Billmon is great

I added an update to an earlier post referring to GWB's idiotic comments about the death toll in Iraq. Billmon shares his reaction as only Billmon can:

And yet, in his own deluded and inarticulate way, Shrub is starting to sound downright Leninist in his willingness to break eggs (or at least see them get broken) if that's what it takes to keep his liberation fantasy -- which is really a personal power fantasy -- alive. And so we get bizarre statements like this one:

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they'’re willing to -- you know, that there'’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

I'm not exactly sure what Shrub meant by that (he probably doesn't either) but it didn't exactly reflect a great deal of ethical sensitivity to, or concern about, the enormous blood price of his decision to invade -- and all the foolish decisions that followed. (And yes, I'm using absurd understatement as an ironic device here.)

The moral of the story, I guess, is that you don't need to be an inhuman monster to cause an inhuman amount of death, destruction and suffering. You don't even need evil -- ignorance and arrogance and incompetence can manage the job quite nicely. But, as I've said before, it does require a rare combination of those qualities to take a situation like Saddam's Iraq and make it worse.

Here are some other Billmon gems from today:

In a post called Dumb and Dumber on Wonkette criticizing Newsweek:

Now this is a pretty ironic complaint considering that Wonkette isn't exactly the Foreign Affairs of the blogosphere -- that is, not unless the Council on Foreign Relations suddenly develops an obsessive interest in talking about anal sex.

But he/she is obviously right: the difference between the international and domestic editions of Newsweek (as well as its crosstown rival, Time) is like the difference between the mind of an international business executive wizzing across the Atlantic at 35,000 feet and that of a retarded chimpanzee thrashing around in own feces at the zoo -- except I think even the domestic edition of Newsweek is probably a little highbrow for Bush.

In a post called Fiasco, Billmon is in rare form dumping on book reviews by the execrable Victor Davis Hanson who, Billmon says, "is dictating straight from his rectum again"

I haven't read Cobra II, and the last one of Woodward's books I even glanced at was Veil (If I want light fiction, I'd rather read John Grisham). But I have been reading Tom Ricks' Fiasco (definitely no air quotes) and I can testify that Hanson's assertion is a libelous lie. The book is brick solid -- with extensive named sources and backed by ample documentary evidence, including classified Pentagon memos, Centcom and ORHA pre-war "planning" (I use the term loosely) materials and the bureacratic detritus left behind by the Coalition Provisional Authority (a.k.a. the GOP branch office on the Tigris).

[...]

Needless to say, these aren't the kind of shortcomings that are likely to concern Victor Davis Hanson. My suspicion is that he's much more ticked off by the things Ricks got right -- such as his unusually blunt and honest (for a Washington Post reporter) analysis of the role played by the neocons and their Pentagon moles, and his withering account of White House haplessness, especially once it became obvious in the fall of 2003 that Iraq was going South in a hurry.

Small wonder Hanson is reduced to sniffing about anonymous sources. He's just following the old lawyer's advice: If you've got the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you've got the law, pound the law. If you don't have the facts or the law on your side, pound the table.

It may seem odd that I'm defending Ricks, given some of the harsh things I've written about his reporting from Iraq. But I guess my attitude is that if Tom Ricks is going to be criticized, it bloody well should be from the left -- not by some pompous neocon windbag who thinks he's the reincarnation of Thucydides.

There's more truth about the war in Iraq in the worst paragraph Tom Ricks ever wrote, on his worst day as a reporter, than there is in all the deluded crap that Victor Davis Hanson has churned out over the past three and half years, at the National Review and elsewhere. I haven't read any of Hanson's books, so I'm not qualified to pass judgment on the quality of his footnotes, but if he's supposed to be the example of a "real" historian, then I guess Henry Ford was right: history is bunk.