The Opinion Mill

Arlington National Cemetery, as most of you know, occupies land owned before the Civil War by the family of Robert E. Lee. After Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army to fight on the Confederate side, the Federal military brass started using the grounds of the estate to bury the Union dead created by Lee’s generalship.

I propose a portion of King George II’s estate in Crawford be used for the burial of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. That way, if there really is an afterlife, we have at least some hope of seeing Bush’s lies come back to haunt him.

Robert Novak, who has been known not to lie on occasion, delivers a revelation about Hillary Clinton so amazing it could only be printed in parentheses:

(In private conversations, Clinton has expressed the view that Obama’s emphasis on Iraq — her Senate vote for it, his against it — defeated her.)

Leapin’ lizards! guess that’s why they call him a news columnist, eh?

One of wingerdom’s favorite dreamland correspondents has declared that the Iraq war is over and — surprise! — we won:

I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.

I guess it’s only to be expected that the war we were lied into by the only president to be personally chosen by God would be winding up just in time for the conclusion of that president’s final term. (Assuming Scalia et al don’t have another surprise in store for us.) After all, Obama has made it clear he wants a tight timetable for withdrawal, and the Iraqis themselves have been clamoring for the U.S. to get lost. Let the Republicans declare victory and go home, leaving behind a brutalized pseudo-state, a make-believe government riddled by terrorist elements, a population traumatized by ethnic cleansing, women at the mercy of theocrats and fresh trouble brewing in Kurdistan. Let the victory parades begin!

Look, I’m resigned to the fact that the wingers will be sounding triumpets, crying “Hail Caesar!” and scattering rose petals at Bush’s feet no matter what happened in Iraq. They’ve been doing it ever since that clown show on the aircraft carrier. Bush has his hard core of supporters who don’t care if the country’s been robbed, so long as the crooks have a magnetized yellow ribbon on their getaway car.

Since the bad guys won and the crooks are going to get away clean, why not end the scam now? Ring down the curtain now, get the troops out, leave one less mess for the next administration to deal with? Can we at least get that much out of this horror? Nobody’s fooled except the fools, so let’s just cut the crap and get this thing over with.

Another reason to send those checks to WBAI.

It’s a cliche that the military is always prepared to fight the previous war. What deserves to become the new cliche — one I shall do everything I can to promote — is that conservatives are always prepared to fight World War II. Every pro-war figure is Winston Churchill, every critic is Neville Chamberlain and every soldier is John Wayne. Of course, John Wayne was really a dancer named Marion who never saw action, but that’s hardly a disqualifier in the wingnut ranks. In fact, Wayne is the perfect model for most conservatives in that he made a living from playing soldier while doing everything possible to avoid becoming the real thing.

So, kids, how’s World War II going?

* Bombing in Baghdad kills at least 51.

* U.S. military leaders conspired to hide evidence of torture and mistreatment of prisoners from the International Red Cross.

* Civilian overseer dismissed because he questioned over $1 billion in KBR expenditures.

How inspiring.

Richard Clarke suggests some form of shunning is in order for the intellect-shills, corporate grifters and partisan creeps who greased the skids for the Iraq war:

Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, as Think Progress points out, the wingnut welfare machine has already been quite generous with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who at the very least deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit every time they step into public.

Clarke suggests something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seen in South Africa, in which participants in the apartheid regime were offered amnesty for their crimes in exchange for their coming clean. The problem with the comparison is that the South African leadership had agreed to dismantle the mechanisms of apartheid and opened the way for honest exploration of the regime’s horrors.

We have no such commitment here. We have an entire political movement committed to perpetuating the lie that what is going on in Iraq right now is some kind of replay of World War II, and that the information coming out about this catastrophe is just a lot of liberal media propaganda written by reporters too scared to leave their hotel rooms. We have an entire cable news channel dedicated to disseminating this crap on a daily and hourly basis. A substantial number of America’s political and media professionals have a vested interest in preventing any kind of sustained inquiry into how this country was lied into a contemptible war. I’m counting the minutes until some FoxNews gasbag starts comparing Clarke’s suggestion to the show trials under Stalin. Check your watches, people, it won’t be too long.

So Clarke’s idea, while attractive, seems unlikely to be realized. All we can do for now is remember, and challenge the lies whenever and wherever they surface.

Worst of all, even if there is some kind of initiative, and even if this weasel pack is exposed to some kind of censure and condemnation, the perpetrators will never have to pay any price remotely as terrible as the one paid by their thousands of victims in Iraq.

