The despicably wrong Jonah Goldberg

Jeff Cohen at AlterNet exposes the slimey Jonah Goldberg of NRO infamy.

There are many shades of right-wing punditry in our country. Among the shadiest is Jonah Goldberg. With arrogance seemingly matched only by his ignorance, Goldberg was just being Goldberg when he offered this wager two years ago:

Let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).

The two-year period comes due this Thursday. Even Goldberg now realizes his prediction was totally wrong -- with poll after poll showing most Americans do not "agree that the war was worth it." (Not to mention what Iraqis think of the war or Goldberg's boast that "Iraq won't have a civil war.")

So shouldn't Goldberg -- or somebody -- pay off the $1,000?

The bet was offered near the end of an overheated blogo-debate between Goldberg (at National Review Online) and Dr. Juan Cole, the Middle East scholar from University of Michigan. In proposing the wager to Cole, Goldberg goaded: "Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don't think it's right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I'll donate the money to the USO."

Cole reacted to the proposed bet with disgust -- calling it symbolic of "the neo-imperial American Right. They are making their own fortunes with a wager on the fates of others, whom they are treating like ants." Wrote Cole: "Here we have a prominent American media star ... betting on Iraqis as though they are greyhounds in a race."

Just before Goldberg proposed his bet to Cole, the professor had fumed: "Goldberg is just a dime-a-dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure that right-wing views come to predominate."

"Relatively uninformed" seemed accurate to me, but I wondered about the "mindless militarism" charge -- although I knew Goldberg was one of dozens of pundits who mindlessly cheered on the Iraq invasion (and suffered no consequences). Then I saw a 2003 column in which Goldberg wrote of "bombing Afghanistan forward into the stone age" and relished this anecdote:

In the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, "Why aren't we killing people yet?" And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people.

This smug bastard is too sick for words...

Ritter was right, gets smeared. Right was wrong, gets rewarded

Scott Ritter has long been one of the most informed and prescient voices on the American invasion of Iraq. He had the credentials and argued convincingly against the war at the time and, to use Judith Miller's phrasing, he "was proved fucking right". Yet, he was smeared and scorned when he received any attention at all in the MSM. This is something that has irked me no end and I've blogged about it here, here and here.

Glenn Greenwald has long been a critic of the perverse way that those who got it so wrong have been rewarded and those, like Ritter, who got it so right, continue to be marginalized. He's posted a treat today:

[I]n writing the book, I spent much time reading through the television and newspaper "debates" which our country had in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That is a very dark period in American political discourse, and reading through it requires a strong constitution in order to endure it. I offer here but a small sampling of what I found. A brief unedited excerpt from the manuscript, which I offer in order to expunge this from my system as much as for any other reason:
_____________________________

In exactly the way that few people were as consistently wrong as Krauthammer, few people were as right about the Iraq war as Scott Ritter was. Back in September, 2002, Ritter was trying to tell anyone who would listen that Iraq had no WMD's. Ritter is a former U.S. Marine officer, was a top aide to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War against Iraq, and built a reputation as a tenacious weapons inspector working inside Iraq for the U.N. It is difficult to imagine someone with greater credentials and credibility who ought to have been listened to on those issues.

As George Bush, Charles Krauthammer, and the national political establishment were assuring Americans that Saddam unquestionably had WMDs and that an invasion of Iraq was urgent, Ritter was desperately warning his fellow citizens of the dangers of Bush's war plans.

In the Fall of 2002, Ritter went to Iraq in an effort to forge an agreement that would save his country from making a horrendous mistake, and during his trip, he addressed the Iraqi Parliament and warned:

My country seems on the verge of making an historic mistake…. My government is making a case for war against Iraq that is built upon fear and ignorance, as opposed to the reality of truth and fact.

As someone who counts himself as a fervent patriot and a good citizen of the United States of America, I feel I cannot stand by idly, while my country behaves in such a fashion...

We, the people of the United States, are told repeatedly that we face a grave and imminent risk to our national security from a combination of past irresponsible behaviour on the part of Iraq and ongoing efforts by Iraq to re-acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic weapons ... which have been banned since 1991 by a Security Council resolution.

The truth of the matter is that Iraq is not a sponsor of the kind of terror perpetrated against the United States on 11 September, and in fact is active in suppressing the sort of fundamentalist extremism that characterises those who attacked the United States on that horrible day.

This is the truth, and once the American people become familiar with and accept this truth, the politics of fear will be defeated and the prospect of war between our two countries greatly diminished...

The truth of the matter is that Iraq has not been shown to possess weapons of mass destruction, either in terms of having retained prohibited capability from the past, or by seeking to re-acquire such capability today...

Iraq must loudly reject any intention of possessing these weapons and then work within the framework of international law to demonstrate this a reality.

