Hūsker Dū: Butcher's Bill Kristol Edition

"Exonerated" is a word with a specific meaning.  You can look it up in any dictionary.  It means "(especially of an official body) absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or wrongdoing, especially after due consideration of the case."

"Vindicate" is another word with a specific meaning, which is also right there in the Merriam-Webster or the OED -- "show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified."

Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --

Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them

...
“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”

-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)

Bill Kristol joins ABC News

Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
...

The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
...
Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:

“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."

Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.

So how, you may fairy ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?  And where, you may fairly ask, does this ghoul get the colossal nerve to lecture anyone else on the subject of "our military's honor" and "our country's decency":

If you care about our military's honor and our country's decency, do read this piece. And all honor to the SEALs who bravely stepped forward to tell the truth. “Not compromising our integrity and keeping right on our side is all we can do.” They did it.https://t.co/oIauuM6poY

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 27, 2019

The answer, of course, is that he gets that colossal nerve from Jonathan Greenberger and from every other amoral corporate media drone who chooses, week after week, to pull out the Big Media Chair for monsters like Bill Kristol.  And the reason they get away with it is because of a phrase you are not going to find in the Merriam-Webster or the OED:  Strategic Forgettery.  From me in 2015:

Dr. Krugman Explains Strategic Forgettery In Two Sentences

From the New York Times:

If the historical record runs counter to what powerful interests want you to believe, well, history will just have to be rewritten. And constant repetition, especially in captive media, keeps this imaginary history in circulation no matter how often it is shown to be false.

This is the Conservative way.  After every Conservative debacle -- foreign or domestic, military or economic -- there is an brief period during which the story of that debacle is still molten and malleable.  Without an agreed-upon fairy tale and a Liberal villain to blame, for a moment both the Beltway media and the Wingnut Hive Mind are in chaos. This is when the cogs and gears of the Mighty Wurlitzer are most in evidence:  the interregnum during which you can actually watch the Right invent, test and discard various bullshit cover stories before settling on one that the Pig People will swallow:

• The Clinton's assassinated Vince Foster.
• Trayvon was a thug who had it coming.
• The ACA Website was Obama's Katrina.
• etc x 1 million

Of course, since it cost trillions of dollars and got thousands of Americans killed, George W. Bush's Iraqi Debacle required a series of series of fire-and-forget alibis --

Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are in league together and just weeks away from leveling New York City with an A-bomb

-- each of which was utterly false --

The war will pay for itself, we will be greeted as liberators and we'll be home before Christmas.

-- each of which was embraced enthusiastically --

Dubya is the greatest Murrican preznit in history and Liberal Iraq war opponents are terrorist-loving surrender monkeys who hate Murrica.  Also Murrica!

-- and then discarded unceremoniously once it was used up --

The Surge worked!

-- until, inevitably, the most transparently ridiculous placeholder of all was put in play --

Who the fuck are you calling "Republican"?  I'm a Constitutional Independent Libertarian Conservative Teabagger who has never even heard of George Bush.

-- long enough for a proper Liberal Villain could be framed for their disaster --

We won in Iraq until Obama stabbed us in the back and invented ISIS.

so that it can pass  into the wingnut pantheon of perfidy where it will be remembered forever more as the Undisputed Truth...

...enabled every step along the way by our compliant Beltway media who are more than willing to hold out chair for the liars and lend their tattered credibility to the lies they tell...

And right on time we are reminded by the late, great Gwen Ifill that the lords and ladies of the Beltway media are never sorry for doing the shit they do.  They are only sorry when someone catches them.  Which why controlling the cameras and the microphones are key to controlling our culture and our politics.  Because if the only people who are allowed on teevee are those who meekly consent to never calling out the people across the table from them for the grotesque lies they've told or the depravity they've tolerated, then those lies and atrocities are simply forgotten -- smothered under the weight of the mediums compulsory, collegial bonhomie:

"My concern ... is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they are sorry that someone catches them.”

In 2007, Gwen Ifill appeared on @MeetThePress, with Tim Russert, @nytdavidbrooks, @JohnJHarwood and @Eugene_Robinson, to discuss Don Imus: https://t.co/8H8tmzzBGx.

— David Gura (@davidgura) December 28, 2019

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