And somewhere Paul Wolfowitz is saying we can clean up this mess in Iraq quickly and easily and it won’t cost the price of a movie plus popcorn. For sure.

It’ll be easy. Honest.

Shamelessly do I copy/paste an entire post from Andrew Sullivan today since I just saw that battle-hardened warrior Bill Kristol on the teevee saying with a straight face what Sullivan recounts here. It was an utterly  hallucinatory experience.

Here’s Sullivan: What do you do with near-clinical fanatics who, in their own minds, never make mistakes and whose worldview remains intact even after it has been empirically dismantled in front of their eyes? In real life, you try and get them to get professional help.

In the case of those who only recently sent thousands of American servicemembers to their deaths in a utopian scheme to foment a democracy in a sectarian dictatorship, we have to merely endure their gall in even appearing in front of the cameras. But the extent of their pathology is deeper than one might expect. And so there is actually a seminar this fall, sponsored by the Hertog Foundation, which explores the origins of the terrible decision-making that led us into the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam. And the fair and balanced teaching team?

It will be led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, who served during the Persian Gulf War as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and as Deputy Secretary of Defense during the first years of the Iraq War, and by Lewis Libby, who served during the first war as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and during the Iraq War as Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Next spring: how the Iraq War spread human rights … by Donald Rumsfeld.

Most people are aware that relatively few of the architects of a war have fully acknowledged the extent of their error – let alone express remorse or even shame at the more than a hundred thousands civilian deaths their adventure incurred for a phony reason. No, all this time, they have been giving each other awards, lecturing congressmen and Senators, writing pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, being fellated by David Gregory, and sucking at the teet of the neocon welfare state, as if they had nothing to answer for, and nothing to explain.

Which, I suppose makes the following paragraph in Bill Kristol’s latest case for war less shocking than it should be:

Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011. The crisis is urgent, and it would be useful to focus on a path ahead rather than indulge in recriminations. All paths are now fraught with difficulties, including the path we recommend. But the alternatives of permitting a victory for al Qaeda and/or strengthening Iran would be disastrous.

But it is shocking; it is, in fact, an outrage, a shameless, disgusting abdication of all responsibility for the past combined with a sickening argument to do exactly the same fricking thing all over again. And yes, I’m not imagining. This is what these true know-nothing/learn-nothing fanatics want the US to do:

It would mean not merely conducting U.S. air strikes, but also accompanying those strikes with special operators, and perhaps regular U.S. military units, on the ground. This is the only chance we have to persuade Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that they have an alternative to joining up with al Qaeda or being at the mercy of government-backed and Iranian-backed death squads, and that we have not thrown in with the Iranians. It is also the only way to regain influence with the Iraqi government and to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces on terms that would allow us to demand the demobilization of Shi’a militias and to move to limit Iranian influence and to create bargaining chips with Iran to insist on the withdrawal of their forces if and when the situation stabilizes.

What’s staggering is the maximalism of their goals and the lies they are insinuating into the discourse now, just as they did before.

Last time, you could ascribe it to fathomless ignorance. This time, they have no excuse. ISIS is not al Qaeda; it’s far worse in ways that even al Qaeda has noted undermine its cause rather than strengthen it. It may be strategically way over its head already. And the idea that the US has to fight both ISIS and Iran simultaneously is so unhinged and so self-evidently impossible to contain or control that only these feckless fools would even begin to suggest it. Having empowered Iran by dismantling Iraq, Kristol actually wants the US now to enter a live war against ISIS and the Quds forces. You begin to see how every military catastrophe can be used to justify the next catastrophe. It’s a perfect circle for the neocons’ goal of the unending war. I don’t know what to say about it really. It shocks in its solipsism; stuns in its surrealism; chills in its callousness and recklessness. So perhaps the only response is to republish what this charlatan was saying in 2003 in a tone utterly unchanged from his tone today, with a certainty which was just as faked then as it is now. Read carefully and remember he has recanted not a word of it:

February 2003 (from his book, “The War Over Iraq“):  According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two.

February 24, 2003:  “Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world’s sole superpower.”

March 5, 2003: “We’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction.”

April 1 2003: “On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

Yes, “always been very secular”. Always. Would you buy a used pamphlet from this man – let alone another full scale war in Iraq?

George Will makes me heart Calvin Coolidge

Will wrote about Calvin Coolidge today (a welcome respite from his usual whining) and offered this anecdote:

When President and Mrs. Coolidge were being given simultaneous but separate tours of a chicken farm, Grace asked her guide whether the rooster copulated more than once a day. “Dozens of times,” she was told. “Tell that to the president,” she said.

When told, Coolidge asked, “Same hen every time?” When the guide said, “A different one each time,” the president said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

And this was Coolidge too:

In 1924, after the lingering illness and death of his 16-year-old son from blood poisoning, Coolidge demonstrated . . . the eloquence of reticence: “When he was suffering he begged me to help him. I could not.”

Two small glimpses into the inner life of a man I’ve never even been curious about – he sounds worth knowing.

