God Bless Matt Taibbi
And god damn the “Sensible Liberals” at the DLC:
But the most objectionable thing about the [David] Brooks column was its crude parroting of a suspiciously similar DLC editorial published about a month before (See Road Rage, from the August 10th, 2006, issue of Rolling Stone) entitled “The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism.” Both columns described Lamont’s Internet supporters as “fundamentalist” liberals bent on a “purge” of poor nice old Joe Lieberman, who represents heterodoxy, centrism and bipartisanship. Brooks used the word “purge” twice; the author of the DLC column, Ed Kilgore, used it eight times.
Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don’t repeatedly use words like “purge” and “fundamentalist” — terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism — by accident. They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off. When I called the DLC about the editorial, Kilgore was not available, but they put Will Marshall on the line.
Marshall is the president of the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term “body count” in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war (“Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor”). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: “What we’re seeing is an ideological purge,” he said cheerily. “It’s national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they’ve decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . .”
We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of “narrow dogmatists” included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.
“So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists,” I said, “and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Well, it’d probably be in the thirty zone,” sighed Marshall.
I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.
“Uh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . .” (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of “no public disclosure,” although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they’re narrow dogmatists?”
He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. “Look,” he said. “Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It’s the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . .”
“Okay,” I said. “So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?” I asked.
“Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that,” he said.
The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we’re talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that’s lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother’s heat off at Christmas. And that’s pretty bad — but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.
Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?
Sorry about the long quote, but that riff was so great that quoting it at any shorter length would be like truncating Jimmy Page’s solo in ‘Stairway To Heaven’ — pure sacrilege.
As they say, though, read the whole thing. Taibbi makes the crucial connection of Brooks to the DLC not only because of their similar tactics, but also on grounds of similar temprament.
Yuppification, pace Brooks, is not just a crucial part of modern Republicanism (although it can’t really be underestimated: Michael Totten is a reactionary ratbag and tenth-rate Hitchens pretty much because some Naderite hippies in Portland were snarky to him years ago, while Stephen Green is a batshit fascist because he fears the next al-Qaeda attack will destroy the pretties his trust fund account paid for at Pottery Barn, meanwhile there’s the Lileks phenomenon) but is also a necessary part of “Sensible Liberalism.” Yuppification is not just an economic condition; it’s also a state of mind. Taibbi emphasizes Brooks’s niceness:
I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren’t dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.
[snip]
Being “nice” is a central part of the Brooks yuppie’s guilt-proofing self-image rationale; so long as you’re the kind of guy who lets people merge on highways, stands politely in line at Starbucks, doesn’t put garish Christmas decorations on his lawn and pays his taxes, you’re not really doing anything wrong. It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.
Somehow, when we weren’t looking, the George F. Will type of polite Toryism became “centrism.” Brooks is most definitely his heir — less affectedly and pompously Anglophile than Will, but every bit as middlebrow and pseudo-conciliatory in being full of bullshit concerns over what is “reasonable.” Brooks embodies the type that is a devious reactionary, but with your friendly next-door-neighbor’s face and demeanor.
As such, his niceness schtick is disarming. But it shouldn’t be, so long as you know that when it comes to brass tacks, Brooks will side with the batshit branch of conservatism every fucking time. For Brooks, batshit conservatism isn’t extremism; it’s the nation’s default political posture, even if it’s sometimes embarassing to him. So then naturally, according to such a calculus, anything Left — truly Left — is the unacceptable extreme.
For Brooks as for “Sensible Liberals,” the Left is too angry, too outraged, too morally offended by such topics as war, torture, profiteering, spying, Constitution-shredding — topics which need to be discussed (euphemism for “objections noted, now run along”) in a civil way. Taibbi’s description of Brooks reminds me so very much of what I think of Mark A. Kleiman with one crucial difference: Where Brooks uses niceness against his side’s enemies, Kleiman uses his niceness against his own (ostensible) side.
I think this is more than coincidence. Both Brooks and Kleiman share a huge moral failing (though they come to that failing from different starting points): They are incapable of manifesting true moral outrage at such things as torture. However, they both are capable of being morally outraged at the “incivility” and “extremism” of the Left. There is only one possible outcome of a “center-Left” of Kleimans and a “center-right” of Brookses: The Left is left out in the cold while the wingnuts are in the tent and in charge.
