JUDY WOODRUFF: Last thing I will raise. We have only got about 30 seconds, so this is tough. The 10th anniversary of the war in Iraq, just a very brief thought from both of you about how it -- looking back, some people are asking, was it worth it? I may not -- I don't want to put you on the spot in 15 seconds, David, but ...
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I'm not sure it was worth it. I think we look back, and we are more modest about what our intelligence can do, more modest about how we can nation-build, more modest about our own sort of role in the world. And so I think it's been a lesson in modesty, but not isolation.
Having picked through most of the inventory of 10-years-later apologies, obfuscations, alibis, revisionism and outright, "Fuck Yeah!" triumphalist lies from America's most infamous Operation Clusterfuck chickenhawk supporters, this was the sum total of David Brooks' opinion on the subject of Iraq.
Mr. Brooks can burn entire 800-word columns in America's newspaper of record musing about the Niebuhrian implications of a bowl of lemon custard, but when it comes to the biggest foreign policy debacle in modern history?
One which he fully and enthusiastically supported at the top of his voice?
One which he gleefully exploited to curb-stomp every Liberal target in sight?
One which he used to massively advance his career?
Uh...modesty, Judy.
I think it had something to do with fucking modesty.
CommonSense Media, a digital advertising network co-founded by film producer and Firedoglake publisher Jane Hamsher, has filed for bankruptcy to liquidate its assets.
Founded in 2007 by Hamsher, AJ Schuler and Deveria Flowers, CommonSense Media describes itself as “a digital alliance of publishers and advertisers who are shaping the future of digital advertising in the political space.”
CommonSense Media's Chapter 7 filing earlier this month in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Washington, D.C., lists many prominent news sites and blogs among its 48 creditors. (A portion of the document, obtained in a public records search, is below.) Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings allow companies to liquidate assets while being protected from creditors.
Hamsher is known as a leading figure in the progressive blogopshere and left-leaning pundit. CommonSense Media's creditors, however, span the political spectrum and include Daily Kos, Raw Story, AlterNet, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, The New Republic, Crooks and Liars, The Drudge Report, National Review Online, RedState Human Events Eagle Publishing, Town Hall Salem Communications , Five Thirty Eight, The Hill, CQ-Roll Call, Taylor Marsh, John Aravosis (AMERICAblog) and Duncan Black (Eschaton).
Hamsher signed the bankruptcy filing, dated March 18, as "debtor" and is listed in a related document as "president." The company's name on its site is "CommonSense Media." The court filing refers to "Common Sense Media, LLC."
...
If you have ever been curious about why some otherwise doughty high-end bloggers were always so shy about ever crossing Ms. Hamsher no matter what she said or did, perhaps you are now a little less curious.
For the record, the only blogging revenue I have ever received has come via direct voluntary contributions from readers. No ads. No Soros checks. No "sponsored content". No quids pros or quos.
Dick Morris Says He Is Working On An RNC Ad Aimed At Latinos
Dick Morris is working with Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus on a new television advertisement that will include Preibus seeking to attract Latino voters, Morris revealed during an appearance in New York City Thursday.
Speaking at the Poli Conference, a political consulting event for Latin American campaign professionals, Morris said the ad will feature Priebus reaching out to "those Latin Americans who've come to the United States to help us build our country, to help harvest our food, to help make our economy work and [Priebus'] message is 'welcome, we need you, you're making our country younger, more prosperous, harder working and we need you for the future.'"
According to Morris, the ad will make use of "that concept of reflecting back to people their own value and their own worth. In the advertisement he [Priebus] says, 'we honor our ancestors who took covered wagons to settle the west and brave the Indians, but you are the new pioneers, you are the new people in America doing that.' And I think that is a very, very interesting thing to do in a campaign."
Republican Party Spokesman Ryan Mahoney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ad. Asked about when it might run or where, Morris declined to offer more details.
