Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

OK folks, I think our anti-insanity activism has got to kick into gear now. These two Glen Greenwald columns are pretty scary. One is about Bush and his opinion that he can declare war, despite explicit Constitutional delegation of this power to Congress (backed up by elaboration in the Federalist papers). The other is how the right wingers in this country have not held a single person in their punditocracy accountable for being so completely wrong about Iraq. Can you believe the right wing still respects and applauds someone who wrote this in May of 2003:
It takes two to quagmire. In Vietnam, America had an enemy that enjoyed significant popular support and effective supply lines. Neither is true in Iraq. Isolated atrocities will continue to happen in the days ahead, as dwindling numbers of the more depraved Ba'athists confront the totality of their irrelevance. But these are the death throes: the regime was decapitated two weeks ago, and what we've witnessed is the last random thrashing of the snake's body. As I wrote back then, apropos Robert Fisk's massive bulk loo-paper purchase in the run-up to war, "I can't say this strikes me as a 25-roll war". By the time you read this, Tariq Aziz and the last five Ba'athists in Baghdad may be holed up in Fisk's Ba'athroom, and he'll be hailing the genius of their plan to lure the Americans to their doom by leaving his loo rolls on the stairwell for the Marines to slip on. But, for everyone other than media naysayers, it's the Anglo-Aussie-American side who are the geniuses. Rumsfeld's view that one shouldn't do it with once-a-decade force, but with a lighter, faster touch has been vindicated, with interesting implications for other members of the axis of evil and its reserve league.I think the level of denial of reality and the lack of "lessons learned" on the part of these folks is truly astonishing. That folks who said this kind of stuff and haven't admitted error are getting any respect at all shows you how little that quaint thing called reality matters to those convinced of their own correctness. Fortunately, I think many Americans are seeing through the bullshit, but unfortunately that may not matter, because Bush clearly holds in contempt all of the institutions designed to check executive power.

Honestly, I think the only way to stop an immoral and counterproductive war with Iran may be to get Bush out of office. He simply doesn't care what anyone outside of his narrow cabal thinks or does. Barring that, we need to get out in front of the warmongers and start making the counter-arguments now.