Yet there is a distinction between the Kleimans (and Kevin Drums, for that matter) and the DLC/TNR goons like Will Marshall, Peter Beinart, Marshall Wittman. The Kleiman/Drum/Washington Monthly sort of “Sensible Liberalism” is opportunist, and therefore capable of change (as indeed, you do see Drum changing in his dolorous way just as Josh Marshall has changed in his slightly more spritely way), while the DLC/TNR sort of “Sensible Liberalism” is reactionary and recalcitrant. The netroots can therefore find a compromise with the former (at least in theory; I have some misgivings) but will have to battle to the death the latter.
This is why the Lieberman-Lamont race is so caustic — and so symbolic. And it’s no accident that, as Taibbi notes, the DLC “Sensible Liberals” are using the “niceness” factor, at least implicitly, in terming the netroots Left a purging, fundamentalist* mob.
*Aside from Taibbi’s correct judgement that the word’s use in this case is Stalinist and meant to connote the spectre of Islamofascists, there is also the fact that the word connotes a person of moral certitude, which means the DLC happens to be correct in a very roundabout, accidental way. Where most fundies in the world steer their moral absolutism to theological topics (to the world’s massive injury), we netroots “fundies” are morally certain of just a few more near, more crucial subjects: like, for instance, that torture is fucking evil, and torture-enablers and apologists are therefore agents of fucking evil, fit only for political destruction. Naturally, we are “uncivil” because of it.
This is good, too.
And this probably goes a long way toward explaining why I feel nostalgic for guys like George Will nowadays.
Back in the days when he and his ilk were still capable of being described by the adjective “conservative”, it meant that there were still people in the public discourse far enough to the left for there to be enough space for an actual “center” to exist.
But the incredible “redshift” that has taken place in our political vocabulary in the last thirty or forty years makes Will a liberal and Barry Goldwater a moderate anymore.
There was a new Twilight Zone episode once in which a man found that the meanings of all the words in the English language had changed. It was still English, but nothing had the same definition anymore – “underwear” meant “breakfast” and so forth. It started slowly, one or two words at a time, and at first, he thought it was a joke, or some new game all the kids were playing, and so he just laughed about it. But one day, he woke up, and he could no longer understand anything that anyone around him was saying.
I have that feeling a lot lately.
I know a couple Bobos like this … they’ve got a few long-term investments and a 5 year lease on the Audi (instead of 3) so dammit, we just have to smack these uppity little countries around once in a while! Torture? Well, as long as the 401k doesn’t move around too much.
That’s a well written piece, even though I don’t agree with you or Mr. Taibbi. The problem is that it has so many debatable, complex points that I don’t believe can adequately be addressed in this venue. I mean this is the stuff that warrants mile long posts.
Geeze – speaking of the reasonable Bobo – Condi just popped up on MSNBC – “Of course you have to be concerned about the region [Middle East] as a whole.” She’s in Crawford with her work husband.
Well, I suppose one point I can address briefly is torture. What makes you think everybody who isn’t on the left, or more specifically “sensible liberals” and everybody to their right, approves of or enables torture?
One more thing. I find it quite ironic that lately words like sensible and reasonable are being tossed out as epithets. Concern troll is another interesting one.
Overton Window, Jillian, Overton Window: incrementalist fascism.
I suppose one point I can address briefly is torture. What makes you think everybody who isn’t on the left, or more specifically “sensible liberals� and everybody to their right, approves of or enables torture?
Well for one thing, when they approvingly circulate Alan Dershowitz’s spewings. Also when, like Charles Krauthammer, they continually revert to the ticking-timebomb argument. And also when they go the semantic, weasel-word route — “well, what do you mean by ‘torture’?”).
But I suspect that’s not what you’re getting at, so I’ll say what you want me to say: They support or have supported the vector by which torture is always grown and spread — perpetual war.
While brief, clearly-defined wars inevitably mean that “bad apples” will do things like torturing and massacring etc, it takes perpetual ideological war to structurally-enable-by-design (if not yet as Dershowitz desires, codify) “legal” torture. It’s happened now just as the Cold War allowed the CIA to “legally” teach torture techniques back then. The milieu of the “Clash of Civilizations” makes torture inevitable, and doubly so when you have ruthless, monsterous men in office at the time. When “Sensible Liberals” signed-up for anything beyond the Afghanistan operation, they stupidly enabled torture. Now they are too stubborn to admit it.