Morris' work with the Republican National Committee is noteworthy given the implosion of Morris' stature and credibility following the 2012 election and his now infamous prediction of a "landslide" victory for Republican Mitt Romney. After the election Morris was effectively banned from appearing on Fox News, where he worked as an on-air contributor until the network declined to renew his contract in early February. Morris also brings with him a host of ethics problems -- Morris' group Super PAC for America reportedly spent significant amounts of money renting Morris' own email list in the months before the election, allowing him to simply pocket money raised by the group.
This is a picture of a portion of planet Earth where I used to live as seen from low Earth orbit.
This is a picture of our lovely, green and blue planet as seen from
a distance of 10 million kilometers, shot by the Juno spacecraft en route to Jupiter.
As here is a picture of Earth as seen from
behind the rings of Saturn.
You will notice that as you move further and further away from Earth, every meaningful, human-scale boundary is lost.
From far away you cannot distinguish between Chicago and North Korea.
From even further away you cannot make out the difference between the Earth and the Moon.
So depending on where you plant your feet and how much geological time you choose to embrace you could write that the distinction between, say, the administration of Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago and the reign of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il were radically different in every meaningful way...
...or you could opine that all of human history is a mere tick of the galactic clock, and all human endeavors are the vain and ridiculous squalling of foolish species that will no doubt soon vanish, unnoticed and unmourned.
Which lays out the perfectly legitimate, detailed low-orbit slam on MSNBC for selling out Phil Donahue and muzzling Bill Moyers:
...if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.
Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.
No argument here.
Then Mr. Hedges takes it out to 10 million kilometers because what this column is really about is "they're all equally awful!"
The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns.
And they all get paid too much:
These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars.
Then, suddenly, it's about Tom Friedman also too!
It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization.
Because however legitimate the original argument may be -- and kicking the crap out of the lackeys who burned Donohue and smothered Moyers is entirely legitimate -- for the Purity Caucus it is vitally important to move every debate as quickly as possible from whatever the initial point was outward to the broader theme that there is absolutely no distinction whatsoever between, say, Fox News and MSNBC:
The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news.
Vitall important that all discussion be limited as quickly as possible to only that which is visible from the orbit of Saturn:
They do not devote significant time to climate scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem. They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or ignore the nation’s most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour, filling our heads with the theater of the absurd. They play clips of their television rivals ridiculing them and ridicule their rivals in return.
After which, for dessert, you can wander through the column's 244 (an counting) comments that form the ever-widening circle of contestants playing the "Whose of conspiracy theory is bigger?" game behind Mr. Hedge's column and learn everything you ever wanted to know about:
How Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are just another set of tools of the empire.
How Rachel Maddow's book might be interesting, but was just a bunch of stuff from ten years ago.
How MSNBC is "just opinion not facts!"
How Rachel Maddow is obsessed with divisive identity policies about gay stuff and abortion that is all designed by her corporate paymasters to distract The People for the Real Issues.
Top!Secret! World Jewish Conspiracy Stuff.
Top!Secret!Kennedy Assassination Stuff
Top!Secret!9/11 Truth stuff, and interplay during which several commenters turn on him for begin too big a pussy to Tell The Truth.
Why you should never, ever vote.
I hear the orbit of Saturn is a lovely place. There, with the Universe as your backyard, you have enough room to encompass however many of the widest, deepest and grandest conspiracy theories as may please you. From there you can laugh and sneer at the pettiness and cruelty your entire species from safe, safe, safe distance and never have to trouble yourself with the actual concerns of our silly monkey-race or grubby little human details like the difference betweenthe administration of Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago and the reign of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.
I hear the orbit of Saturn is a lovely place. But I don't live there. UPDATE: Welcome Crooks and Liars Readers.
The inarticulate tendency in conservatism is what led John Stuart Mill to say the following:
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
Of course, I think that’s a misunderstanding. The inability to articulate the value of something you have come to love or do is, to my mind, part of its value. Some things in life are ineffable and to explain them almost a violation of their essence. Most of these lie in the practical arena. How does a master chef explain exactly how he makes a dish with his singular skill, developed for years? How do those who are doing beautiful things with scooters answer when you ask them how they became so good at it, and why they keep at it? How do I explain why the cutting down of a small copse of trees near my childhood home traumatized me – because of what it did to my little universe of boyish escape?
