“A Little Surreal”
Even the normally cautious and reserved CNN reporter, Ed Henry, couldn't contain himself. "Absurd" is how he described Dick Cheney's, um, absurd assertion that his office isn't part of the executive branch. Then CNN ran footage of Monday's White House briefing in which a red-faced Dana Perino stood at the podium and, with little effort, tried to explain it. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (no relation) describes the moment:
The explanatory task fell to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, whose skin reddened around her neck and collar as she pleaded ignorance during the daily briefing: "I'm not a legal scholar. . . . I'm not opining on his argument that his office is making. . . . I don't know why he made the arguments that he did." "It's a little surreal," remarked Keith Koffler of Congress Daily. "You're telling me," Perino agreed. "You can't give an opinion about whether the vice president is part of the executive branch or not?" Koffler pressed. "It's a little bit like somebody saying, 'I don't know if this is my wife or not.' " Give the flushed and flustered Perino credit for trying. The vice president had put her in an impossible position. Already under fire for his secretive ways, Cheney has refused to comply with an order governing the care of classified documents; his office concluded that the order does not apply because he is not "an entity within the executive branch."To tell the truth, Cheney has put the entire administration in an impossible position. More Milbank:
Cheney has, in effect, declared himself to be neither fish nor fowl but an exotic, extraconstitutional beast who answers to no one. As if to demonstrate his status as the fourth branch, Cheney left the White House yesterday and made his way to the Capitol, escorted by eight police motorcycles, three police cruisers, two armored limousines, and five SUVs and minivans packed with aides and armed Secret Service agents. Cheney spent all of six minutes on the Senate floor, fulfilling his legislative obligations as president of the Senate. His task was simple -- swearing in a newly appointed senator, Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming -- and was designed to be foolproof. He had a brief parliamentary script to read, and a laminated card printed with the oath of office. But the executive-branch refugee showed himself to be equally unimpressed with legislative custom. Instead of reading the oath of office and having the new senator merely say "I do" at the end, Cheney ordered Barrasso to "repeat after me." Barrasso, unprepared to utter the entire oath, got tripped up on the line about "mental reservation or purpose of evasion" -- and asked Cheney to repeat it. The fourth branch of government, his duties thus completed, applauded, left the floor and returned downtown in his motorcade. It's not entirely surprising that Cheney would attempt to flee the executive branch, given Bush's sub-30-percent standing in polls.More than a little surreal. Cheney's flagrant extra-constitutionality comes at a bad moment. Just when the country's leading newspapers are running front page stories about the long reach of his political power. One thing is for sure, historians are going to have a field day for the next two decades reconstructing and dissecting his legacy. This guy's really gonna go down in history. Let's just hope he doesn't take the rest of us with him. And speaking of going down... you know the President has hit rock-bottom in popularity when a gaggle of do-gooder high school students start to protest. This is an incredible story: Some 140 hand-picked, high-performing seniors are chosen, wooed and brought to the White House...and they slap the Prez with a letter signed by 50 of them protesting the use of torture. Doesn't get any better.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:56 am
Snotty kids egged on by rude, left-wing educators showing lack of class and respect by trying to overrun the purpose of the meeting with the President and spitting on his hospitality and his giving of his time…. I don’t consider disrespect as getting any better.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:00 am
I must admit that this is even more contrived then “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.â€
Apparently Cheney will soon be expanding on this logic and say, “It depends on which part of the word part that you are referring to. In part, I am legislative and in part I am executive and in part I am neither.â€
June 26th, 2007 at 8:34 am
“The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights,” deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.
So now Cheney’s office isn’t even a part of the U.S.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Oh, wow, I just got it, all this time Woody has been putting us on! That last post proves it.
Playing along and pretending to take the joke seriously: If 40 out of 150 hand-picked students are so willing to diss the president, it doesn’t look good for the future of conservatism in America. God help us!
June 26th, 2007 at 9:18 am
I noticed that several papers have endorsed Rahm Emmanuel’s suggestion that, since Cheney isn’t part of the Executive, he shouldn’t get any funds.
The combination of arrogance and incompetence shown by this crowd is now so complete that I want to know one good reason why Articles of Impeachment aren’t immediately drawn up for both.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Woody those kids showed a lot of respect – for the Constitution. Which is more than you can say for the boy-king and his cronies.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:20 am
rlo, some months ago I said I thought an impeachment campaign was a misuse of time and energy. I have changed my mind about it. It may not work, but would be an excellent political education tool.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:25 am
It is strange, and truly a pleasant surprise that a centrist AIPACite like R Emmanuel is suggesting such a radical move…but…it may simply mean that this is forordained.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:55 am
The shorter Woody – “Kids should be seen but not heard.”