I find it quite ironic that lately words like sensible and reasonable are being tossed out as epithets.
Jesus christ, Bill, the irony is intentional. Hence the scarequotes often used. The whole point is that their reasonableness and sensibility is a sham, superficial at best.
“approves of” and “enables” are two distinctions with a big difference. Claim them both you can claim a plurality of opinion, but viewed individually, a truth is revealed that most of us don’t want to see.
nobody ‘approves of’ torture, but torture has been enabled, as no one is apparently accountable.
It happenned, and in our time, and by our agents, and it is our fault. Yours and mine, and ours.
Someone will pay. Probably us.
Okay, but I think you’re going on unfounded assumptions here. Even if, for the sake of argument, torture is the inevitable consequence of perpetual war, who favors perpetual war? And no, I don’t think the irony is intentional when it comes to words like “sensible” and “reasonable”, especially when presented in the context of saying they must be destroyed politically. It reads to me like you’re defending radicalism because you believe it’s necessary.
Oh, and the ruthless, monstrous men bit. Who are you talking about?
who favors perpetual war?
Do you not read wingnuts or the New Republic? Google the phrase “the long war”.
And no, I don’t think the irony is intentional when it comes to words like “sensible� and “reasonable�, especially when presented in the context of saying they must be destroyed politically. It reads to me like you’re defending radicalism because you believe it’s necessary.
No necessarily. They dont have to be radical, but they might radically hold accountable those who are giving the orders to torture. I’m really not asking for much here; even “moral equivalence” between the “extreme” and “radical” Left and the torturing Bushies would be an improvement. But no, real “sensibility” and “reason” for them is thinking that Kos is more extreme than Donald Rumsfeld.
I’m not splitting hairs when I say a long war isn’t a perpetual war. I don’t perceive the war against a particular fascist, totalitarian ideology that uses Islam as a pretext as a war against all of Islam per se. I get the feeling that’s what you and Mr. Taibbi think it is. As for Rumsfeld, I don’t think he’s extreme as much as he is bumbling, and as far as Kos…I think he’s just in it for the money…but that’s another topic.
It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.
I heart Matt Taibbi. And Retardo. Thanks for so saying what I’ve been trying to get out for years.
fiver says:
Am I reading you right that you don’t think nice people would ever vote for wars?
“Somehow, when we weren’t looking, the George F. Will type of polite Toryism became “centrism.â€? ”
In the United States. That was one of the weirdest thing about moving here. I went from being a “centrist” to a “flaming moonbat” without changing any opinions.
Sniper said,
I’m afraid I have you beat. I went from centrist/moderate right to reichwing, wingnut, torture supporter/enabler
Am I reading you right that you don’t think nice people would ever vote for wars?
Well, I’m just quoting Matt Taibbi there, so you’d really have to ask him. The point is, it’s annoying when a group of people (like the DLC) are constantly painting you as an extremist and lauding their own “sensibility” while simultaneously voting for pointless and ill-advised wars.
I don’t think he said anything about nice people never voting for wars. You’d have to get into all kinds of semantics arguments over the meaning of nice, and then we’d lose the point altogether.
Uh, that first line was supposed to be italicized, btw. And that’s all from me, cuz for some crazy reason, they expect me to actually *go* to work and not argue on blogs all day.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to pick it up later, too. Because like I said, it’s a lot of stuff to discuss.
Bill, you’re coming *this* close to trolling — talk about “centrism”!
I’m afraid I have you beat. I went from centrist/moderate right to reichwing, wingnut, torture supporter/enabler
This is poop. The Brit ex-pat represents not only his country’s standards of what is Left and what is Right, but also the world’s. Naturally, you think that is trumped by the American version of the ideological spectrum, which is uniquely skewed to the right at such a point that categorical and emphatic condemnations of torture *and torturers* are impossible by those of the “center”.
— I edited this for clarity, because it’s an important point, I think.
You’re boring, Bill B, please go away.
“I’m afraid I have you beat. I went from centrist/moderate right to reichwing, wingnut, torture supporter/enabler ”
That’s a pretty good description of what the right wing in the U.S. has become.
How can someone deny that we are engaged in perpetual war when the architects of our current war literally have no plan whatsoever to end it? Ask George W what his plan for ending the war in Iraq is and he’ll say “That’s for someone else down the road to figure out”.
