December 11th, 2006
As I watched FauxNews this Sunday I couldn’t help but to blurt, Juan, you’re my hero. Here’s what prompted my reaction, via ThinkProgress.com:
After enduring years of posturing on Iraq by Fox’s Brit Hume and the National Review’s Bill Kristol on the Fox News Sunday roundtable, Juan Williams reached his limit. This morning, Williams said, “Sometimes I just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began.”
Williams noted that Hume and Kristol “don’t give credit to people…who said from the start this is a mistake.” Instead, “now it’s everybody’s a surrender monkey or impatient or squeamish or weak.”
[...]
Transcript:
WILLIAMS: Squishy, impatient, you know, they’ll be in the land of milk and honey? What do you imagine, an American administration is coming in, Republican or Democrat, after President Bush that’s just going to lay down and run away like scared little —
HUME: It will not be phrased that way. Listen, Juan, it’s very simple.
WILLIAMS: This is really — sometimes i just want to scream. You guys have been going on since this thing began. I mean, you don’t give credit to people, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Barbara Lee, people who said from the start this is a mistake. You put them down. Now it’s everybody’s a surrender monkey or impatient or squeamish or weak. Why can’t you say, hey, there’s a real problem in Iraq?
UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has a longer clip of the Fauxnews segment.
December 7th, 2006
David Broader is often referred to as the "Dean" of the DC press corps, because of the perceived authority with which he writes about entrenched establishment interests in DC. The so-called Dean of the DC press corps is less interested in the factual consequences of policies, and more concerned with the process of compromise and the personalities involved. Over the years, this bloviating Dean has demonstrated a clear right-of-center bias; that is, he favors the Republican viewpoint, as he provides a certain establishment shine to the Republican talking point of the day. And, as you can imagine, given the
bloviating Dean’s penchant for relaying on pro-institutional and establishment frames, his natural bias for the Republican viewpoint, the Dean was no fan of the Clinton White House, given how Bill "disrespected" the Oval Office (read, how Bill Clinton received a blow job in the Oval Office).
At any rate, here we see one more example of the bloviating Dean ignoring the grim consequences of current Republican policies re: Iraq, as, instead, he focuses on a personality driven process of what respectable consensus in DC should look like:
Whatever the final impact of the Iraq Study Group report being issued today, for the 10 commission members this was an exhilarating experience, a demonstration of genuine bipartisanship that they hope will serve as an example to the broader political world.
[...]
The nine men and one woman serving on the commission — five from each party — represented a wide range of political backgrounds and philosophical views. Several had been on opposing sides in past presidential campaigns.
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"This process has been a lesson in civility."
Hmmm… never mind the real world "impact" of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), instead, let’s appreciate what an "exhilarating experience" this exercise was for the ten old-establishment-hands that comprised the ISG.
As for the bloviating Dean’s idea that the ten old-establishment-hands of the ISG "represented a wide range of political backgrounds and philosophical views," let’s remember:
- By the Dean’s own accounting, the ISG was comprised of 5 Democrats/5 Republicans, by definition this does not constitute a "wide range political backgrounds and philosophical views" — it merely represents two political views, even if within the two parties there are varying viewpoints on an issue.
- None of the ISG members opposed the Iraq invasion before the Bush administration went into that country.
Senator Feingold, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, underscored the same two points I list above. Additionally, unlike the bloviating Dean, whom focuses on what an "exhilarating experience" this was for the ten old-establishment-hands, Senator Feingold is not afraid to look at the real world "final impact" of the ISG report:
“Unfortunately, the Iraq Study Group report does too little to change the flawed mind-set that led to the misguided war in Iraq. Maybe there are still people in Washington who need a study group to tell them that the policy in Iraq isn’t working, but the American people are way ahead of this report.
