Now That the War in Iraq Is Over...

According to the New York Times Magazine, the war is over and we should all go home.

Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over. 

Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?

by Ross Barkan

Oh sweet summer child. 

Mr. Barkan was a mere stripling lad of 13 back in 2003, so maybe he is unfamiliar with the early work of his most famous New York Times colleague: Mr. David Brooks.  At the time Mr. Brooks was still being paid to stomp stupid (his word), crazy (his word) Liberals for Bloody Bill Kristol at the now-defunct Weekly Standard and was confidently making sneeringly belligerent declarations about a different resistance during a different struggle.  

The war was over.  The Good Guys had triumphed.  Neoconservatism had been vindicated.  And it was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional absurdism (emphasis added.)

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

By

David Brooks

April 28, 2003 4:00 am

Now that the war in Iraq is over, we’ll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami’s phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are...

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic “Aha!” moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam’s remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, “We were wrong. Bush was right.” They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war’s opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago...

Three days later, Bush was standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln giving his "Mission Accomplished" speech.

And the pundits swooooned.  

This is all from a retrospective in The Huffington Post, May 1, 2008 (emphasis added):

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a "hero" and boomed, "He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." He added: "Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple."

PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was "part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan." 

On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, "The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing."

Bob Schieffer on CBS said: "As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time." His guest, Joe Klein, responded: "Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me." 

Everyone agreed the Democrats and antiwar critics were now on the run.

Then, after getting his ass kicked by John Kerry in every debate and relying on one of the most savage slander-and-gay-bashing campaigns in modern history (engineered by Resistance Hero Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove, with a big assist from Fox News and the Swiftboat Scumbags), the incompetent, dry-drunk halfwit president won re-election in November of 2004. 

And a thousand blogs were born.

Within a year, the Bush administration (defenestration?) started to fall apart in ways the Republican White House could no longer cover up and the Conservative media could no longer out-shout.  It got so bad that by April of 2006, with Iraq now in complete, murderous chaos, the Bush White House felt it necessary to reassure everyone that Rummy was doing a heckuva job!

President Bush Expresses Full Support, Appreciation for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

Earlier today I spoke with Don Rumsfeld about ongoing military operations in the Global War on Terror. I reiterated my strong support for his leadership during this historic and challenging time for our Nation.

Seven months later...

Bush Ousts Embattled Rumsfeld; Democrats Near Control of Senate

Ex-CIA Chief Robert Gates Nominated to Lead Pentagon

By this point, the blogs had focused so much resistance energy that they were able to help Ned Lamont kick the ass of incumbent senator and Iraq war pimp, Holy Joe Lieberman, in a free and fair Democratic primary.

This caused Ross Barkan's future New York Times colleague, David Brooks, to lose his fucking mind and accuse the "flamers" of the Liberal blogosphere of being the moral equivalent of corrupt Republican waterhead thug Tom DeLay in an infamous column about which I have written many times.  

Sadly, with the energetic help of the Connecticut Republican party and many of the Democratic party's incumbent senators -- including, shamefully. then-Illinois senator, Barack Obama -- Lieberman managed to cook up a third party (the Connecticut for Lieberman Party) under whose banner he ran and won in the 2006 general election. 

As you may recall, Joe Lieberman paid Obama back for his political largesse when he needed the mot back by (checks notes) stabbing Obama in the back on the Affordable Car Act. 

Why Joe Lieberman is holding Barack Obama to ransom over healthcare

Democrats accuse Gore's former running mate of bitterness and vanity after he uses his deciding vote in Congress to water down president's reforms 

So, getting back around to the original point of this post in a getting-back-around-to sort of way, let's finish up with the inimitable Rick Perlstein on the SuckerBorg site yesterday:

It's part of our cultural crisis that people have no compunctions about writing things off the top of their head without even a pretense of evaluating evidence.

Today New York Times Magazine ran just such an evidence-free wank, "Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.

Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?"

Here is a picture of a standing-room-only meeting yesterday of Chicagoans taking in detailed instruction about how to document and respond to ICE raids. A picture of similar-sized crowd at a  City Hall press conference of the people organizing against denuding Chicago's sanctuary city ordinance (we won, 39-11). And a picture two hundred people waiting in line for the drawing for seven spots to speak in the public comment at the City Council meeting.

Jonathan Swift: " It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom." Folly, truly: a piece like that performs a ritual of innocence among agenda-setting elite political journalists by evading its own agency: it says something that is not so; but, saying it,  may help make it so.

There is energy to spare out here in the Real World.

It's just that at the moment, much of it is scattered by grief and shock and fear, so has not yet gathered itself into a siege engine capable of smashing the American Fascist Party to smithereens.  

Not yet.

I Am The Liberal Media