This notion, of course, is the epitome of snotty, disrespectful adult attitudes.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:05 am
It seems history repeats itself again and again. When you want to do something that is immoral, you get some lawyer to redefine the meaning of words:
– We don’t torture, we water board, since we have determined it not to be torture.
– We don’t have slaves, we own property, since we have determined blacks not to be human..
– We don’t murder, we abort, since we have determined that the un-born baby is not a life.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am
We are witnessing a theater of the absurd at an unprecedented level. I firmly believe that actions such as Cheney’s in this case and other Orwellian dictionary oxymorons have left us stunned and stultified into incredulous inaction. We simply no longer believe our eyes, ears or internal senses.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:14 am
“we have determined that the un-born baby is not a life.”
Not to get into an extended debate over this issue, but I’ve NEVER heard anyone ever argue that a fetus isn’t alive or a “life”. Obviously there are questions raised about degrees of viability outside the womb or even the degree of “humanity” imputed at various stages of development, which – since we’re starting with a cluster of cells and a nine-month process – is hardly an irrational or devious discussion. The legal questions are argued around issues of conflicting rights – the mother, her womb, the fetus, the right of the state to intervene, etc. – not over “a life”. The slippery use of “redefinition” and making the desired outcome seem a matter of what legal language is imposed is surely happening when abortion is defined as “murder” and a fetus is defined as a “human being” with full rights under the law from conception. (The only “pro-life” proponents I take seriously as having the courage of their convictions are those who argue firmly that abortion should be proscribed even in cases of incest or rape. If abortion is in their moral theory murder, what’s the morality of committing murder against someone whose father happened to be a rapist ? At that point, most abortion proponents retreat to a doctrine of “personal choice” – which is the only thing that makes any sense before the law as regards a life that is only viable if “hosted” inside another’s body in the first place.) “Abortion = Murder!” is slippery, callously calculated legal language of the first order.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:21 am
other than Cheney’s latest “who want’s to know?” gambit… I’m not sure what’s new here. Underneath it, maybe, is a an emurging like to let W off the hook along the lines of “he’s a tragic figure, his mistake was putting too much faith in power hungry advisors who betrayed him, and his tragic sense of loyalty would not let him see….” I’ve heard variations of this line from Camille Paglia, James Carvelle, and now Sally Quinn is shopping it around (with a plug for Mr. Wonderful, Fred Thompson).
Just reading a smidge between the lines you could garner most of this stuff form the Vulcans book or other places. It may be a case of the Post seeing the handwriting on the wall, and trying to distance themselves from the disaster they played such a part in making happpen. Glad the writings good, though.
Woody, you better just hope your senerio on those kids is correct, far fetched as it seems. Because when the real bills for Iraq start rolling in…. there’s going to be a lot of that disrespect goin around.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:36 am
“A Little Surreal”
I think that describes Woody’s comment pretty well.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
RE K Nardy’s comments about those who believe Bush was betrayed, etc….Bush quite simply would never have gotten the nomination had not the “power hungry” brokers obtained assurances that they would be in control. Cheney was chosen as the man for the job, and all the right-wing big guns fell in behind Bush, despite his clear lack of qualification, experience and apparent aptitude for governance. I am convinced a deal was made that Cheney would have complete access to all aspects of the presidency, and the ability to constructively make the decisions. Bush could glad-hand and seduce the fundamentalists and holy-rollers.
The deal might not have gotten off the ground, audacious as it was given the fact that Bush-Cheney, uh, lost the election, or at the very least the actual vote. But then came 9/11/01, and they had a pretext to expand (or contract) federal power. Perhaps if that had not occurred, Cheney would have made less outrageous inroads into constitutionally-protected territory, but he may as a result have been more successful.
Let’s hope we locate all the landmines these guys are going to leave in place throughout the executive branch of government….
June 26th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Concerning abortion as a political question, I am now reading a historical novel by Marge Piercy set in the “Gilded Age” in NY, the mid-late 19th century, titled “Sex Wars.” It features various historical and fictional characters who were involved in the battles over the use of contraceptives, the right to abortion, and of course suffrage and economic rights of women. One point the author makes is that before men got involved in the business of childbirth and “women’s things,” abortion was common and rarely remarked-upon in the early stages of gestation.
