Michael Gerson, Conservative Hedgehog

  "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." -- Archilochus of Paros.

The Liberal Fox knows many things.  Climate change is real.  Health care is a right.  Biden won.  Masks work.  George W. Bush and his gang of Neocon conquistadors lied us into the wrong wars and then irreparably botched them.  The GOP has been fucked in the head for decades.  The Beltway media is broken beyond repair.  

Many things.

But the Conservative Hedgehog knows one big thing.  And that is that no matter how repeatedly, comprehensively and lethally wrong they are, they will never be brought to book for their sins.  

Never, ever.

Which brings us once again to the matter of Mr. Michael Gerson:  former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser, relentless war pimp, reliable Beltway Republican stalactite and, of course, a permanent member of the Can-Never-Be-Fired-No-Matter-How-Fucking-Wrong-They-Are Pundit Guild.

And because Mr. Gerson is a permanent member of the Can-Never-Be-Fired-No-Matter-How-Fucking-Wrong-They-Are Pundit Guild he knows he can blithely write this sort of thing in the Washington Post (syndicated here) -- 

The United States’ war in Afghanistan formally ended in 2014. The maintenance of a few thousand troops to support the Afghan military and conduct counterterrorist operations had a cost. But that cost was minimal compared with the price of the Taliban’s complete triumph in Afghanistan — the humanitarian disaster, the harm to American credibility, the destabilizing flow of refugees, the morale boost for Islamism and the likely incubation of new terrorist threats.

...while blithely ignoring what his own newspaper was writing just a few pages away in this column summarizing the ugly findings from an internal investigation by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction:

Opinion: Rather than focus on how the U.S. got out of Afghanistan, focus on how it got in

...

Under President George W. Bush, the early mission — to defeat al-Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — quickly turned to nation-building. The United States would seek to build a democratic state in an impoverished country with entrenched divisions and cultural, language and religious traditions of which U.S. national security managers and military officials remained utterly ignorant.

That mission was an abject failure from the beginning. Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent more money developing Afghan institutions than it had spent to help all of Western Europe after World War II. Yet as Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan concluded, the “single biggest project” stemming from the flood of dollars “may have been the development of mass corruption.” Decades and millions of dollars devoted to building up the Afghanistan military produced forces that U.S. military trainers described as incompetent and unmotivated, with commanders making off with millions from the salaries of tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

The effort to build a “flourishing market economy” led to, as Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar under Bush and President Barack Obama, reported, “a flourishing drug trade — the only part of the market that’s working.” Nearly $10 billion was spent to eradicate poppy production but as of 2018, Afghan farmers produced more than 80 percent of the global opium supply. The reality, Lute admitted, was that “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”...

The report spells out in stark, infuriating detail just how much of a absurdist puppet show Afghanistan became after Mr. Gerson's boss fucked up his one job in that slice of the globe -- capturing bin Laden and those directly responsible for 9/11 -- and decided instead to leave a holding force there and pretend that he could use dollars and tanks to conjure a democracy and a market economy out of thin air so he cold get on with his real priority: using America's fury and grief over 9/11 to lie us into a war of conquest in oil-rich Iraq.  

Or maybe you remember Mr. Gerson as the clod who never said a mumbling word as his boss pissed away the Clinton budget surplus on gargantuan tax cuts for the rich and saddled the nation with the largest deficits in history.  As a man who slunk offstage having helped Dubya presided over the collapse of the global economy, but who suddenly discovered his Inner Fiscal Conservative mere months after the new Democratic president was inaugurated and who was only too happy to be able to throw around words like "unsustainable" and "realistic" again:

I am not generally a deficit hawk. A government can run a responsible deficit in a growing economy -- and may have to run one to counteract an economic downturn. But Obama's proposed level of debt is irresponsible. It makes broad tax increases nearly inevitable. It expands our dependence on China, America's loan officer. And it creates pressure for the government to purchase or monetize debt, leading to inflation. No Republican, even of the moderate variety, could accept a budget that spends America into unsustainable debt by completely avoiding the setting of realistic priorities. And none in Congress did.

But while Mr. Gerson routinely slagged President Obama for spending too much money on stuff Mr. Gerson doesn't believe Americans should have -- like affordable health care -- when it came to Dubya War One, words like "unsustainable" and "realistic" dry up in Mr. Gerson's mouth and blow away.  

Who cares if the United State has already pissed two trillion dollars away into the sands of Afghanistan?  What does it matter that we spent an entire generation training the Afghan military and government to use the weapons we put into their hands to defend their country, and the minute we started for the exits they opened the city gates and greeted the Taliban as liberators?  

In Mr. Gerson's mind none of that is even worth mentioning.  All that matters is his rage that the first and only remaining monument to the Neocon's grand plan for regional hegemony...

...has now become the last few lines of Ozymandias:

...My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Burn The Lifeboats