphasis added because I know you're busy people):

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. And so Bush has this problem.

And I thought the speech — I wasn’t quite as underwhelmed as Mark. I don’t know how you rate underwhelmed-ness. But I do think it was sort of lacking in some of the innovation and substance, the willingness to take a risk and offer something new. I think what’s heartening is that — we can have different views about Paul Wolfowitz. I think he’s a much more complicated character than sometimes he’s portrayed...

At no point do people like David Brooks ever stop being horribly wrong. 

And at no point do these people ever admit being wrong, or apologize it, or correct their thinking.

Because they don't have to.  Because at no point do they suffer even the slightest professional consequences for being wrong, or for being hypocrites.

Because there is still a Club.

And you and I are not invited.

History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, Second as Farce...

...Third as a blog post from some fringe America-hating Liberal who you will never see on "Meet the Press":

Now if the President or Padishah Emperor or King of the Andals or whatever the head of our puppet government in Iraq is weak and corrupt, well shit, just sack him and put in someone else. Hell, Ahmed Chalabi is currently "at liberty" as the vaudevillians used to say, and I hear he works cheap!

...and Fourth, as an actual proposal being floated by Serious Foreign Policy Professionals as seen on  David Gregory's "Meet the Press" and Shuck Todd's "Guess That Soup!" show on MSNBC:

Wolfowitz Sees Chalabi as Viable Iraq Leader Even With Iran Ties

By Nicole Gaouette  Jul 3, 2014 11:00 PM CT

Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who helped spur the U.S. invasion of his country, would be viable as its next prime minister though close ties he established with Iran pose an impediment, said Paul Wolfowitz, a top American national security official when the war launched.

“The man is a survivor,” Wolfowitz said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capitol with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “That’s impressive. I think he wants to succeed in what he does, he’s smart; maybe he’ll figure out a way to do it.”

Chalabi, 69, currently serves in Iraq’s Parliament as government forces battle insurgents who have destabilized the country and prompted calls for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s resignation.

Chalabi’s political group, the Iraqi National Congress, supplied Wolfowitz and others in President George W. Bush’s administration with information that tied then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and alleged he was developing weapons of mass destruction -- the justification for the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The information was later discredited and in May 2004, U.S. soldiers raided Chalabi’s house and offices in Iraq to investigate allegations of fraud and grand theft against him...

I'd laugh a lot harder at those silly furriners for trying to turd-polish an unrepentant Iraq War con man and pathological liar like Chalabi into a serious candidate for Prime Minister were it not for the fact that my very own American teevee and political system is positively festooned with an army unrepentant Conservative Iraq Wars criminals, con men, bigots, frauds and lunatics being treated as serious thinkers and astute men of world every single fucking day of the week.

America's Wolfowitz Problem

*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.

(Those of us who are doomed to remember the past also vividly recall the last time Dirty Hippies started talking openly about the bloody ordure of failure and madness and slaughter of which Mr. Wolfowitz reeks,  fellow Neocons like David Brooks went straight for the long knives, angrily dismissing criticism of The Great Man as nothing but anti-Semitism and the "socialism of fools".

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.