There are reasons we can come up with. But they don’t capture the lived experience and never can. And it is precisely when you explain it that you undermine it. As soon as you call the town you have always lived in a “community”, it no longer is one. This is the Tao of conservatism. If conservatism were to be properly represented by a religion, it would be the opposite of fundamentalist Christianity. It would be Taoism.
Seen from the outside, it has long been painfully clear that the most charitable thing one could say about Conservatism is that it has two things in common with an alien encounter: chronic butt-hurt and a complete inability to remember the past.
But I suppose if you are is a Conservative -- especially if are a very public Conservative who has the word "Conservative" indelibly stamped on every professional document that defines your public existence -- and you cannot afford to look like a complete dolt, you need to make up some shit about how Conservatism is completely other than what it obviously is.
How it is a purely mysterious, interior experience that disintegrates once you try to pin it to the page with words. Or explain it to people who don't fall for the bullshit.
How it isn't a fucked up witchbag of bigots and imbeciles and hucksters.
If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke. If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.
Since your Beltway Media has collectively decided that the 10th anniversary of the launch of the greatest American foreign policy disaster in modern history holds no lessons worth learning, I though I'd give Mr. Moyers' the floor.
It's not that there weren't plenty Iraq War sockpuppets stocking the green rooms of every Sunday show in the land. There were. There always are. Hell, David Gregory went so far as to prove to the world that he is perfectly capable of dredging up their words from all the way back in 2003...
DAVID GREGORY: E.J., I want to get to you in just a second, but I want to come back to, Ralph. I mean, David [Brooks] wrote back in 2003, we looked at your column, 2003 you wrote the following: "The conservative Court is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage, we should insist on gay marriage." What is your opposition to it? [Question directed to Ralph Reed]
The whole subject of Iraq and who was right and who was Dick Cheney's Dremel tool is far, far too icky and professionally parlous for millionaire-sea-monkeys-in-suits like David Gregory to countenance, which is why, as far as the Sunday Gasbagger are concerned, the whole written record of who said what about Iraq and Bush and the Dirty Hippies might as have been put to the torch along with the naughty books section of the Library at Alexandria.
Forever lost to history...as long as clowns like Mr. Gregory continue to be permitted to write that history.
By way of quantifiable example, you might recall that last week was the run-up to the 10th anniversary of the worst foreign policy debacle in modern American history: that unmitigated Republican catastrophe which was foisted on the American people by a cabal of war criminals, sociopaths, imbeciles and profiteers. Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away, last week was also the week that a well-known a bronze age religion picked a new titular head whose job appears to be living in a big castle in a tiny city/state and issuing pronouncements that 90% of the faithful ignore 90% of the time.
Today. more Iraq War salesmen hype the Iran threat and David Gregory stands up for the right to drink soda
BY ALEX PAREENE
How many of these people should be banned from television forever?
One interesting thing I’ve noted since I started watching the mostly wretched Sunday shows is that for the most part there is not much debate, between the liberal and conservative panel mainstays, on gay marriage. Everyone is in favor of it or not inclined to strongly oppose it. So in order to have a proper right-vs-left Sunday Show Debate on the matter, two of the shows today were forced to bring in outspoken bigots. National embarrassments Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed both gamely answered the call, and defended “traditional marriage” from the inevitable march of widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians.
First, though, ABC’s “This Week,” the only one of the big three shows this morning to have another idiotic debate about budgets, began with George Stephanopoulos actually bragging — bragging! — that he had both Jim Messina and Karl Rove. Oh boy, two campaign strategists! When I am looking for well-considered and thoughtful commentary on national issues, I always turn to people who are good at managing political campaigns.
Finally, over on This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins got into the Green Room laudanum again and, well, the tiny canaries that orbit her head went into full spring mating cry.