“Sensible” isn’t an epithet. “Sensible Liberal” is. It describes a clearly distinct subspecies of political animal. Kind of like using the phrase “useful idiot” doesn’t make the word “useful” an epithet.
Well, I emphatically condemn torture and torturers, and I’m definitely center/right. I suppose if one is afflicted with a serious case of self-righteousness he can only view those who disagree as supremely evil. More to the point…these torturers and torture enablers are mere figments of your imagination. “Sensible” and “reasonable” people just don’t view the world that way.
‘More to the point…these torturers and torture enablers are mere figments of your imagination”
This is just idiotic. There are pro-torture voices in the mainstream media and torture apologists. If you think otherwise you haven’t been paying attention and no, I am not doing your googling for you.
Fuck. “And torture apologists in the White House.”
“Michael Totten is a reactionary ratbag and tenth-rate Hitchens pretty much because some Naderite hippies in Portland were snarky to him years ago.”
Actually, it’s funnier than that; he was a Naderite scared Republican because some centrist Democrats were mean to him for not using that same lame media-driven personality cliches to describe Gore that he did.
Mental disconnect:
Bill B, Powerline reader:
“More to the point…these torturers and torture enablers are mere figments of your imagination. “Sensibleâ€? and “reasonableâ€? people just don’t view the world that way.”
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline writer, discussing the McCain anti-torture amendment:
“What about the United States? The pro-terrorist rights wing of our Senate is picking up steam, and our Supreme Court can never be counted on to resist European trends.”
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/012212.php
Need more input, Stephanie!
I would wager that most people who could be termed “yuppies” were against the Iraq war and think the Bush administration generally sucks.
Well, I emphatically condemn torture and torturers, and I’m definitely center/right.
Really? When? I have only seen you troll post in support of Bushco, never condemn Janis Karpinski, Abu Gonzales, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Negroponte, or any of the other torture enablers in the Administration.
Were you using another pseudonym when you did this condemning?
Well, I emphatically condemn torture and torturers, and I’m definitely center/right. I suppose if one is afflicted with a serious case of self-righteousness he can only view those who disagree as supremely evil. More to the point…these torturers and torture enablers are mere figments of your imagination. “Sensible� and “reasonable� people just don’t view the world that way.
Bill, I can accept that you are pro-war and anti-torture. I know for a fact that philosophical construct exists, and you may very well believe both. They certainly are not self-canceling. However, your argument loses most of it’s effectiveness when you adopt the standard wingnut tactic of claiming the torture did not happen. There can be no doubt whatsoever that American military and inteligence operators tortured and killed detainees. No matter how oddly you parse the definition of the word torture. Were those photos of abu ghraib a figment? The acknowledged waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? Leaving John Walker Lindh in a metal container on a freezing night with an untreated gunshot wound? Hell, most soldiers would either shoot the guy right away, or get him medical treatment.
So if you really want to come over here and argue in support of a failed military policy, a disasterous illegal invasion and the remarkably stupid ‘stay the course’ rhetoric, while also declaring your opposition to torture, as an act and as american policy, fine, but then goddam it come out and say that the torture that HAPPENED was wrong and someone oughta be held accountable for it. Or shut up about it, ’cause you don’t really mean it…
mikey
“When “Sensible Liberalsâ€? signed-up for anything beyond the Afghanistan operation, they stupidly enabled torture. Now they are too stubborn to admit it.”
Interesting point… as a self-described ‘pragmatic/centrist democrat’ I did support going into Iraq as it seemed the only way to break the logjam of disfunctional post-colonial dictatorships. Neo-Wilsonianism, you could call it.
Should I have known that Bush would utterly screw the pooch both diplomatically and strategically? Yeah, I should have, and I have sat down and shut up (at least as regard other Democrats) ever since they lost this war around June of 2003.
Was the institution of torture such a predictable outcome that I should be held negligent for supporting the administration in this rotten adventure? I don’t think so, but your point about colonial regimes sliding from Disraelian idealism to Churchillian babarity is well taken. I guess what I did not account for was for this slide to take in a matter of days, or to think that there was never any idealism but that the administration was shot through with savagery from the beginning.
In retrospect the rehabilitation of Eliot Abrams should have tipped me off.
Actually, I think it has more to do with the that fact that Bush is hated more than Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or Islamic terror, and the belief that America-Israel is a greater threat to the world than Iran-Syria-North Korea—the historical equivalent of fearing Roosevelt-Churchill more than Hitler-Stalin.