The only way that Iraq can achieve this is with the unconditional return of UN weapons inspectors, allowing such inspectors unfettered access to sites inside Iraq in order to complete the disarmament tasks as set forth in Security Council resolutions...

Ritter’s extremely prescient warnings were all but ignored in the mainstream American press, except when television panels were convened to smear his character and attack his credibility.

[...]

Ritter’s arguments were never engaged by this harmonious panel of war advocates. His arguments did not need to be engaged because these panelists -- intoxicated by war rhetoric and Manichean imperatives and the smug sense of their own Rightness -- had, in unison, pronounced the ex-Marine so lacking in credibility that he could merely be swatted away, ignored, just as Peter Beinert said he had been doing with Ritter for some time.

Literally in a matter of minutes on CNN, Ritter – one of the nation’s preeminent experts on the subject of the Iraqi weapons program and one of the most vocal and knowledgeable critics of Bush's war plans (who was aggressively questioning the WMD orthodoxy) -- was quickly transformed by a panel of no-knowing war cheerleaders posing as experts into a grotesque cartoon – a pro-Saddam propagandist, a liar, a child molester and a know-nothing, integrity-free subversive whose loyalty was very much in question.

Moments earlier, though, Beinert gave a stirring explanation of how the war on Iraq was not only necessary for our security but morally right as well, and we therefore must not wait for the inspection process to be complete before invading. Moments later, Goldberg urged that the “president needs to make a forceful case for a regime change in Paris,” and when Blitzer and the jovial, war-crazed panel laughed heartily and good-naturedly at Goldberg’s war-on-France joke, Goldberg struggled to assure them that he was serious.

That Ritter was right about everything he said, and Beinert, Goldberg and company profoundly wrong and misguided -- and that the latter helped lead the country into the worst strategic disaster in its history -- means nothing. To this day, it is almost impossible to avoid hearing from Peter Beinert and Jonah Goldberg in the nation’s most influential media outlets (Beinert was recently given a column in The Washington Post, and Goldberg went on to become a twice-weekly columnist for The Los Angeles Times). But if one wants to know what Ritter thinks about anything -- say, whether the nation should wage war on Iran, or about anything else -- one would have to search for obscure websites or alternative weekly newspapers.
_____________________________

That was how our country debated whether to go to war against Iraq and how it was established that Saddam had WMDs (a belief which, even today, the establishment pundits and journalists attempting to excuse themselves for their war advocacy will insist was one which "everyone" accepted -- from Krauthammer in The Washington Post, June, 2003: "Everyone thought Hussein had weapons because we knew for sure he had them five years ago and there was no evidence that he had disposed of them."

And, as I have noted before, this is what Dean said following Secretary Powell's slide show to the U.N.: "Secretary Powell's recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness."

Truth

It was going to take a lot to get me to post something again... and it did. Read what Glenn has to say and watch Bill Moyer's documentary and learn the truth about BushCo corruption and media complicity.

Glenn:

If you didn't watch Bill Moyers' documentary last night regarding the joint, coordinated behavior of our government and its media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I can't recommend it highly enough. You can watch it here.

For those who have been following these issues, there was no single, specific blockbuster revelation that was not previously known, although Moyers' focus on the superb (and largely ignored) pre-war work of Real Journalists at Knight-Ridder (now at McClatchy) does cast a new light on the profound malfeasance of our most influential media outlets. Most of all, the documentary very powerfully compiles some of the most incriminating facts, and it unapologetically identifies many of the guiltiest and most destructive wrongdoers in our government and in the press.

For that reason, the documentary is -- in one sense -- a very valuable historical account of the corrupt behavior by our dominant political and media institutions which deceived the country into the invasion of Iraq. But on another, more significant level, it illustrates the corruption that continues to propel our political and media culture.

One of the most important points came at the end. The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003. The people who committed the journalistic crimes Moyers so potently documents do not think they are guilty of anything -- ask them and they will tell you -- and as a result, they have not changed their behavior in the slightest.

Just consider that, as Moyers notes, there has been no examination by any television news network of the role played by the American media in enabling the Bush administration and its warmonger propagandists to disseminate pure falsehoods to the American public. People like Eric Boehlert have written books about it, and Moyers has now produced a comprehensive PBS program documenting it. But the national media outlets themselves have virtually ignored this entire story -- arguably the most significant political story of the last decade -- because they do not think there is any story here at all.

The fraud that was manufactured by our government officials and endorsed by our media establishment is one of the great political crimes of the last many decades. Yet those who are responsible for it have not been held accountable in the slightest. Quite the contrary, their media prominence -- as Moyers demonstrates -- has only increased, as culpable propagandists and warmongers such as Charles Krauthammer (now of Time and The Washington Post), Bill Kristol (now of Time), Jonah Goldberg (now of The Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinert (now of Time and The Washington Post), and Tom Friedman (revered by media stars everywhere) have all seen their profiles enhanced greatly in our national media.