The novel, which is excellent, describes the involvement of people like Victoria and Tennessee Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Anthony Comstock and a variety of fictional characters in the struggle over what our public sexual morality would be, and whose lives would be adversely affected by the outcome.
June 26th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Checney thinks he is doing this for the longevity of the Empire. He knows we are on shaky ground and the executive is going to have to return to the tactics of the 60s and 70s in the future.
Speaking of which, the CIA’s long-awaited “family jewels” report was released an hour ago – 693 pages of confessions from agents who had the most skeletons in the closet (spying on reporters, consorting with mobsters, trying out neato drugs on citizens, etc). Nothing we haven’t heard, but the operational detail is facinating.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
The NY Times is bloggin’ it live with a bunch of experts – commenting on Howard Hunt’s failed (Watergate) “lootpicker,” how the CIA really deserved the name “the company,” how spying on reporters was approved at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration, and confirming that Dulles approved the Castro assasinations…
June 26th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
The 50-minority of those kids had as much right to upstage this one-time special event for the decent kids and to be rude to their host and to act as if they know more than the President and Congress as I do to tell Bob Dylan that he doesn’t know squat about music. It reminds me of a bumper sticker: “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything.”
BTW, I’m an adult and I don’t agree with Dick Cheney on his quasi-branch status.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Anyone remember the 1980 GOP convention? Remember the rumor of Gerry Ford becoming Veep and running a “Copresidency” with Reagan. It didn’t happen but they waited and dusted off the plan. Inmany ways Reagan was a front man. The genial salesman who charmed the public while some really creepy characters (James Watt, Ann Burford, Eliot Abrams) crawled around in the background. And they got all the shit. That was half the secret of Ronnie’s “Teflon”. Problem now is Bush is so lame and so – well just incompetent – that he shields nobody. What a loser. And now the GOP is looking for another empty suit to front the operation – sorta like those old Vegas “Owners” like Jack Entratter and that Desert Inn guy (help me out Marc I’m coming up blank here) who were the public face for the mob guys from Cleveland, KC and Chicago.
And while the POST sends us this series (and how long was it delayed?) everyone’s favorite real life courtesan, Sally Quinn, gushes over Fred Thompson and says he should replace Cheney since “Everybody loves Fred.” Yeah Sally, at your parties they do but check the polls. Every Dem beats him and Hil does second best against mr “Law ‘n Order.” Must be great to be in the in-crowd in the most recession proof town in America. Recession proof, that is for the folks in NW!
June 26th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Woody, you DO have a right to tell Bob Dylan that… what you don’t have is ACCESS.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Well, when I saw Cheney’s ridiculous statements yesterday in the newspaper, I came very close to regretting my vote for Nader in 2000…
Still, the question begs – why hasn’t the Democratic leadership called for Cheney and Bush’s removal? What in the &*!! does it take to get impeached around here?
June 26th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Aren’t any of the Usual Suspects excited now that Paris (Hilton) is free?
Wonks!
June 26th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
And she’ll be on “Larry King Live!” Tonight. In fact I believe that she bumped Michael Moore.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I liked James Watt.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
I’m really gonna have to ignore that, Woody.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Sally Quinn: “Thompson would give the Republicans a platform for running for the presidency — and the president a way out of Iraq without looking like he’s backing down. Bush would be left in better shape on the war and be able to concentrate on AIDS and the environment in hopes of salvaging his legacy.”
Is it just me, or is Sally Quinn one of the dumbest people who ever put pen to page in a major newspaper ?
June 26th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Years ago in a jounalism class (relax, it was just a class) we had to read some of the early pieces that made Sally’s career. As I recall, they were pretty good.
So, even though She slept her way to the top; then got midevil moral on Bill Clinton’s ass; at least She started with something. I’ll admit, I haven’t gotten to her novel’s yet.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
RLC: Inmany ways Reagan
Is this a conspiracy about Inman?
During the Kennedy assasination craze arond the Stone film Chomsky wrote a book The Truth about Camelot – disproving Stone and the Kennedy hagiographer’s loving assuredness that Kennedy was not an Imperialist and would not have gone to Vietnam (or the more sophisticated ‘he wouldn’t have gotten involved at the extent that LBJ did) – this is clearly bullshit. He speculated – and later this came out in documents alluded to by him and Cockburn in the book “golden age is in us” that talk about government releasing documents about controversial subjects like the CIA and Kenneday assassination to keep the jackals at bay and distract people from current conspiracies…
Its in this context that I take the “family jewels” – great operational detaila s Leftside said…..but fundamentally a distraction from current actions which we’ll read about in documents thirty years from now if we don’t shape up.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Yeah Moore got bumped. Health Care or the spectacle? hmmm..