I suppose if one is afflicted with a serious case of self-righteousness he can only view those who disagree as supremely evil.
Having lost track of who “one” might be, I’ll just assume that “one” is a person posting in this thread who unequivocally condemns torture. As one of the “ones,” I’ll slip right past the self-righteousness assertion in order to clarify that I do not always assume that those who support torture are supremely evil. Some are stupid. Some are ignorant. Some have been so manipulated that they live in a constant state of fear. I do assume supreme evil in those who do the manipulating.
More to the point…these torturers and torture enablers are mere figments of your imagination.
Thanks, Mikey, for covering this one so well. Now I can move on to:
“Sensible� and “reasonable� people just don’t view the world that way.
I can almost hear the plaintive, desperate tone in Bill B’s voice here. He so wants it to be true. The alternative is too ugly to bear: how will Bill deal with a world in which those who profess sensibility and reasonableness (two qualities he cherishes in himself) turn out to be pragmatically in favor of, oh, let’s call them “coercive tactics” (because if we don’t use the word “torture,” then we’re not really doing it) as long as the result makes them feel stronger and less afraid?
Fuckola, my lawnmower won’t start. So…
Scott — that really is pathetic!
digamma – don’t confuse yourself with other yuppies. I know you were against it (remember those Primer days? even Dayn got bitten by the war bug; it was me and you and dp against the rest of the site), but by a census of the blogosphere, most werent. OTOH, as a ritual cheapshot, I have to say that at least you did get in Iraq your long-desired libertarian paradise.
fiver – tank yas
Tulkinghorn — You seem familiar. Not trying to out you at all but didn’t you have a blog-of-contrition that you erased? If so, nice to finally meet you (I miss your blog), if not, then sorry to assume…
As for your point, well thank you. I argued immediately that with former Nixon and Ford hacks in charge of a colonial enterprise, as well as a bunch of former oil execs in charge of invading an oil-rich country, *nothing* but ruin could result. I always argued that the neocon “wilsonism” scthick was a front; the PNAC thing is blatant imperialism. But otoh, I wouldnt have been for an occupation of Iraq if it had been Gore or any modern Democrat I can think of in charge, either. Afghanistan is one thing; Iraq, otoh is another, is too tempting in its riches for any western power to occupy “temporarily”, and indeed the original plan we now know was installing Chalabi as “our SOB” puppet. Now it’s back to Plan B — permanent bases no matter what kinda shit hits the fan over there.
So what I am saying is that I could have been for the war *if* it was to depose Saddam Hussein, *if* he had WMD, and if we got out immediately and left a NATO or UN transitional team in untilt he Iraqis got their shit together. Otherwise, forget it.
I think it has more to do with the that fact that Bush is hated more than Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or Islamic terror,
False dichotomy.
the historical equivalent of fearing Roosevelt-Churchill more than Hitler-Stalin.
This analogy is moronic to the tenth power. There is no comparison. This is not a world-historical clash as was WW2. Go back to playing Call of Duty and STFU here, thank ya.
I did support going into Iraq as it seemed the only way to break the logjam of disfunctional post-colonial dictatorships. Neo-Wilsonianism, you could call it.
Taken literally, how does this distinguish you from Osama bin-Laden, Pat Robertson, Pol Pot, or anyone else who condones mass murder as the shining path to some imagined better world?
It was statements like that which convinced me that the degrees Political Science professors handed out were worth less than the paper they were printed on. Well, that and the second cowardly “some people believe we should re-colonize Africa to save it from the corrupt post-colonial dictators” classroom debate (with which shares quite a lot).
It’s an evil position (conquer country X) wrapped in a conveniently self-serving fantasy (to save them from) wrapped in a historical fiction (post-colonial) wrapped in reality (dicatorships). By contrast, Colonialism 1.0 was an evil position (conquer country X) wrapped in a conveniently self-serving fantasy (to save them from) wrapped in a historical fiction (a uniquely ignorant) wrapped in reality (brutal existance).
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
Rats! I was hoping Jose would drop the WWII us-n-them thing once more (third time’s the charm) and then, if we stayed really, really quiet behind the furniture, he’d go away. Now he knows we’re here.
Well, I emphatically condemn torture and torturers, and I’m definitely center/right.