And while Judy Miller became the scapegoat for the media's failures, most of the media stars responsible for the worst journalistic abuses -- from Michael Gordon to Tim Russert to Fred Hiatt to most of The Washington Post, to say nothing of the Fox stars and cogs of the right-wing noise machine -- continue merrily along as before, with virtually no recognition of fault and no reduction in their platforms.

Moyers did a superb job of questioning both Tim Russert and Peter Beinart, and both were -- appropriately and enjoyably -- extremely defensive about their behavior. Beinart, along with his good friend and mirror image Jonah Goldberg, participated in one of the most vile -- though not all that unusual -- smear campaigns against a war opponent, Scott Ritter. The smear campaign was necessary precisely because Ritter was one of the very few individuals in this country who (completely unlike Goldberg, Beinart and all of the other faux warrior-experts parading across television screens loyally reciting the Bush line) actually knew what he was talking about when it came to the Iraqi weapons program and its "relationship" to Al Qaeda, and continuously warned (to little effect) about all of the warmongers' false claims about those topics.

But credit is at least due to both Russert and Beinart for appearing on Moyers' program and facing his appropriately confrontational questions. Their willingness to account for their conduct stands in stark contrast to the long list of cowards who still constantly strut around self-lovingly touting their own courage, resolve, Churchillian backbone, and all of their other little self-glorifying platitudes, yet were too afraid to face questioning from a real journalist about all of the fact-free, false propaganda they spewed for years (and continue to spew).

That disgraceful, dishonorable roster of Great Warriors hiding under their beds from Bill Moyers includes Fox's Krauthammer, Fox's Kristol, Fox's Roger Ailes, Bill Safire and Judith Miller. As The Washington Post's own Tom Shales put it:

Among those who declined -- and thus became a part of the story more than they already were -- are Judith Miller of the New York Times, a reporter who became a relentless drumbeater for war; Times pundit William Safire, who'd predicted that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators when they marched into Baghdad; columnist Charles Krauthammer, another hawkish columnist who's usually anything but camera-shy; and Fox boss Roger Ailes.

William Kristol, a conservative columnist who, Moyers says, "led the march to Baghdad behind a battery of Washington microphones . . . has not responded to any of our requests for an interview, but he still shows up on TV as an expert, most often on Fox News."

People like Bill Kristol and Krauthammer will only go and sit with the likes of Brit Hume and speak only to Fox audiences, so they are never reminded of the literally countless falsehoods they churned out not only to justify the invasion but to profoundly mislead Americans for years about the ongoing occupation. And they both continue to issue one-way decrees from the pages of Time and The Washington Post, where they are never held to account for what they have done.

Moyers' documentary is a superb piece of journalism and makes inescapably clear how profoundly corrupt our dominant political and media institutions were prior to the invasion. But most national "journalists" will simply ignore the whole program (as Digby notes, The New York Times, one of the principal culprits, did not even review it).

They will almost certainly dismiss Moyers as a liberal partisan, not a real journalist, and continue to insist that they are doing a superb and even-handed job. They will continue to revere the most guilty parties responsible for the deceit and destruction of the last six years.

And, worst of all, the sicknesses documented so potently by Moyers will continue to pervade our dominant media and political institutions. Comparing 2002 and now, however, there is a significant difference: as Moyers' documentary illustrates, as does the emergence of political blogs, more and more people are increasingly recognizing how pervasive those deficiencies are, and consequently, are developing multiple alternatives to the rancid governing Beltway system.

UPDATE: Tom Tomorrow is one of those radical, unserious, untrustworthy extremist commentators who saw exactly what was going on back in 2002 and was right about virtually everything. As a result, Fred Hiatt and Richard Stengel will never invite him onto the Op-Ed pages of The Washington Post or Time alongside our Brilliant Foreign Policy Luminaries like Charles Kruathammer, Joe Lieberman and Robert Kagan, but -- to celebrate the four-year anniversary of our Glorious War -- he does have a small though rich sampling over at the Huffington Post of the great wisdom showered on us by Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and many of their other media and neoconservative friends.

UPDATE II: CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller watched Moyers' documentary and he is absolutely befuddled that anyone could possibly suggest that our White House Press Corps was insufficiently skeptical of the White House's pre-war claims or that they were too deferential to the Leader:

To hear Bill Moyers tell it last evening on his PBS program "Buying The War," the White House press corps was a willing participant in its own deception about the President's case for war in Iraq.

He portrays us as easily-manipulated stooges on bended-knee to the President and his top aides.

Now, I'm the first to concede there are plenty of good reasons to criticize the White House Press. We're an irascible and unlikable bunch. I'm one of us and I don't like us very much. But the point made by Bill Moyers at the start of his program last night is just off base. . . . Now, I can understand if Moyers didn't like the President's answers. Fair enough. But to portray reporters as mindless conduits of White House policies is unfounded.