Yeah, Americans don't take it well and don't accept it as a resolution when their black robed masters in Washington decide to put on them what they decide is the right thing. One of the great sins of Roe versus Wade, the abortion decision of 40 years ago, was that it decided everyone has to do it one way, instead of leaving it to the states. It seems to me it is certainly in line with conservative political thinking, but I think it would be acceptable certainly to liberal thinking, that when there are these gnawing, disagreeing questions going on in America, if you can't solve it here, you can say everybody can solve it down there. Let's state by state make their decision. You will immediately have New York having some of the most liberal decisions on this issue. You will perhaps have Utah or Arkansas, having less liberal decisions. Work questions out that way as much as possible.
Brilliant. If only someone had figured out this formula before! And, not for nothing, but we had a bad president for eight years because of a decision by "black-robed masters," at least two of whom had insurmountable conflicts of interest. I don't recall Our Lady's vapors back then.
The old gal is back on the sauce (via the New Yorker):
NOONAN GOES ALL KRUGMAN ON US
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
...
Noonan, despite a quick “to be sure” aside in which she avers that things like deficits, regulations, and “the federal tax code” are “part of” the problem, is clear about which side she’s on:
But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.
For Noonan, “everywhere you look” is a hotel she stayed at in Pittsburgh, which was so understaffed there was no bellhop to walk her up to her room in case a criminal was lurking. Nevertheless, about “the central thing,” she, like Paul Krugman, is right (i.e., left).
She’s also right about what Obama should have done about it:
He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care.
Here’s where I started getting dizzy. Noonan is describing exactly what Obama did do. He did see a jobs crisis four years ago. As a major part of his eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus package (which he pursued in addition to, not instead of, health care), he did go for public-works projects, specifically including bridges and a strengthened power grid. The only opposition to all that bridge-building and grid-strengthening came from Noonan’s party. In the House, zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, three did. Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter jumped from the G.O.P. before he was pushed. (Repackaging himself as a Democrat did not keep him from landing with a splat.) Olympia Snowe, citing hyperpartisanship and legislative dysfunction, retired. Her Maine colleague Susan Collins, the last RINO in the Senate zoo, may or may not seek a fourth term...
Lesson: Eventually, the bottle drinks you...
'Cause the bouncer is a Sumo wrestler Cream-puff Casper Milquetoast And the owner is a mental midget With the I.Q. of a fence-post...
(On behalf of the entire blogosphere, I'd like to once again eternal thank Tengrain at "Mock, Paper, Scissors" for inventing the Noonan Genre virtually single-handed. However many noobs like me who may now till that rich soil, never forget is was Tengrain who busted the sod, dug the irrigation ditches and built the railroad spur to take the harvest to market.)
I'm not talking about all the good people who were completely fooled by the Bush Administration; who reluctantly acceded to the bulldozing insistence that we needed to conquer and remake Iraq Now!Now!Now! because if we did not, we'd start losing major America cities to terrorist attacks that would make 9/11 look like Sheffield Townswomen's Guild reenactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor.
And why wouldn't they believe it?
After all, despite the clear evident that the Republican Party had devolved into a cult of reptile aliens, to most Americans the idea that any US President -- even one who stole the office -- would hijack the worst terrorist attack in American history use it to lie us into the wrong war with the wrong enemy was almost unimaginable. Especially as, one by one, some of their most elite institutions and trusted public authorities echoed the Bush Administration party line.
That impulse I can understand and defend.
What cannot be defended or forgiven was the rush by the Professional Right to seize on the Iraq War as the Best Hippie-Bashing Sledgehammer Ever. War as Magic Cudgel, perfectly engineered to permanently secure the Reagan Revolution by defeating America's real enemy -- the Evil Liberal Horde -- by beating their teeth out and then kicking them in the stomach for mumbling (h/t Phillip Marlowe). And best of all, to do it with the giddy, fascist delight of the thug who knows he is curb-stomping someone who cannot fight back; who finds he likes the intoxicating taste of blood on his teeth and that no one is going to stop him from sinking his fangs in again and again and again.
In the summer of 2000, when I foolishly found myself wanting Al Gore to lose (Excelsior!), it was not a strong emotion. In the campaign, Gore was the advocate for a larger defense budget and Bush was all about being a “humble” nation. I figured there wasn’t much difference between them (and I still think Gore would have launched the Iraq War as well). But when the vote ended up a statistical tie in a key state, Florida, stances hardened.
