It looks like Rick Lowry of National Review offered the White House his services in doing some positive P.R. on behalf of Rove protege Tim Griffin, who the administration had sought to sought to muscle into the U.S. attorney job in Arkansas as a replacement for the fired Bud Cummins.
In a January 2007 email, White House political director Sara Taylor wrote:
Prior is going after Griffin. He’s made this his cause…We need to find some folks to defend Tim and his credentials, not to mention our policy.
Your thoughts? Rich Lowry offered to help Tim
The best part? Taylor went on to ask: “Anyone better?”
Rich, Rich, Rich, Rich, Rich.
If you really want to learn how to properly fellate power, you could do worse than boning up on the technique of John ”Linda Lovelace“ Solomon. The consensus first choice in media mouthpieces.
Niall Ferguson reminds me of Dante the Racist Badger. One of the best-loved cartoon characters on an obscure Mighty Boosh skit, Dante was not only British. He was also very, very racist.
As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
As Wizbang astutely notes, Sarah Palin’s internet commentary is totally validated by the internet commentary of people who go around validating Sarah Palin on the internet. Q.E.D. The self-correcting blogosphere has proclaimed it so.
So, Obama’s “death panel” will decide who to dies based on “level of productivity in society”? I thought all us useless people were going to be on welfare! I thought the “death panels” were to weed out Whitey, infidels, and our brave troops protecting our freedom overseas! The Gay Koran is pretty damn clear about how socialist death panels are supposed to work, but maybe there was some miscommunication, and Big Gay Allah ended up sounding like Ayn Fucking Rand. Is that how it went down, Obama, you lying piece of shit? How did it go, exactly, pray?: did Allah stutter, Obama, or did your big motherfucking ears flap? I guess when Obama was making all those secret campaign pledges, he was just playing us all for fools.
Fucking great. I guess we can forget about putting Osama bin Laden on the Supreme Court, too. Just great. Now I have to get this “Obama: THE ONE” full-back tribal tattoo removed. Obamacare probably won’t pay for that, either.
I hereby nominate George W. Bush as this man’s successor:
If you think you face an uphill challenge at work today, spare a thought for Farah Ahmed Omar, the man in charge of Somalia’s navy.
He has neither boats nor equipment and admits he has not been to sea for 23 years.
Not even Bush could screw that job up. That is, unless and until they get an actual budget and some actual sea-faring vessels. At that point just tell Georgie he can go back home and clear some brush.
What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place.
Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. Consumed with its ABC agenda—“anything but Clinton” was the Bush administration’s watchword in those days—the people at the top didn’t have their eye on the ball. So we let ourselves get sucker-punched. Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses.
Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Of course, Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how Brits, Russians, or other foreigners have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until just recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.
Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around.
Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in late 2006 when President Bush announced his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy. Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. [...]
Six-plus years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than forty-three hundred American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for an-other five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.
Given the embarrassing yet indisputable fact that this was an utterly needless war—no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad—to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere, is nothing short of obscene. The great unacknowledged lesson of Iraq is the one that the writer Norman Mailer identified decades ago: “Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.” [emph. added]
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite pleased that we prevailed in WWII (with the Soviets doing the lion’s share of course), and it would be heartless to fail to recognize and respect the sacrifice of all the people that fought and died to ensure that outcome. But one of the drawbacks to that victory, and the Greatest Generation hagiography, is the fact that it reinforced our confidence in the awesome redemptive capacity of war. It is a force that gives us meaning, to coin a phrase.
I realize that, humans being humans, and Americans being humans themselves, we’d have fought a number of bloody, mindless, counterproductive wars even without that mythologizing. Humans have always enjoyed a bit of the old mass slaughter. It’s good for ratings.
But it would be nice if we could focus a little more on the fact that wars really aren’t good for much outside of creating piles of dismembered body parts, rubble and broken lives, and spend less time daydreaming about the valor of fighting the sui generis good fight.
Justifiable and necessary wars come about very, very rarely. That’s one of the reasons WWII enjoys such a special place in our collective hearts: it’s the one war we can almost all agree we had to fight. But we’ve let our sentimentality get the better of us such that we’re on the permanent hunt for the next war that will bring back that loving feeling.
Iraq wasn’t it, despite the Keyboard Kommandos’ vicarious rush early on. And Afghanistan, even with its more justifiable initiation, won’t get it done either. Let’s go home.
My new favorite word(s). I leave the pronunciation up to the reader, but roughly translated, it is a German compound word meaning “a face badly in need of a slap.” In common usage, it is reserved for a certain kind of smirk.
Thusly and anon, I hereby designate the following my top three Backpfeifengesichts (in no particular order):
1. William Kristol
2. Glenn Beck
3. George W. Bush
Feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments.
A little over a month ago, the grand conservative collective was criticizing Barack Obama for his insufficient rhetorical support of the Iranian people in their brave fight for democracy, whiskey and (though less so than Lebanon) sexy.
Where were his magic American words that would sweep aside the ruling regime just like Reagan brought down the USSR? How could the protesters possibly carry on without Obama providing the oratorical version of the “hang in there” poster?
Obama’s reticence was nothing less than clear evidence of The Left’s affinity for dictators, dhimmitude and lack of regard for the plight of those poor Iranians – the wogs the right love so much.
From pundit and politician, blogger and radio personality, we were subjected to an ostentatious parade of green-tinted moral superiority based on the right’s supposed solidarity with the Iranian people, while the terror loving, despot-coddling Left remained silent.