Really, what can one even say about this? Like most of his colleagues, he is drowning in total self-delusion. Note how he pretends to criticize White House journalists for being "irrascible and unlikable" -- the implication being that they are a really tough, ornery and contentious bunch of hard-core reporters who may not be likable or agreeable, but boy, they sure are feisty.

After describing (though understandably not quoting) several of the oh-so-super-tough questions he claims were asked at the pre-war Press Conference -- the one where reporters pretended to raise their hands in the hopes of being called upon, even though they knew Bush had a pre-scripted list of which reporters would be allowed to ask questions and they were only doing that to create a false perception of a free-wheeling press conference -- Knoller ends with these paragraphs:

Did we report what the President said about his case for war? Of course we did. That's our job. Did we also report that his views were challenged or disputed by others? Absolutely. Were questions raised about the veracity of the president's arguments? Certainly.

Did reporters stop the U.S. from going to war in Iraq? No. Could reporters have done a better job? Always.

But to charge that the White House press was "compliant" and cheered the President's arguments for war plainly misrepresents the facts.

I wonder if Knoller is aware that seven out of 10 Americans believed even six months after the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9/11 attacks. But Knoller just cannot believe that anyone would suggest that the national press corps was too compliant.

This is the point I have realized only recently which I cannot stress enough. They really do not think they did anything wrong. They think that their pre-war "journalism" (which, they will admit with great humility, could "of course" -- like everything in the world -- have been better) was perfectly excellent journalism, and anyone who suggests otherwise simply does not understand the elevated role of journalists, and is probably just a lowly partisan hysteric.

That's how they think. Just go read Knoller's response to the Moyers' documentary. Our government deceived the entire country into a war based on a whole set of blatantly false claims -- all of which were shoveled into the public's minds by our nation's media outlets -- and they continue to say what a great job they did.

Rumour: Michael Ledeen is dead

In a particularly witty obituary, Jon Swift reports that:

According to a confidential source, Michael Ledeen, Pajamas Media's supreme pundit, is dead. Apparently he was not well for some time. I have not been able to get any independent confirmation of what my source is telling me, but I have decided to go ahead with this story anyway because, after all, that is what Ledeen would have wanted me to do.

Sadly, Ledeen did not live to see his greatest scoop vindicated: his report that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead. Or if he hadn't actually died, was dying. If not right at the moment, then eventually. Iran denied the report, dismissing it as "Internet rumors," and even Michelle Malkin, who is a bit of a stickler for verifying rumors before she prints them, said, "This is either going to be a two-ton feather in Pajamas's cap or a major embarrassment." Even after pictures surfaced of Khamenei (which may have been of an imposter! Or Photoshopped!) making an appearance in public, Ledeen stuck to his guns. His last post on January 10 reported the death of Carlo Ponti, who is, in fact, dead.

Despite his untimely death, Michael Ledeen will continue to live on through the influence his ideas will have on American foreign policy for years to come. Ledeen often advised Karl Rove on foreign policy and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were among his admirers. If it is true that we have declared double-secret war on Iran, you can thank Ledeen, who was a tireless advocate for regime change Iran. Ledeen is a longtime expert on Iran whose expertise on the country goes back to his stint as an advisor to Robert MacFarlane in the Reagan Administration when he helped negotiate the deal that would later be known as Iran-Contra, just one the many successful foreign policy initiatives Ledeen was involved in.

[...]

But our upcoming (or ongoing) war with Iran is not the only legacy Ledeen leaves behind. Ledeen warned in 2003 that France and Germany may have made an alliance with Islamic terrorists to bring down the United States. "They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down," he wrote. "So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans." Eventually, it looks like we may have to go after our "allies," Ledeen said: "If this is correct, we will have to pursue the war against terror far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe." When we invade France and Germany, we'll have Ledeen to thank. I think we can all sleep better at night knowing that he was giving this kind of advice to the Bush Administration.

There is no question Ledeen's foreign policy advice will be greatly missed. Ledeen supplied the principal rationale for going to war with Iraq, which his friend Jonah Goldberg called the "Ledeen Doctrine." According to Goldberg, Ledeen once said, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." Although he modestly claimed later to have nothing to do with the decision to invade Iraq, and, in fact, told Vanity Fair, "I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place," it was typical of the man not to seek out credit for his ideas. Some critics would go so far as to accuse Ledeen of lying about his support for the war, but they just didn't understand the subtle, sophisticated way he had of expressing himself. For example, when he told an interviewer that we should invade Iraq "yesterday," what he was actually saying was that we shouldn't invade Iraq because everyone knows it would be impossible to do something yesterday unless you had a time machine. And just because he criticized those who opposed the war, it doesn't mean he supported the war. He was highly critical, for example, of Brent Scowcroft who said that, "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror." To Ledeen, that was a good thing. "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today," Ledeen wrote.