While the report has regenerated a few good ideas, it doesn’t adequately put Iraq in the context of a broader national security strategy. We need an Iraq policy that is guided by our top national security priority – defeating the terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11 and its allies. We can’t continue to just look at Iraq in isolation. Unless we set a serious timetable for redeploying our troops from Iraq, we will be unable to effectively address these global threats. In the end, this report is a regrettable example of ‘official Washington’ missing the point.”
And here you have it, the Dean says, never mind the "final impact," isn’t wonderful what an "exhilarating experience" was had by these ten DC insiders? On the other hand, Senator Feingold reminds the Dean, David Broader, and the ‘offical Washington’ of whom the Dean is so enamored of, stop "missing the point."
Here’s another reaction to the bloviating Dean. David Sirota writes:
What is important in Washington is not that a war is threatening to destabilize the entire Middle East or that American troops are dying every day – no, no. The most important thing is that old Serious People who are not Dirty Hippies or “partisan polarizing finger-pointers” and who are personally approved of by David Broder get put on commissions, fly all over the world together and are nice to each other – regardless of what they actually do or don’t do. Because as the world burns, that, and only that, is what the American people are most concerned about and thus worthy of an extra long column by the Dean of the Serious People: old Washington hacks being polite and cordial to each other.
And one more reaction to Broader’s column:
For this truly is one of the most amazing columns ever. I literally laughed and nearly literally cried. It’s tragic, and comic, and disgusting, and sad. I’ve just … well, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s like an era passing, a world ending with a whimper in the form of a mailed-in column by a man who doesn’t realize his time is up, the pundit version of a crank on the street talking about how he used to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. And it just says volumes about the charade known as the Iraq Study Group. I’m speaking, of course, of David Broder.
December 2nd, 2006
If you’re into reading stenographed regurgitations of establishment conventional wisdom (CW), then you need read no other than the pompous NYT’s columnist Tom Friedman. This mouthpiece of establishment and financial elites will serve you one dish after another high on empty CW calories, saturated with high opinions of his "insights," and totally lacking a new or fresh look at the issue of the day.
Now Glenn Greenwald takes a look at “the Tom Friedman disease [that] consumes establishment Washington”:
[Tom Friedman], by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal "hawks" and thereby creating "consensus" support for Bush’s war[.]
[...]
I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite — amazingly enough, I think it’s more accurate to say "because of" — his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America’s history.
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[T]he specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman’s strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and "centrist" and "responsible" political figures currently attempting to "solve" the Iraq disaster.
In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called "knee-jerk liberals and pacifists[.]"
[...]
Despite the Bush administration’s failures to take any of the steps necessary to wage the war "the right way," Friedman never once rescinded or even diluted his support for the war. He continued to advocate the invasion and support the administration’s push for war — at one point, in February, even calling for the anti-war French to be removed from the U.N. Security Council and replaced by India, and at another point warning that we must be wary of Saddam’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate an alternative to war lest we be tricked into not invading — even though Friedman knew and said that all the things that needed to be done to avert disaster were not being done by the administration.
Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:
(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.
Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the "wrong way" and would thus — also by his own reasoning — create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn’t what we would get.
To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets. The fact that there is some idealized, Platonic way to fight the war doesn’t make that any better if you know that that isn’t what is going to happen.
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Friedman himself continues to play the same repugnant game, arguing: (1) If we don’t do X, we should not stay in Iraq; (2) X is impossible or unrealistic; (3) I do not advocate withdrawal.
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But tragically, there is nothing unique about Tom Friedman. What drives him is the same mentality that enabled the administration’s invasion of Iraq and, so much worse, it is the mentality that is keeping us there and will keep us there for the indefinite future. We stay in Iraq in pursuit of goals we know are fantasies, because to do otherwise requires the geniuses and serious establishment analysts to accept responsibility for what they have done — and that is, by far, the most feared and despised outcome.
The invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. But the behavior of our political and media leaders after that, and now, reveal that they are not just bereft of judgment but entirely bereft of character.
There’s a lot more in Greenwald’s post, including comments on John McCain and on the Baker/Hamilton Commission — go read the entire post here.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has more on Friedman.