June 26th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Incidently, as I’ve just finished reading it, I can reccomend to Woody, and to others in order to understand Woody Joe Bagient’s new book Deer Hunting with Jesus. Check it out.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Those kids give me hope.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Well, dang it. After having foresworn any additional reading material purchases from Amazon, because I really cannot control myself over there, I now have Deer Hunting with Jesus (jc), and Tragic Legacy (digby) on order. Anyone else want to chime in with some other darned book I oughta be reading?
June 26th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
LOTS:
I recommend The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan. It’s a well researched and documented study of the environmental disaster that led to the Dust Bowl.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Here are the students on their effort to speak truth to power.
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Students_hand_Bush_letter_urging_ban_0626.html
You will see they are very respectful.
The Dems didn’t want to run on this issue in 2004. They left it to children.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Thanks, Randy. Glory be, it’s in paperback! My checkbook thanks you as well.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
LOTS,
i couldn’t put it down as they say: I read it on the subway in the morning, during lunch, subway going home and before I went to bed.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I’m happy to report that Glenn Greenwald’s book has hit the top of Amazon’s fiction list. See you don’t need Richard Mellon Scaife bulk buying your book to get on the best seller list.
And can we all say hurrah to Elizabeth Edwards for bitch slapping the vile Ann Coulter today on “Hardball”? Maybe the wrong Edwards is running. Gee I wish she weren’t so sick. I’d love to see her run for the Senate Seat currently held by another Presidential wannabee’s wife!
June 26th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
That’s a cool story Patrick. Thanks for putting it up. It gives me great hope.
RLoC, Hopefully, they didn’t really classify Tragic Legacy as fiction. Number 15 at the moment, but was at 13 earlier.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
As long as I’m wracking up the mother of all credit card bills at Amazon, I figured it was worth taking a look at my wish list. Oy! Something I’ve had there for some time, but am off-put by the sheer size of the thing, is A People’s Tragedy by Figes. Has anyone read it? Thoughts?
June 26th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Sorry – Its NON-FICTION of course. Unless this whole last six and a half years has been a nightmare from which I can’t wake up!
June 26th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Jcummings, when do you people find time to read all these books? Don’t any of you work or raise kids or have aging parents to help?
Anyway, I had never heard of the popular book that you mentioned, Joe Bageant’s “Deer Hunting with Jesus,” so I researched it and decided, upon a very quick study, that he may be a clever writer, but also a clueless writer.
I don’t mean that in a snide way. It’s simply true. I conclude that it is almost impossible for a liberal to understand a conservative, much less communicate about them. Liberals have preconceptions that they try to prove rather than produce unbiased raw research to get the accurate answer.
Further, people are conservatives for many reasons other than, say, being uninformed or just plain stupid rednecks. Perhaps we understand history better than those who rush blindly ahead trying things that destroyed civilizations in the past. In any event, conservatives are individuals rather than group members, and you would have to understand many to get a correct picture.
I do agree that there is a class war, but it’s a war from the left. Perhaps, it could be better described as class or wealth envy.
This from someone who is Scot-Irish.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Woody’s ignorance of modern liberal philosophy – rooted in pragmatism, a la Dewey and Rorty – is amazing. He actually stacks the deck upside down. For some insight into the wacky world of the right, check out this article in the current TNR by Johann Hari on his experience on a National Review cruise. It’s hilarious. Even William F. Buckley isn’t enough of a knee-jerk reactionary for this crowd of crackpots, paranoids, armchair bombadiers and class warriors.
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070702&s=hari070207
June 26th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Clueless?
Read the guy’s work – his many essays online. His book is about his Scots-Irish life in his town.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I haven’t read all of the Figes book but used it a great deal in an undergrad history class. He’s refreshing for a historian, a great fan of Deutscher and thus a critic of the Revolution by its own standards, as opposed to the Pro-White Western standards. That said, he paints too nice a picture of Kerensky et. al.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Woody – just re-read your comments again, Bagient re-appropriates the concept of redneck. He is a southerner. You really don’t know what you’re talking about. I really think he’d speak to your soul. I’m serious.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I’m sorry to provide so much free promotion, but I think this is the most important mainstream left AND liberal book of the last few years. Joe deserves it…
After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor†childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.