Vote Republican lately Bill? Then you helped the torture along! It takes more than a signing statement for Bush to do what he does. He gets everything he wants from the House and the Senate. Politicians who want to stop the torture would stop giving him money, and they’d impeach him. Instead, the McCains of the world continue humping his leg.
or to think that there was never any idealism but that the administration was shot through with savagery from the beginning.
In retrospect the rehabilitation of Eliot Abrams should have tipped me off.
This is simply golden. Yes, yes the reactivation of deathsquadbot “Mr. Kenilworth” was a hell of a tip off; also the re-installation of Poindexter in the snoop section, and the naming of Henry Motherfucking Kissinger to the 9/11 Committee (which is what should have stopped people like Hitchens in their tracks; as it was, they just grumbled a little but enough to stop it; still, it was Bush’s thought, as it were, in the matter that counted).
But the other tip-off was the neocon element. Wolfie and Richard Freakin Perle. Veterans of the original Plan B. These guys are insane and have been for 30 years.
Also, another warning sign is when Richard Armitage is considered a moderate, a braking mechanism, in the administration.
digamma – don’t confuse yourself with other yuppies. I know you were against it…. but by a census of the blogosphere, most werent.
Well the blogosphere is a very bad way of gauging public opinion in any demographic. The simple fact is that young urban Americans are mostly leftist. Bush couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in any coastal city, much less in the “hip” neighborhoods – what few votes he got in Queens were probably from older Catholics. There really aren’t that many Jane Galts and Vodkapundits out there.
Shorter Bill B.: “Yes, the war seems to be stretching out a bit but thank goodness well-meaning people are in charge!:
Ah, found the link. Funniest thing you’ll read all weekend, I tell ya:
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000703.html
Yeah, I can only the abject terror he must have felt after those Dems gave him the evil eye after his self-congratulatory recycling of asinine Joe Klein bullshit…
Wait… I’m confused. Which war is the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism/GWOT supposed to be like again? I hear how it’s like World War II, then I hear how it’s like the Cold War, then I hear it compared to the British struggle against the Malaysian Communist Insurgency. Did they stick all these different wars in a blendor to make this one?
“Funniest thing you’ll read all weekend, I tell ya:”
OMG that’s hilarious. I just got to the part where he says “I’m not an activist…I’m an intellectual..”
I’m drying my eyes now.
If you could stomach it all the way to the end, you get to this:
An echo chamber is an invisible mind prison.
Drop that into a Marie Jon column, and it would seem right at home.
Man, I love you guys. Retardo, mikey, et al., always cut right to the heart of things. I’m not as good a writer as you folks, so I can’t really express what I mean, but thank you.
Here‘s another classic.
With just a pinch of Vietnam… for flavah!
He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. “Look,� he said. “Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It’s the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . .�
This is what needs to change in politics if we are ever to get rid of the DLC and the warmongers in the Republican Party. Until then, centrism as it’s currently defined is just a useful tool for useful idiots to browbeat people who actually care about the consequences of U.S. policy.
The fact that Marshall felt it was necessary to sighingly explain this to Taibbi as if he thought Taibbi was a child is even more expressive of the mindset.
Totten’s cavalcade of photos makes about as much sense as this …
So all this discussion (I was always against the war, I was for it but now I’m against it, I’ve always been for it, but bush fucked it up) got me to thinking. It just seems so simple to me. I sat down and wrote 10 guidelines for determing whether to go to war. I’d like to share them:
1. If someone hits you, hit them back. This is moral, and reasonable. Killing their family and destroying their neighborhood is not.
2. War is NEVER a solution. Things are ALWAYS worse after a war.
3. If you decide to build a boat, don’t forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. It will cost you more money and take longer than you think. If you decide to start a war, don’t forget the law of Unintended Consequences. This Law should cause you to rethink your position.
4. Wars fuck EVERYTHING up. The only people who come out of wars to the better are profiteers and a few careers. Feh!
5. War is evil, wrong, sick and wasteful. Anyone who is pro war is objectively evil and should be shunned.
6. No one should be allowed to advocate for war until they have spent one night in the boonies, on the perimeter, fighting hand to hand.
7. Look around you. Look at your schools, hospitals, roads, libraries, parks, programs. Imagine how much better they would be if we were as quick to spend money on them as we are to spend it on war.