I was a lonely Bush supporter in TNR offices back then, and I felt something I’d never felt before, even in the polarized, back-biting, ego-colliding of that era’s TNR. My colleagues felt that the election was being stolen in front of their eyes – and there was almost a cold civil war mood emerging. They also knew, as I did, that Bush would be a president without a majority of the national popular vote. Worse, Bush, instead of governing in a way that calmed the waters, and acknowledging his weak position, acted from the get-go as if he had won a landslide. America was in a constitutional crisis months before it was embroiled in a second Pearl Harbor. The very legitimacy of the entire democracy was in the air. It was in that profoundly polarized atmosphere that the catastrophe happened.
It may have seemed meaningless at the time, but now we know why 7,000 people [sic] sacrificed their lives — so that we’d all forget how Bush stole a presidential election.
My horror at 9/11, combined with crippling fear, compounded by personal polarization was a fatal combination. This is not an excuse. It’s an attempt at an explanation. And my loathing of the left had been intensified earlier that year by a traumatizing exposure of my own sex life by gay leftists determined to destroy my reputation and career because of my mere existence as a gay conservative.
I had spent much of the 1990s at war with the gay left, and I think it had embittered me.
...
-- full of truths, half-truths and equivocations, but he will never get close to understanding the root of what really happened because what really happened is too much for him to face. From L'Hote:
where's all the hippie punching?
...
First, some might say that personality doesn't matter, that what matters is substance. But personality influences substance. A huge amount of the arguments in favor of the war were essentially genetic: look at the people opposing the war, dirty fucking hippies! How could you stand with them? From the space of 10 years, people are putting all of their arguments into the most rational, logical light. Even in the commission of apologizing, they can't stop themselves from trying to rationalize what they advocated. But I don't, actually, think that they were being rational when they advocated for war. I think they were tribal, and they were being emotional, and that it mattered. And the refusal to recognize that makes it more dangerous that they will get it wrong in the future.
Second, I think people don't want to admit that hatred of the left-wing was part of their problem in 2002 and 2003 because they still hate the left, and recognizing the irrationality of their earlier hatred would compel them to think over their current hatred. Jon Chait, to pick one of the people doling out so-so-sorrys, certainly has never stopped treating the left with open-mouthed contempt. (Far more contempt than he has for most Republicans.) Look, casting your eyes back a decade, no matter how much you couch it as a matter of self-criticism, is easy. You're operating at a remove. You get to consider a much younger you. Thinking about how you currently are animated by petty resentments is harder.
Behold the Hatred, Resentment, and Mockery Aimed at Anti-Iraq War Protesters
Few hawks who treated them shabbily have reflected on their behavior in reminisces about the conflict.
Reflecting on the apologetic Iraq War retrospectives many writers have published in recent days, Freddie deBoer observes that "one of the most obvious and salient aspects of the run up to the war" is being ignored: "the incredible power of personal resentment against antiwar people, or what antiwar people were perceived to be." As he remembers it, "the visceral hatred of those opposing the war, and particularly the activists, was impossible to miss. It wasn't opposition. It wasn't disagreement. It was pure, irrational hatred, frequently devolving into accusations of antiwar activists being effectively part of the enemy." Now, he says, it is all but forgotten.
Is he exaggerating?
Judge for yourself. And may the quotes I've assembled serve as a caution: All this is what was said about the people who protested a war that a majority of Americans now regard as a tragic mistake, that began on false pretenses, and that proved far more costly than any advocates anticipated. Keep in mind as you read that tens of millions of people in dozens of countries protested against the impending invasion of Iraq over a period lasting several years. To be sure, some behaved in ways that justified criticism. But none could discredit the cause generally, and any reductive description of "what anti-war protesters are like" is self-evidently nonsense.
...
The simple truth which Mr. Sullivan cannot bear to face is how easily and eagerly he and so many of his fellow "Reasonable Conservatives" shed their Burkean figleaves of modesty and reticence and became everything the Dirty Hippies had always warned they were under their veneers of urbanity and collegiality -- everything Mr. Sullivan claims to loathe in every homophobe who ever terrorized a gay man.