Oh dear, another constituency down. Well done GOP

from Little Green Footballs

Now this would be a fine anthem, that ‘God’ part and all

Take comfort. Or, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

I perused my own QUOTES page for historic words, relevant to our times – and found some. Take comfort:

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.                      John Adams

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.                                                                                                          Will Rogers

Talk is cheap…except when Congress does it.                                 Anonymous

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class…save Congress.                                                                                                 Mark Twain

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.                                                                                                              Aesop

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.                                                                                      Mark Twain

Meanwhile, let us not forget that:

Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society            Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.                                                                              Louis Brandeis

And, having absolutely nothing to do with politics, my personal, all time favorite:

One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being.                                                                                   Mas Kodani

 

George Washington did it. John Adams too.

Now that SCOTUS has finished hearing the challenges to Obamacare, we settle down to wait a few months for their opinion. (Elvis save us from the wrath of those who chant f-r-d-e-e-d-o-m-e-! at every loss if  the justices say, yeah, okay.)

The first US Supreme Court, 1790

Meanwhile, this is interesting. From friend Ed this morning:

. . . three laws, passed in 1790, 1792 and 1798 respectively . . . provide for mandates not unlike the one being considered by the Supreme Court this week . . .:

[In] 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.

PolitiFact dug deeper into Elhauge’s claims and found evidence that mandates were approved by Congressmen who had also signed the Constitution; refuting the assertion that the laws passed despite framers’ objections:

There was no roll call for the House and Senate bills requiring health care for seamen. But on the proposal mandating the purchase of a musket, firelock or rifle as part of the larger bill to establish a uniform militia, 10 of the 14 framers whose votes were recorded endorsed the measure.Not only did mandates pass muster with the Framers in Congress, they were signed into law by George Washington and John Adams.

The American aristocracy? Royalty? Plutocracy?

We have a political aristocracy in America that is increasingly becoming hereditary as well. We scold Syria and belly laugh over North Korea, but we’re in the game too (this is my own very incomplete list, but check out Oligarch Kings for more on the subject).

Anyway, lookee:

• Senator Prescott Bush
• his son, Congressman and President GHW Bush
• his son, Governor and President GW Bush
• his brother, Governor Jeb Bush
• Governor and President Bill Clinton
• his wife, Senator and Sect’y of State Hillary Clinton
• Governor and Presidential candidate George Romney
• his son, Governor and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney
• Congressman and perennial Presidential candidate Ron Paul
• his son, Senator Rand Paul
• US Ambassador to England, Joseph P. Kennedy
• his son, Senator and President John F. Kennedy
• his brother, Attorney General and Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy
• his brother, Senator Ted Kennedy
• his son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy
• assorted other Kennedys in State offices
• NY Governor Mario Cuomo
• his son, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo (married ot RFK’s daughter)
• California Governor Pat Brown
• his son, 2-time California Governor Jerry Brown

(Of course, there were the Adamses, father and son, in the early 1800’s and the 20th Century Roosevelts – although their relationship was very distant.)

So, who am I missing?

The Chaplin adds two more 19th century names:

• President William Henry Harrison
• his grandson, President Benjamin Harrison

One of the most interesting things about these people is that many of them are interrelated, i.e., one family to another.

An old American tradition: Occupy Washington

In 1932,  unemployed and denied payment of the wartime bonuses they’d been promised, 43,000 WWI veterans from all over the country, calling themselves The Bonus Army, marched on Washington, DC. There, they built and occupied an encampment (from local rubbish) known as Hooverville. Many had their wives and children with them since they were otherwise homeless anyway.

While they were there, the  Senate voted down a bill to pay the bonuses, and the police were ordered in to break up Hooverville, which they did, killing two vets. But when the police raid failed to break up the camp, President Hoover ordered the army in.

At 4:45 p.m., commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, two regiments, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch. The Bonus Marchers, believing the troops were marching in their honor, cheered the troops until Patton ordered the cavalry to charge them—an action which prompted the spectators to yell, “Shame! Shame!”

Shacks that members of the Bonus Army erected on the Anacostia Flats were left burning after the confrontation with the military.

After the cavalry charged, the infantry, with fixed bayonets and gas . . entered the camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River to their largest camp and President Hoover ordered the assault stopped.

However Gen. MacArthur, feeling the Bonus March was a Communist attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, ignored the President and ordered a new attack. Fifty-five veterans were injured and 135 arrested.^[9] A veteran’s wife miscarried. When 12-week-old Bernard Myers died in the hospital after being caught in the tear gas attack . . .

During the military operation, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, later President of the United States, served as one of MacArthur’s junior aides.^[14] Believing it wrong for the Army’s highest-ranking officer to lead an action against fellow American war veterans, he strongly advised MacArthur against taking any public role: “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there,” he said later.

This was not the first time MacArthur, a figure of adulation – especially on the right, ignored his Commander in Chief. He did ther same to Truman in the Philippines after WWII. Truman, being Truman, just fired him. If America had ever fallen to a fascist military dictatorship, MacArthur would probably have been the guy at the top.