[...]

he predicted that the American people would welcome the War in Iraq with flowers, no matter how many people were killed. "I think the level of casualties is secondary," he said. "I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.... What we hate is not casualties but losing." If it is true that the American people love war, then Ledeen may have been the most American person of all.

Ledeen's unique perspective grew out of his interest in Italian fascism, which he studied while earning a PhD. at the University of Wisconsin and then in Rome, where he went after being rejected for tenure at the University of Washington in St. Louis. (Faculty members said he was rejected for plagiarism and the "quality of his scholarship" but it was no doubt in reality because of his iconoclastic conservative views.) Ledeen believed that despite the bad name Mussolini gave to fascism, there were plenty of good fascist ideas that were worth salvaging.

[...]

To know Ledeen was to love him. He leaves behind a beautiful family who will continue his important work: his wife Barbara, a former aide to Sen. Rick Santorum; his daughter Simone who nabbed a job working for the Civilian Provisional Authority in Iraq and did such a bang-up job getting the Iraq economy on its feet by driving around bags of cash in the trunk of her car; and his sons Gabriel, a Marine, who spent a lot of time drinking designer coffee in Iraq, and Daniel, a student at Rice University, who once asked Michael Moore how he felt about Hezbollah distributing his film Fahrenheit 9/11, but was unfairly cut off before he could ask his follow-up question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" Let us remember them all in our prayers.

Plame was covert

It was obvious to anyone who had even a passing interest in the truth that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent. As I've said before, the CIA would not have lodged the complaint if she hadn't been and there would have been no investigation of her outing for Scooter to subvert and no subsequent trial and conviction.

Can we please put this baby to bed now?

From Think Progress:

During House hearings today, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) announced that CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden recently told Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) that there was no doubt Victoria Plame Wilson was covert. Cummings — relaying what Waxman had told him — said that Gen. Hayden expressed clearly and directly, “Ms. Wilson was covert.”

Cummings also asked Wilson to respond to the specific claim, made by Victoria Toensing and others, that Plame had lost her covert status because she “had not been stationed abroad within five years.” Cummings asked, “During the past five years, Ms. Plame, from today, did you conduct secret missions overseas?” She answered, “Yes I did, congressman.”

Watch it:

More here:

This morning, in her testimony under oath before the House Government and Oversight Committee, Valerie Plame Wilson asserted that she was in fact a covert officer at the time that columnist Robert Novak revealed her employment at the CIA. “In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified,” Plame sad in her opening testimony.

She added, “While I helped to manage and run secret worldwide operations against this WMD target from CIA headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.” Watch it:

The right-wing, aided by the mainstream media, have engaged in an unhalting effort to spread false claims that Plame was not covert, despite the fact that the CIA, Plame’s former colleagues, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have all previously reported that she was covert. The conviction of Scooter Libby only intensified conservatives’ efforts to further propagate their lie:

Washington Post editorial: “The trial has provided…no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.” [Washingotn Post, 3/7/07]

Mort Kondracke: “I frankly don’t think since Valerie Plame was not a covert officer that there was a crime here.” [Fox, 3/9/07]

Sean Hannity: “She did not meet the criteria, in any way, shape, matter or form as a covert agent.” [Fox, 3/6/07]

Robert Novak: “No evidence that she was a covert agent was ever presented to the jury.” [Fox, 3/6/07]

Brit Hume: “Whether the woman was covert, Valerie Plame was covert within the meaning of the law, remains at this point, still unclear. Unlikely she was.” [Fox, 3/6/07]

Victoria Toensing: “Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak’s column.” [Washington Post, 2/18/07]

We await their apologies and statements of correction.

UPDATE: On September 30, 2003, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg claimed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.” But today Plame rebutted Goldberg, stating, “It was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit that everyone knew where I worked.”

Bat-shit crazy

George Bush's radio address this weekend illustrates the truly bizarre morphing of everything into his GWOT. Bush has already referred to Israel's bombing of Lebanon as "our war". He says that we need to "change the course of the Middle East -- by fighting the ideology of terror and spreading the hope of freedom" and he said this the day after the horror at Qana. Yeah, that's the ticket, spread the hope of freedom by bombing the shit out of children. It's madness, I tell ya... or as Glenn puts it: "This view is, in addition to everything else, unbelievably incoherent and internally inconsistent".

Glenn Greenwald writing about the possible expansion of the conflict into something involving Syria notes that "escalation is more often than not unintentional, or at least the by-product of recklessness rather than a deliberate choice". The Jerusalem Post shares this frightening tidbit: "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria".