8. If you are stupid enough to have a war, your conduct should be driven by two thoughts: First, you COULD end up the loser, and second, in any case, you’re going to have to find a way to live with these people after it’s over.
9. It’s never really over.
10. In war, no one REALLY wins. Ever.
mikey
9. It’s never really over.
If the Civil War were over we might not have George W. Bush.
So true. QED
Matt Taibbi is the best.
On Tom Friedman:
Free-trader leg-humping. You gotta love it.
(New York Press)
I’m sorry. Am I to understand that run-of-the-mill, common sense, hilarious liberals are considered dogmatic in certain circles in American “liberal” politics?
Brits, Australians and Canadians…are you following this? Are you as shocked as I am?
“Am I to understand that run-of-the-mill, common sense, hilarious liberals are considered dogmatic in certain circles in American “liberalâ€? politics?”
If I live here 100 years I will never understand this. The most tolerant, sensible, pragmatic voices in the U.S. are the ones denounced as shrill, naive and vainglorious by those in what passes for the “center”. Candidates for bullshit local positions are asked about their faith in Jeezuz. The education system is being dismantled for the sake of “choice”.
Actually, there’s a lot of things I don’t get.
Retardo-
Nope, that was not me. But thanks… I think.
As for the responsibility for centrists who were along for the ride, there were very few moments when, as a procedural matter, opposition could have been raised. The only chance for Kerry, Clinton, et al to vote yay or nay was for the appropriation of funds. At first Bush denied we were committed to go in, and once we were in, denial of funds for troops in the field was not politically feasible.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight it appears the snafu is as it was intended all along. The low level of troop deployment, the tolerance of rioting, and the inexplicable, sudden and unexpected disbanding of the Iraqi military only makes sense if your intent is to cause a civil war you intend to ride out in the green zone, and eventually dominate a ruined, utterly beggered country.
I am embarrased to admit it, but I never expected such complete depravity. Combine this with the mismanagement of domestic affairs, and our country has been set back 50 years in power and prestige. And I helped the bastards do it (albeit in a very small way).
Mikey said:
One the first one: I don’t deny abuses have occured. And it damn well does matter how you define torture. People have been held accountable for their abusive actions where they have come to light. Now, I know according to you and others when you say someone should be held accountable what you really mean is that everybody in the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes and imprisoned or worse. Of course after impeachment proceedings and copious frogmarching. I don’t agree, and neither do most sensible and reasonable people. That’s moonbattery.
One the second one: Hmmm…are you suggesting enemy combatants should just be summarily executed instead of being held in confinement? I’ve heard that argument before, but from real wingnuts. I’m surprised if your thinking is that same as theirs. In any event, the things you believe are acknowledged facts are in fact debatable. You believe it because you’ve heard other people say it. It’s the echo-chamber effect again.
And lastly, if you believe war is NEVER a solution then there’s nothing more to discuss. I disagree, and so do other sensible and reasonable people.
As for the rest of the posts, they either generally fall along those same lines or consist of meaningless ad hominem..and as such are unworthy of a reply.
BillB
purging, fundamentalist*
IMPORTANT NOTE:
This isn’t just supposed to connote communism, but something a lot closer to home.
It’s supposed to be an end-run on Godwin’s Law.
The largest pogrom against the Jews was the Holocaust. The second largest (at least since the Babylonian Exile) was in Russia (I’m not sure if it were the Great Purge or the Russian Civil War). Somewhere between 70,000 and 250,000 Jews killed.
This is what that rhetoric is trying to do. It’s trying to convince people that the Lamont supporters are:
A.) Anti-semitic, and
B.) in league with the premillenial dispensationalist fundamentalists, who want to set up a state in Israel in order to bring about the end times so that they can kill all the Jews.
Tulkinghorn,
I think you’re giving these neocons way too much credit by assuming they planned any of this. I don’t know what in the neocon fairy world can lead one to believe these people had the sophistication required to not send enough troops just so the situation would devolve into a bloody civil war. Especially given the fact that allegedly Bush couldn’t even tell the difference between Suni and Shi’a.
These people really did believe their own bullshit. There’s of course the badass imperialist thinking, but I think if you’re looking for answers to the things you mentioned (not enough troops, tolerance of rioting, the disbanding of the military) you need look no further than the honey pot. I don’t think people pay enough attention to the economic engineering part of it, but personally I found this Naomi Klein article from 2004 to be the most enlightening piece I ever read on the war.