December 2nd, 2006
Eleanor Clift has more on “What Having Skin in the Game Looks Like”:
Fresh off a nasty campaign that centered on the war in Iraq, Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb had no interest in a picture of himself with President Bush, and he didn’t want to exchange small talk with the man whose war policies he opposes. So he skipped the receiving line at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, creating the first of what we should all hope will be many ripples in Washington.
Webb’s presumed snub of Bush is rare enough in a city where everybody who’s anybody has a glory wall, and social occasions are geared to a parade of picture taking. But what happened next is where the story really takes off. President Bush, spying Webb across the room, walked over to him and asked, “How’s your boy?” Webb’s son is a Marine in Iraq.
[...]
“I’d like to get them out of Iraq,” he replied, according to several published accounts. “That’s not what I asked you,” Bush said, repeating his question: “How’s your boy?” Webb’s reply: “That’s between me and my boy.”
[...]
A quirky individualist who wants no part of the phony collegiality of Washington, Webb was rightly insulted when Bush pressed him in that bullying way—“That’s not what I asked you”—trying to force the conversation back to Webb’s son. Webb could have asked how the Bush girls are doing, partying their way across Argentina. He could have told Bush he was worried about his son; the vehicle next to him was blown up recently, killing three Marines. Given the contrast between their respective offspring, Webb showed restraint.
But that’s not how much of official Washington reacted. Columnist George F. Will was the most offended, declaring civility dead and Webb a boor and a “pompous poseur.” Were the etiquette police as exercised when Vice President Dick Cheney told Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to perform an anatomically impossible act on the Senate floor? Or is that amusing by Washington’s odd standards?
Webb told The Washington Post that his intention was not to offend Bush or the institution of the presidency but that “leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is.” By standing up to Bush, Webb became a hero to a lot of people who voted against this president and this war, and whose views have been sidelined for six years. Symbols matter. Bush certainly understands their importance, or he wouldn’t have jetted onto that carrier in a flight suit and stood in front of a banner that proclaimed MISSION ACCOMPLISHED more than a thousand days and thousands more deaths ago. A president snubbed by a junior senator-elect and then, more tellingly by the puppet prime minister in Iraq, should be wondering where he went wrong, not the other way around.
It’s justice long overdue for a president who has so abused the symbols of war to get his comeuppance from a battlefield hero who personifies real toughness as opposed to fake toughness.
December 1st, 2006
The word: “caves.” As in, the New York Times caves once more and fails to aggressively inform the public about domestic surveillance. Via the HuffingtonPost.com:
Today, the New York Times, in its editorial wisdom, decided to run at the bottom of page A22 the story that the federal government is profiling millions of American citizens regarding their travel habits.
The Times thinks the revelation that for the past four years the government has been running an "Automated Targeting System" that rates citizens in a computer-generated matrix according to the level of "risk" they pose as international travelers so unnewsworthy that it is buried amidst irrelevant puff pieces on politicians’ jockeying for 2008.
Apparently, the editors of the Times blandly absorb revelations that faceless federal agents without court warrants have been for years pouring over American citizens’ motor vehicle records, travels arrangements, and even their seating preferences on planes.
[...]
These are the same editors who gave Judith Miller above-the-fold front page space to weave whole cloth about Saddam Hussein’s "WMDs" based on anonymous sources, which probably did more than any other media outlet to bring us into the current bloodbath in Iraq.
Now, the Times continues this shameless pattern by framing the news of this secret program that has grave civil liberties implications as just another little story. Bush’s authoritarianism was repudiated by voters on November 7th, yet the Times continues to shill for the administration. This kind of framing of important civil liberties issues has enabled Bush to abuse his power by rescinding habeas corpus, running CIA secret prisons, and operating rendition and torture operations of prisoners, etc. The "paper of record" is perhaps more to blame for the current state of our eroded civil liberties than even Fox News.