Yet in those dreadful months before the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, the cheerleaders for war inhabited a place of privilege within the media. They could say anything—and get away with it. Kristol could declare—as he did the day before our exchange—that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East," face little challenge, and gain plenty of debate-shaping attention.
...
They showed themselves to be goons who, when offered the chance to bully the weak, grabbed it with both hands.
They showed themselves thugs who didn't just fail their own, personal Milgram Tests, but found a way to made a tidy profit by cranking the shock box up to 11.
...I don't want an open and rational debate with these lycanthropes. They relied on journalistic convention and the soft agreements between gentlemen to peddle their poison. I want them dismissed from this anniversary because it's like bringing out the Manson family to discuss the film oeuvre of Sharon Tate. I want to see op-eds from Hans Blix, and from ElBaradei. I want to see long retrospectives, not from the liberal laptop warriors assembled by The New Republic, but from Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. (A note: I generally credit "the McClatchy guys" for getting it right. I got that wrong. McClatchy bought out Knight-Ridder after Strobel and Landay did all their best work. They did that work under the aegis of Knight-Ridder and that should be properly recognized.) For all the fan-dancing that's being done by people in order to rehabilitate themselves, it is still the most important thing to remember that there were people who got...it...right. Luckily, over at his place, Bill Moyers put up the full-length television special he did a few years back on this very subject. Consider that my open and rational response to the disgusting spectacle playing itself out elsewhere.
When the crisis came, many good people were misled by war criminals who lied and lied and lied and turned those good people's sense of duty and their faith in their civic institutions against them. And from my vantage point as a deeply flawed and failed human being, the good people who were defrauded and terrorized into making a mistake do not require anyone's forgiveness.
But when that crisis came and they were given complete freedom of movement, professional Conservative public intellectuals took that opportunity to whip out a gun, leap up on the table and use their privileged positions in the public square to threaten to waste any Hippie who opened his fucking pie-hole.
On this site I often stand in the saddle of my high horse to bitch about Fake Centrism. Fake Centrism is a racket. A scam. A Potemkin village run by well-connected hucksters who insist that the*:
...Universe [is] carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.
It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.
It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.
It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.
However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.
Ta Nehisi Coats -- who writes better than everybody -- recently had a near-fatal allergic reaction while on the train. Which, being nerd-to-the-core, he then blogged about before heading off to Europe with a bag of good reads.
The world has changed. It has not changed totally, but it has changed significantly. When I fell out on the train, everyone on the car was white. So were all the paramedics and all the doctors and nurses. The challenge for someone trying to assess America, at this moment, is properly calibrating how far we've gone with how far we have to go. Too much optimism renders you naive; too much pessimism makes you cynical.
Je ne sais pas. What I know is I live in a time that people who made me possible only dreamed of. And then yesterday I almost lost it all...
UPDATE (h/t "Scott"): As Peggy Noonan showed in yesterday's WSJ, in the seven years since I wrote that, the hustlers of Fake Centrism have not updates their hymnal by so much as a single note:
...
Mr. Powell told the U.N. Saddam Hussein must be stopped and asserted that Iraq had developed and was developing weapons of mass destruction. That turned out not to be true.
But I believed it, supported the war, and cheered the troops. My break came in 2005, with two columns (here and here) that questioned Mr. Bush's thinking, his core premises and assumptions, as presented in his Second Inaugural Address. That questioning in time became sharp criticism, accompanied by a feeling of estrangement. In the future I would feel a deeper skepticism toward both parties.
So that was my Iraq, wronger than some at the start, righter than some at the end, and not shocked by the darkening picture I saw when I went there in 2011.
Henry Kissinger said recently that he had in his lifetime seen America enthusiastically enter four wars and struggle in the end to end each of them.
Maybe great nations do not learn lessons, they relearn them.
I called for a serious Republican debate on its foreign policy, but the Democrats need one too. What's their overarching vision? Do they have a strategy, or only sentiments?
There's a lot of Republican self-criticism and self-examination going on. What about the Democrats'?