BillB-
Are you being willfully obtuse? Mikey said a SOLDIER would have either killed a guy, or gotten him medical treatment. You know, like on a battlefield. I think he’s saying that in a battle, the guy would either be captured and properly treated, or had been killed as part of the battle. Even if the klling happened as part of the proverbial mopping up operations.
Or are you going to now claim that those kinds of things never happened, along with the torture?
And reasonable people DO believe war is never the answer. Isaac Asimov, one of the most reasonable of people, said “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” I don’t see how the folks who are so eager to destroy the military and thousands of lives on a fantasy of empire can claim to be ‘sensible’ or ‘reasonable’.
Mikey said Things are never better after a war, and I’ve got to say I can’t find any justification – anywhere, except maybe in the dim dark recesses of the moldy peach that Bill KKKristol uses in place of a mind- that would suggest otherwise.
I know, I know, I’m feeding the troll. But Teh Ruppert doens’t come out to play anymore.
Bill, the use of terms like “sensible” and “reasonable” absolutely is ironic. The irony lies in people who say things that have historically been outside the pale of what is considered either sensible or reasonalbe in America, but they say it in a tone of voice that implies that the speaker thinks it is sensible and reasonable. Upon hearing such things said, people who are (really) sensible and reasonalbe react with outrage. The reason this is notable in our current poisoned political atmosphere is that certain people within the US use the TONES of the original speaker and the response to, in effect, redefine what is “sensible” and “reasonable” by the tones of how ideas are spoken rather than the substance of what is said. Thus, using these terms to describe the apologists for torture, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, perpetual (or long) war, or even genocide is indeed meant to be ironic.
Sorry for the lengthy discourse, but obviously Bill wasn’t getting the point without the lengthy discourse.
Thanks, TC, your (should have been unnecessary clarification) is dead on. At the end of the battle, there are hurt people here and there. “Ours” and “Theres”. Different guys, with different outlooks, different amounts of anger and adrenaline, will deal with them differently. The point was, if they DIDN’T choose to shoot the poor fucker dead, they would have gotten a medic. Some sick American fuck decided that he would be stripped naked, put in a metal shipping container and NOT FUCKING TREATED. These are the motherfucking “heroes” this asshole is defending. Oh yeah, I killed my share of of innocents. And I live with it every day. But I got medical treatment for a helluva lot more. And if I saw that fucker abusing a wounded prisoner on the field, I’d sure like to think that he’d have had to deal with me and the muzzle of my rifle…
mikey
“god damn the “Sensible Liberalsâ€? at the DLC:”
“Taibbi makes the crucial connection of Brooks to the DLC not only because of their similar tactics, but also on grounds of similar temprament.”
If you’re trying to prove that the attempt to get rid of Lieberman really is a purge – something I don’t believe for a second – then you’re going about it the right way.
The second quote in particular is a standard Leninist line of argument, used whenever it becomes necessary to prove that moderate social-democrat parties, despite what they say about themselves, are in fact objectively bourgeois imperialists.
Will Marshall is wrong about Lieberman, but he’s not a Republican and he’s not David Brooks. And the inability to manifest “outrage”, as a criterion of insincerity, is not a characteristic that would have been recognized by great liberals like Lionel Trilling or Adlai Stevenson.
And what did that get poor Adlai Stevenson? The Kennedy crew left him twisting in the wind, and the right wing perpetually smeared him as a closeted homo.
But it’s very clever of you to say that my argument is Leninist. Look, I know that the post itself appears self-contradictory, but I’ve addressed it, I think, in comments here knowing as I did that some troll would show up (not you, Bill).
The thing here is that the real attempted purge has been for ten years or more coming FROM the center TO the Left, not vice-versa. It’s Will Marshall and Lieberman and the DLC who wants to purge the Left, and they did such a fine job of it that the results of the 2000 election are a testament to their abilities — a large enough chunk of the Left, tired of being told to FOD, voted Green. Well, they cant get away with it anymore, especially as they do with smiles on their faces a la Brooks. The center sold its soul to Satan.
But they dont have to leave. As I told Bob, all they have to do is a) stop attacking the anti-war Left and b)hammer the Right on accountability. Instead, they like to pretend that the Kossites are more extreme than the wingnuts in charge. Sorry, Lionel Trilling and Adlai Stevenson would never have subscribed to such a calculus.