A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomicsâ€; the ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical thinking†of the Christian right. (Bageant’s brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of “the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.â€
Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs “the American hologramâ€â€”the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
jcummings, it was a very, very quick review on my part, so I might be wrong. I was trying to hang a dart board, and that had a higher priority. You know how we conservatives are. I’ll try to do this justice later.
reg, of course, pulls out an isolated article and says, “See, see! This is how conservatives are!,” and then he wets all over himself in excitement.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
If I’m allegedly “wetting myself” by posting a very funny article on the National Review crowd, I guess your half-wit cartoon comments regarding liberals would qualify as a pantsload.
June 27th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Well, excuuuuuse me for not wanting to register or pay extra to read an article in The New Republic suggested by reg. Liberals have almost no sense of humor, which makes the description of “a very funny article” quite suspect, but it could make one throw up.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Sorry – I didn’t realize that article was behind a wall. Here’s a long excerpt from Johann Hari’s experience on the National Review cruise, just because it’s so funny and revealing of these cranks and crackpots, including that icon of academia Bernard Lewis, who for all of the degrees and accolades turns out to be as politically insightful as Woody…
The next morning, I warily wander into the Vista Lounge–a Vegas-style showroom–for the first of the trip’s seminars: a discussion intended to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of November 7, 2006.
There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public–that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich–are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”
The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”
Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, announces, “The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”
No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The aging historian Bernard Lewis declares, “The election in the U.S. is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.
A fracture-line in the lumbering certainty of American conservatism is opening right before my eyes. Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley–two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party–begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking–”I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants–and Buckley says to the chair, “Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America’s power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank God” for that.
…
“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.”
The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward.” His wife nods and says, “Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.
…
The familiar routine of the dinners–getting-to-know-you chit-chat, followed by raging right-wing echo chamber–is accelerating. Tonight, there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entrée has arrived. I drop the news that there are moves in Germany to have Rumsfeld extradited to face war crimes charges. A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, “If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to cite the Pinochet precedent, and (Kate) O’Beirne snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: “Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.” “Exactly,” adds O’Beirne’s husband. “And he privatized Social Security.” (“Editor’s Note” – O’Beirne’s husband was responsible for staffing the “Coalition Provisional Authority”, and hiring a bunch of Young Republicans from places like the Heritage Foundation to construct a new Iraqi government from inside their bunker in Baghad. This utterly incompetent, ideologically driven piece of shit has a lot to answer for himself. Aside from being married to that harpy.)
…
At one of the seminars, a panelist says anti-Americanism comes from both directions in a grasping pincer movement–”The Muslims condemn us for being decadent; the Europeans condemn us for not being decadent enough.” Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz’s wife, yells, “The Muslims are right, the Europeans are wrong!”
(end clip)
A floating loony bin…
June 27th, 2007 at 7:45 am
re: People’s Tragedy. Hmmmm. Thanks jc. It strikes me as a beast of a book. Maybe I can get it from a library and scan first to see if I have a prayer of plowing though it. Appreciate your thoughts. Not being an historian of any stripe, I fear I’d need a reader’s guide to understand it.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Reg, that piece from TNR reads like a spoof. It can’t be real, right? Please say it’s a spoof.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:53 am
It’s totally real.
June 27th, 2007 at 9:54 am
What’s really funny is this. The NR cruise has been a success for years. So the NATION started one too and it has been successful. But when Marty Peretz wanted to set up a cruise for him and the TNR crowd there was an underwhelming response. Oh Well – can’t image why? I mean the prospect of floating along with Marty sounds appetizing to me!
June 27th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
woody, you suck
June 27th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Maybe if TNR didn’t call their blog “The Plank”, more people would be willing to get on board ship with Long John Peretz.
June 29th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
The piece from TNR was actually done similarly by Eric Alterman in the Nation about ten or so years ago…its a better piece, but rereading it one looks at the unhinged 90s right as enlightened compared with today’s hate crowd.
June 29th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
I like Peretz for laughs…he’s kind of a highbrow Horowitz. A recent blog entry claims Pakistan is not a nation(!) So not only to Peretz are Palestinians not a nation because there are Arabs outside Palestine, then Pakistan, since there are Punjabis etc. on both sides of the border, is not a nation eithe…Is he gonna declare that Austria is not a nation?
October 30th, 2007 at 7:39 am
anthony lapaglia gia…
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May 14th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Phat Farm Store…
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you….
October 14th, 2010 at 3:40 am
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