Yet, the neocons are saying that the problem is that we haven't killed enough people yet to show the "terrorists" that we mean business: "They don’t fear us yet because we have not punished them enough".

As Glenn says:

That really is the essence of neoconservativsm. It's nothing more noble or complex than a base belief that we have to wage as many wars as possible and kill as many people as possible until people are sufficiently fearful of the U.S. that they will comply with our mandates. It is psychopathic and deranged, and the fact that it is typically cheered on by the likes of Mark Levin -- people who plainly lack feelings of physical power themselves -- is not insignificant. The contrived chest-beating and transparent desire to feel like a feared warrior, with none of the risk, is manifest, and it is what has shaped our foreign policy for the last five years and, by all appearances, continues to do so.

[...]

To neconservatives, everything that made the U.S. a respected superpower over the last six decades is all obsolete and worthless. To them, foreign policy experts from both political parties are responsible for 9/11 and the rise of Islamic extremism because they believe too much in diplomacy and restraint. They didn't wage enough wars and the wars they did wage weren't ferocious enough. There weren't enough Qanas, and as a result, we aren't sufficiently feared. People around the world need to know that they either comply with our instructins or fire and brimstone will rain upon their heads.

I still consider Jonah Goldberg's explanation for why he favored the invasion of Iraq to be the Gold Standard for illustrating the impulses which lay at the heart of the neoconservative syndrome:

Q: If you're a kid and you've had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what's one of the smartest things you can do?

A: Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

That is why we hear that the "people who are fighting this war" include Michael Ledeen, Cliff May, and Mark Steyn. It's why we hear someone like Jonah Goldberg -- who still has to move his nepotistic umbilical cord so that it doesn't get in the way when he types -- warn us in his best tough-guy, no-nonsense voice that we are becoming "A Nation of Wimps" because "Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children." This is all about a personal craving for feelings of power and superior strength, to be fulfilled through endless war waged on those who have not been placed in sufficient fear of our warrior greatness.

All of this is why George Will recently called neoconservatism a "spectacularly misnamed radicalism." It is opposed to every guiding principle of American foreign policy under both political parties, and seeks to transform the U.S. into a rogue state which operates with no moral limits or ethical constraints, and for which unrestrained war is always the preferred option. All failures can be and are explained away by the fact that we just haven't killed enough people yet. It is homicidal madness, real derangement, masquerading as some sort of serious philosophy, and it is a true indictment of our political life that its advocates are taken seriously at all, let alone often listened to at the highest levels of our government.

McCain Watch - 7

Blue Texan at Unclaimed Territory somewhat assuages my concerns (see most recent in my series of McCain Watches) about Sen. John McCain becoming president in 2008.

McCain, who couldn't beat Bush in South Carolina in 2000, still couldn't. Despite his reluctance to vote against his own party and his nauseating attempts to prove that he's really one of them since shilling for Bush in 2004, he's still hated among Bush followers. They've never forgiven him for McCain-Feingold, and they suspect that deep-down, he's a closet liberal.

Powerline recently wondered, "Can the nation afford a President McCain?", Mobius Dick accused him of "bashing Bush" on the war as Red State called him a "backstabber", Ann Coulter called McCain a "demagogue," Hugh Hewitt hilariously blamed the Republicans staggering losses in November on McCain, Free Republic called him a "treasonous bastard" and a "fascist" World Net Daily just asked, "Why does John McCain hate the GOP?" and Jonah Goldberg breathlessly declared that "McCain's moment is over"...six years ago.

But if you really want to see firsthand the level of hate and vitriol that rank-and-file Bush followers have for McCain, just go to Town Hall or Free Republic or Red State and scroll through the comments on any McCain-related article. It's beyond ugly.

Our Dictators

As I said Monday regarding the Iraq debacle: "The U.S. has no business determining the future of Iraq and should be looking at holding its war criminals to account". The fact that GWB started a war gets glossed over too often when talking about Iraq. I think that he should be impeached and tried as a war criminal. The thought that someone can commit such a great "wrong" and get away with it is outrageous. And it was this thought that went through my mind when I heard about Pinochet's death. It was a great injustice that he died a free man.

That was bad enough. Then I started to hear tributes being paid to him and talk about a state funeral. WTF? I was not surprised to find that Glenn Greenwald was outraged as well and he wrote a scathing review of a WaPo editorial which had gone so far as to praise Pinochet!

The Editorial Page of The Washington Post today lavishly praised right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Editorial begins with the cursory (really almost bored and resentful) acknowledgment that "for some [Pinochet] was the epitome of an evil dictator." Why would the dreaded, unnamed "some" shriek that Pinochet was an "evil dictator"? No good reason; only this:

Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.

The Post even belittles the contempt expressed for Pinochet by claiming that it is due less to his murder and torture of political opponents -- that can't possibly be the real reason -- and is driven instead by the fact that "he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked."