 

Thick and thin, we managed . . .

This is an old favorite of mine and I’ve posted it before. It doesn’t thrill me quite as much as when I last put it up, but it’s a terrific reminder that the political world we inhabit isn’t unique to our time. These guys had their demagogues and vicious attackers. Hell, we killed a few of them. They were pretty much all attacked for destroying the country. But thick and thin. . .

I’m off to see X-Men – Ta-Nehisi Coates already saw it

Ta-Nehisis Coates is a relatively new columnist at The New York Times. I read him today – for the first time – because his column invoked X-Men: First Class, a movie I am about to go see. (I love this stuff.)

Just want to say he’s a gorgeous writer. What a thrill these days to find such as he. I look forward to more.

Mosque madness no more?

Have we moved on? Has my country found a new thing to label terrorist or a new thing to be very very afraid of? I just don’t spend enough time with talk radio or FOX news to know whether the tempest has finally blown over. In any case, it does need to wind down and move on because  – in our one-story-at-a-time media culture –  there’s a new game comin’ to town.

Some batshit crazy pastor here in my home state is organizing The First Annual Great American Quran Burning. On 9/11 apparently. In Indonesia counter protests are being organized. I hope there is a legal way to stop these clowns from building their bonfire. Incitement to riot? Isn’t that a crime? Does a resultant feared riot have to be local? How about incitement to cause a riot in Indonesia and other countries? (If you’d like to participate in this great American event, go here to get your own Quran to burn. Oh fun!)

Thinking of these things, it seemed to me a fine time to post Mayor Bloomberg‘s wonderful speech of a  month ago. (The transcript is here.) A very fine lesson in American history, in who we are, in what we stand for and in what actually is the right thing. I haven’t posted it before because it was ubiquitous. But now it seems appropriate.

Without a hitch

The American Civil War was about a lot of things, but it wasn’t about presidential succession – we’ve managed to do that seamlessly for 234 years. Just wow. Thanks gentlemen. And Happy Fourth!

He thinks he’s a presidential candidate

Andrew Sullivan’s Hewitt Award Nominee of the day:

Obama is detached from the American experience. He just doesn’t identify with the average American because of his own background. Indonesia and Hawaii. His view is from the viewpoint of academics and the halls of the Ivy league schools that he went to and it’s not a love of this country and an understanding of the basic values and wants and desires of its people,” – Rick Santorum.

And neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson were aristocrats. Also.

The 20th century man

Robert Byrd was a man of his times and as the times changed so did he. Byrd experienced and contributed to the entire canvas that was 20th century America.

As a young man he was a member of the Klu Klux Klan and carried his Southern racism into the Senate. In 1964 he voted against the Civil Rights Act. That was Robert Byrd.

But he moved on; he grew with the century and with the country (his attitude toward race parallels a journey taken by my own father).

Here is Robert Byrd’s journey from 1944 to 2003:

1944:

“	I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.	”
	— Robert C. Byrd, in a letter to Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), 1944, [8][12

2004: 

In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People‘s (NAACP)^[59] Congressional Report Card for the 108th Congress (spanning the 2003–2004 congressional session), Byrd was awarded with an approval rating of 100 percent for favoring the NAACP’s position in all 33 bills presented to the United States Senate regarding issues of their concern.

He served way too long in the Senate of course but that guaranteed his place in the history books by virtue of longevity alone.

Byrd was known as the parliamentarian of the Senate, an unofficial title conferred because no one knew the arcane convoluted rules of that body better than he did. And long before Newt Gingrich turned it into a political gimmick, Byrd carried his copy of the Constitution in his breast pocket and consulted it often while on the floor of the Senate.

He gave one of the most honorable speeches of his career in 2003 – a very underreported speech. His voice echoed around a nearly empty chamber as he – a man who’d lived through two world wars  – appealed to President Bush to tamp down his zeal for a war of aggression.

He’d overstayed his time certainly and we still need his voice.

The 2003 speech:

They have always been with us

E.J. Dionne is an observant and thoughtful guy. In this morning’s column he looks at the Tea Partiers and reminds us all of some history:

“Something else is going on in the Tea Party movement, and it has deep roots in our history. Anti-statism, a profound mistrust of power in Washington, dates all the way to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution because they saw it concentrating too much authority in the central government. At any given time, perhaps 20 to 25 percent of Americans can be counted on to denounce anything Washington does as a threat to “our traditional liberties.”
. . .
Understanding the principled anti-government radicalism that animates this movement explains why its partisans see the conservative Bush as a sellout and the cautiously liberal Obama as a socialist. For now, their fears of Obama are enough to tether the Tea Partiers to the GOP. In the long run, establishment Republicans are destined to disappoint them.”

This bit of history doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to seek ways to bring that 20% into reality. We should. And as long as they are anti-Washington, they are dissatisfied and angry and vulnerable to demagogues-to-come. Which, unlike dissent, is NOT good for a nation.