For example, the Mustache of Wrongness* had this to say:
…[Y]ou know what’s worst of all about this, looking at President Obama, is not only that he’s being timid, he’s being disingenuous. The real reason that he won’t speak out has nothing to do with this argument that we don’t want to meddle. [...]
[Obama] is abandoning the people in the streets and not providing any possibility of concrete assistance to them.
Abandoning them in the streets? Providing no possibility of concrete assistance? What cruelty! What callousness! What brutality! What…a difference a month makes.
Now with the protest chest thumpery fading into the distance, and with the sheen off the preen, Bolton is impatiently tapping his foot, perturbed at Obama’s lack of urgency in unleashing a massive bombing campaign on…the Iranian people. Love hurts I guess.
But then, this “faster, please” call to set Iran ablaze has been the default setting for Bolton and the right for many years. It was only the protests that gave the warmongers a chance to come up for air – resurfacing and reinventing themselves as the only faction with compassion and concern for the towel-heads.
Therein lies one of the neatest tricks of neoconservatism (aka modern Republican foreign policy). Despite its reflexive bellicosity and its rank bigotry, regardless of its “war is always the answer” framework, its adherents get to cover themselves in a veneer of ersatz piety.
Recall, it was the Left that defended Saddam Hussein while the right was concerned with Saddam’s human rights abuses (which the right ignored when Saddam was slaughtering Iranians, natch). The Left wanted Saddam to stay in power, but the Right wanted to “shock and awe” the Iraqi people to a better life. So it is that those that called for a war that has lead to such an unthinkable amount of suffering get to pretend they have the best interests of the targets at heart.
Now, too, the right gets to demagogue the left with its self-righteous bluster about freedom, democracy and common struggle with the Iranian people…while fueling up the bombers and drawing up the battle plans.
I have been asked to comment on this abortion. Very well. I would have thought that, at this point in my illustrious blogging career, I would not be expected to offer further comment on the “thoughts” of Jonah Goldberg, or, indeed, the baleful influence of Gregg Easterbrook on our public discourse. I would have thought that my previous commentary would have been sufficient. I can’t remember what that commentary consisted of – I was drunk, obviously – but assuming it contained lots of rude words and dicks photoshopped on faces, I believe that History will judge it to be a balanced and judicious assessment of each man’s career and ideas. If History comes to a different conclusion, I can always find a mugshot of this “History” to photoshop some dicks on, so it would appear that I have all the bases covered in this regard. But, more is expected. Very well.
I can state with considerable confidence that the Earth will not be destroyed by asteroids. This is true, and I can back it up, but I’m not going to, because it is not required. It is not required because careful analysis by NASA scientists has revealed that “Global warming is not real because of OH MY GOD KILLER ASTEROIDS!!!” is not, in fact, an actual argument. It isn’t an argument now, it wasn’t an argument when Gregg Easterbrook tried it, and it wasn’t an argument 12 years ago when Steven Milloy invented it. Now, let’s do a little science project:
1. Get a piece of graph paper, a sharp pencil, a straight-edge, and a loaded shotgun.
2. On the graph paper, label the horizonal (side-to-side) axis “time”, and mark each square as a year, starting with 1997. Then, label the vertical (up-and-down) axis “how much of an argument this is”, and mark each square so that the top is labelled “100%” and the bottom is “0%”.
3. Make a dot for each of our three data points: “Milloy: 1997, 0%”; “Easterbrook: 2008, 0%”; “Goldberg: 2009, 0%. Using your straight edge, draw a line connecting all three data points. What does this line tell you about how the validity of this gambit has changed over time?
4. Put the shotgun in your mouth and blow your brains out. (You may need to ask your parents to help you with this step.) Step #4 was going to involve making a graph of how frequently this particular style of nonsense has been employed over time, and drawing a line to induce how often you will have to listen to it in the future, but just blowing your brains out now uses less graph paper.
The world will not be destroyed by Asteroids or by Gobal Warming, because it will first be destroyed by Stupidity. The only hope for mankind is to have President Obama and Vice-President Biden invite the leading lights of conservatism to the White House to discuss the Asteroid Menace over a game of Edward Forty Hands. Every pundits from across the country will converge on Washington in order to explain the world-historical significance of George Will’s choice of Mickey’s “Big Mouth” and wonder if Obama will be bold enough to go with St. Ides and so on and so on and blah blah blah. Then, before the P and VP arrive, an asteroid will crash into the White House lawn, killing everybody present* and saving the world. I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and the chance of an appropriately-sized asteroid hitting Washington, D.C. during a given 2-hour window is approximately 1 in 10^39. Not great odds, admittedly, but the best we’re likely to get, and somebody’s gotta win the lottery, amirite? Let others wallow in defeatism; I choose hope.
* Plus, the editorial staffs of all national publications contract incurable Dutch Elm Disease, and are also trampled by elephants (because all the elephants in all the world’s zoos simultaneously escaped). Also: blown up by helicopters. I forgot to mention that part of the plan before, because I was drunk, obviously. So the actual odds are slightly longer. But if what we call “objective reality” is actually a re-run of “The A-Team”, this plan will totally work, provided we pretend to be plumbers or some shit, and then I’ll smoke a big cigar and drive away in a sweet ass van. Sweet! I put the odds that what we call “objective reality” is actually a re-run of “The A-Team” at about 1 in 10^36, so things are looking up already. I love it when a plan comes together.