[...]

It is hard to overstate just how radical and extraordinary it is -- though also unsurprising and revealing -- for the Post, particularly in our current political climate, to expressly embrace Augusto Pinochet and to endorse Kirkpatrick's seminal pro-dictatorship article, titled "Dictatorship and Double Standards," which was published in Commentary in November, 1979 (the headline of the Post's Editorial tracks Kirkpatrick's title).

[...]

Objectively speaking, Kirkpatrick's description of the virtues of "traditional autocracy" sound quite similar to the vision which Bush followers and certain elite enablers (e.g. Fred Hiatt and similar Beltway pundits) have of the Ideal America today.

Despite the radical transformation of our national character over the last five years, The Washington Post continues to be able to earn money and enjoy the rewards of the free market. We continue to "worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos." And Bush officials "leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few."

Just as Kirkpatrick argued in 1979 -- and as the Post implicitly endorsed today -- we can all live with some torture and arbitrary arrests and detentions. And we must always keep in mind that things could always be worse -- at least the Bush administration (like Pinochet) is keeping taxes low and corporate profits high. So our view of its human rights abuses (like our view of Pinochet's) should be tempered by our appreciation for its rejection of socialism.

Thus, argues the Post (following along with the illustrious Jonah Goldberg, among others), let's set torture and lawbreaking and indefinite detention to the side. At least George Bush (and Pincochet) aren't Fidel Castro. That this has become the Post's measuring stick for our own government explains much about the last five years in this country.

Mommy's & Daddy's little big boys

Glenn Greenwald comments at length on something that has been obvious for years but has not been sufficiently scrutinized and scorned. Glenn begins with the "begats".

Bill Kristol's parents are Irving Kristol, the so-called "godfather of neoconservatism," and Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose defining political act was a homage paid at the AEI to the virtues of Victorian morality. Bill followed in his parents' footsteps almost completely - the same career, the same political circles, the same exact political beliefs as his mother and father, and had his career shaped by them from the start.

Fred Kagan did exactly the same thing as Bill Kristol -- copied the career and mindset of his father. Just like Kristol's father, The Washington Post labelled Kagan's dad, Donald, "a beloved father figure of the ascendant neoconservative movement." Fred Kagan even went so far as to co-author a 2000 book with his dad entitled While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today, a book which -- pre 9/11 -- advocated many of the very same militaristic policies which today are "justified" by the 9/11 attacks. Fred Kagan's brother, Robert, is exactly the same as Fred and Bill Kristol. Along with Kristol, Robert co-founded the Project for the New American Century which, of course, spent the years prior to the 9/11 attacks urging regime change in Iraq, among other things.

This sprawling nepotism web goes on and on even as one descends to the lower levels of the neoconservative ranks of importance and influence. Jonah Goldberg's career was created and shaped by his mother, Lucianne, whose political beliefs he copies. He came to be known by attaching himself to his mom as she milked her role in the Lewinsky scandal (at the time, Jonah, 29, was "vice president" of his mom's company). John Podhoertz is a poor man's version of his dad, Norman, and his mom, Midge Decter, two of the most revered neoconservative figures around. White House neoconservative (and Iran-Contra convict) Elliot Abrams married one of Decter's daughters (from her first marriage), and one of his first key jobs in the neoconservative movement was when he was chosen by Norm Podhoretz, Decter's husband, to write for Commentary (Abrams was also a major contributor to (Bill) Kristol and (Robert) Kagan's PNAC).

[...]

To have the top level of an entire highly influential political movement be so dependent upon their parents for their careers and worldview seems, at the very least, to be worth some commentary.

[...]

Many, perhaps most, of the leading neoconservatives don't seem to have arrived at their political worldview through much or any intellectual struggle or independence, nor do they seem to have had to make their own way in building their careers. Quite the opposite -- they seem to have been bred into their lives, and they just marched, like good little boys, along with their parents' views and plans for them. And they not only willingly accepted, but seem to have eagerly sought, all sorts of help from their parents in building their careers, all in exchange for fully embracing their parents' views almost without deviation.

It's rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental) that neoconservatives love, more than anything else, to strut around spewing tough-guy Chruchill warrior rhetoric and to sermonize on the virtues of self-reliance -- and are characterized in their political views by a total lack of empathy for the plight of others -- even though they have chosen extremely coddled, privileged lives feeding off the accomplishments and directives of their mothers and fathers. And quite significantly, the political Leader they found to represent their belief system, to personify their contrived warrior pose, and to implement their radical agenda -- George W. Bush -- is the most extreme version of that coddled and father-dependent personality one can find.