Professional claims on my time have kept me away from blogging this week. So much wordage has been expended on Barack Obama’s march into history, and so much of it has been very good, that I’m more inclined to quote the post I like best. It’s from Ezra Klein:

Obama’s speech tonight was powerful, but then, most all of his speeches are. This address stood out less than I expected. It took me an hour to realize how extraordinary that was. I had just watched an African-American capture the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, and it felt…normal. Almost predictable. 50 years ago, African Americans often couldn’t vote, and dozens died in the fight to ensure them the franchise. African-Americans couldn’t use the same water fountains or rest rooms as white Americans. Black children often couldn’t attend the same schools as white children. Employers could discriminate based on race. 50 years ago, African Americans occupied, in effect, a second, and lesser, country. Today, an African-American man may well become the president of the whole country, and it feels almost normal.

It really will say something about this country if Obama, with all his intellect, his verbal gifts and his strategic canniness, ends up losing to a crusty old out-of-it white guy who left his principles in the dumpster years ago and has nothing to offer this country but the chance for conservatives to go on playing Jack Bauer and G.I. Joe for another four years.  

Back when Prince Hal’s Inbred Brother was running against Al Gore for the presidency, the elephant in the room that never got addressed was the anti-Clinton psychosis that had all but paralyzed the country and turned the Republican Party into a daycare center for raging troglodytes. Whenever Bush talked about how he wanted to cool off all the partisanship and start everybody working together, the obvious thing for Al Gore to say was, “Well George, if you’re offended by all the anger and partisanship going on right now, why not put in a couple of calls to your party leadership and tell them to stop accusing the president of drug-running, murder and rape. And while you’re at it, tell them we all have better things to think about than Bill Clinton’s dick.” Gore could have found a more polite way to phrase it, but you know. Still, it never was addressed.

This time out, as Duncan Black keeps pointing out, the elephant in the room is the Iraq war. If Hillary hadn’t decided to play it safe and let the rumpus room warriors have their way, she would be the nominee and everyone would be saying “Barack who?” She thought she was being shrewd, and it blew up in her face. That vote lost her the nomination, and yet the “analysts” and pundits are scrupulously avoiding talking about it. The war decided this primary, and it will decide the vote in November as well.

In her essay about self-respect (it’s in Slouching Towards Bethlehem), Joan Didion writes that without integrity, ”one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” I’m not a Hillary hater, but I think that sentence sums up this turning point in her political career. The country needed more from her than what she was ready to give, and now she gets nothing.     

I suspect John McCain, who began his career as a living rebuke to torture and ended up endorsing its practice on our side, may have a similar encounter with himself when this election is all over. 

I’ll take “Books About the Howlingly Obvious” for $500, Alex.

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

• McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

• He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

• He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.” 

• The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

• McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

“Badly misguided”? That’s rich.

And now, Alex, I’ll take “Useless Republican Tools Who Only Warned About Bush After It was Too Late to Do Anything.”

Oh, that’s McClellan too? How about that. 

Spencer Ackerman takes in the baffling ways of the Iraqis, which so confound conservative analysts:

If an unaccountable band of politically-connected soldiers-of-fortune shot my mother as she was trying to flee from a traffic circle, and the State Department offered me $5,000 in order to make the incident go away, I would not only be angry, I would be exploring my options for revenge. You don’t have to be an Iraqi to understand this.

Matt Yglesias does his bit to help:

It’s really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it’s not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.

Of course, nobody could have anticipated that Iraqis would be upset about such things.

If you really want to take your gag reflex out for a spin, try this sample of the way the pundits squealed five years ago when the Boy Emperor went flouncing across that aircraft carrier deck with a couple of socks jammed down his flight suit. Joke Line, Tweety Matthews, Drowsy Dave Broder — all our faves fell all over themselves in the rush to bow down before the greatness that was Incurious George. In particular, check out G. Gordon Liddy as he checks out . . . oh, you know:

After all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out.

Having read Liddy’s autobiographical rodomontade Will back in college, I’ve always suspected there was, shall we say, a little too much emphasis on the he-man stuff, considering the rather glaring divide between the author’s image of himself and the rather pathetic career chronicled in the book’s pages. Almost like Liddy was, how to put it, overcompensating for something about himself. Let’s just say that when the leader of the Political Gang That Couldn’t Burglarize Straight started slobbering over Bush’s crotch on television, I wasn’t too surprised.

Incidentally, despite what you have been hearing in some quarters, that “Mission Accomplished” banner was entirely appropriate. As students of The Bush Bust-Out know, the mission was never about service, security or stewardship. That grinning chimp knew he had the whole thing dicked, that the twin specters of Osama bin laden and Saddam Hussein were going to keep him in power until all the cash registers had been broken open, all the bank vaults had been looted, and all the goodies pocketed.

I don’t know what the Latin translation of “So Long, Suckers” would be, but that’s what should replace “E Pluribus Unum” on the national seal once Bush swaggers back to Texas for the last time.