The embrace by the President of the "surge" plan of Kagan and Kristol -- father-controlled figures all -- is really nothing more noble or elevated than a petulant refusal to accept the consequences of their failure and responsibility for their actions. It's a foot-stomping exercise, whereby they feel entitled to satisfaction and personal vindication, and that personal desire trumps everything -- hence, their eagerness to ignore the damage they have wrought by inventing new war theories and fantasies to continue their wars that don't affect them in any way, for which only other people pay a price. It's the behavior of people who have developed an extreme sense of personal entitlement by virtue of allowing, even urging, their fathers and mothers to shape their lives far beyond what is normal or healthy.

Bush -- the liberal

Digby and Glenn Greenwald have predicted and are now responding to the bizarre claims by "real" conservatives that Bush is no conservative and, in fact, he's a liberal! And you thought it couldn't get more bizarre. Yes, that's right, these conservatives work like a Soviet 5-year plan -- it changes such that at the end of five years, it has changed to have predicted whatever did in fact come to pass, so that it never fails. The conservatives (who, you will recall, were rather proud to call George one of their own a few years ago when he was polling better) conclude that if George is an unpopular failure, he can't be a conservative because conservatives don't fail.

Glenn:

It is, to put it mildly, rather bizarre to watch people claim that there is nothing notable or new about calling George Bush a "liberal" -- caveats or not -- or that doing so is really no different than complaining that his adherence to conservative doctrine is something short of pure and absolute. Since at least the 1980s, our political dialogue recognizes two opposing, hostile camps -- conservatives and liberals. "Liberals" are the traitors, the lunatics, the ones against whom Rush Limbaugh has been viciously railing to 20 million people, 4 hours a day for the last 20 years. "Liberals," as Karl Rove told us, are anti-American and allies of The Terrorists

That's how "liberals" have long been talked about -- they're the subversives, the weak losers, the socialists, the Friends of the Terrorists, the lunatics, the anti-American bad ones. At best -- in more sane, less "unhinged" right-wing circles -- they are wildly misguided and are the political enemies of conservatism. Whichever approach one takes, it is self-evidently startling and politically significant to hear that, after all this time, George Bush -- presumably along with the entire Republican leadership in the House and Senate which passed every spending bill since 2003 -- is, to at least some extent, now one of them, an actual liberal. It is hard to understand how one can pretend that to suddenly stick the "liberal" label on Bush, even partially, is unnotable and really nothing new.

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As Hunter observed:

Fiscal and other conservatives may say that they value small government, but it is a fact of the movement that when in a position to actually implement those policies, they do not. . . .

They shuffle the tasks of government around, yes; they close so called "liberal" governmental tasks such as environmental protections and citizen welfare and safety programs, while hyper-boosting "conservative" governmental tasks such as defense spending and business-based "incentives" and other sops . . . but post-Nixon conservatives have been remarkably consistent in their actual actions: increase spending; increase deficits; increase government; increase interference in citizen lives under banners of "religion" and "morality".

Ultimately, Bush's ideological purity matters little. It is conservatives whose support twice put him in office, who vigorously supported him for virtually his entire presidency, who never objected to his being described and self-labeled as "conservative," and who -- with rare exception -- repeatedly claimed him as one of their own. I understand the desire to re-cast Bush as a "liberal"; he's now akin to a live grenade frantically being tossed around because nobody wants to be stuck with him in history.

But for conservatives, this effort is futile. Bush is indelibly branded in the public mind as a conservative, largely because of the unyielding support given to him by most conservatives. For that reason, his failure will almost certainly be viewed as a failure of conservatism, despite the last-minute and rather unprincipled effort by conservatives to engage in an emergency re-labeling campaign.

Digby:

There is a very interesting discussion taking place all over the left blogosphere about how the conservatives have discovered that the entire Republican establishment, particularly the George W. Bush administration, are liberals. Glenn Greenwald has been directly taking on Jonah Goldberg on this subject (which is something like my cat "taking on" his toy mouse), Hunter at DKos has written a lengthy and fascinating explication of the process, and Kevin Drum, in a different vein, discusses political Lysenkoism as the consequence of conservative loyalty over policy.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while know that I've been talking about this for some time as well (here, here and here) as has my pal Rick Perlstein, an expert on the conservative movement, who went into the belly of the beast last fall and talked about it right in front of the grand poohbahs of the conservative movement. (An academic version of the Colbert Miracle, IMO.)

This has been percolating for a while, but is now exploding in full effect as the fog of 9/11 lifts and Bush's failure becomes manifestly obvious to the vast majority of Americans, including many who voted for him.

[...]

Today, the CIA is crawling with liberals. The military is crawling with liberals. The Bush administration itself is nothing but a bunch of liberals as must be the GOP congress since they signed off on everything Bush has proposed. The media are, needless to say, nothing but squishy liberals.

The country is going to hell in a handbasket. The president and the congress and all their policies are dramatically unpopular. This, then, is just further proof of the failure of liberalism.

The only thing that can save us is conservatism.