Please Go Away–Redux

Again I say what we need is a little patriotism — of course I don’t mean the flag waving drop the bombs first promoted by Bush and his crew as well as John McCain, nor do we need the kind that the tears the country down at every turn while accepting a life style that is obviously a by-product of practices that are being railed against.
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We need an adult version that says enough! We are in deep sh1t so business, politics, media, and citizenship as usual must stop right now. It’s all on the line and so for the next six months we are going to suspend self-interest. No matter who you are, what party you belong to, what industry you represent, your class, ethnicity, gender, etc. If you speak you will be held to three basic principles: 1) that you know what you are talking about (evidenced base data only), 2) that your sole motive is to improve the position of the country as a whole (not the advancement of only segments of our society–no more red/blue state mentality crap), and 3) it is completely devoid of hypocrisy. Otherwise we will take a lesson from the Amish and we will publicly shun you. This means severing any ties to you politically, socially, financially and intellectually.

The thing is that what the Serious People consider to be a desirable outcome–democratic, sovereign Iraq allied with the US–is simply not possible. I don’t see any path toward Iraq having a national defense force. I don’t see any possibility that a truly open election will pick a government that allies with the US, Israel’s closest ally, and the nation responsible for enormous damage to Iraq. I don’t see any way that a representative government doesn’t get closer to Iran. In fact, I don’t see any coherent outcome that doesn’t involve the insertion of an American puppet, kept in place by an occupation force of tens of thousands of soldiers.
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Which never turns out well.

Joe Klein:

Your initial premise may be flawed. I’d argue it is entirely possible – in fact, both relatively easy and useful – to ignore such idiocy. Absent your link it will be read and quoted, but only by those already foolish enough to believe it in the face of all evidence to the contrary. These benighted souls, generally those who firmly believe the president to be a communist-fascist-weak-totalitarian-appeaser, will have none of your rejoinder anyway.
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Your post, while lucid, serves only to feed the trolls. How long do you suppose it will be until Wehner or one of his ilk will use it as the springboard for further nonsense?

Tangentially on topic. Joe, are you aware that PNAC is back, with a brand new name but the same old players? Ygleisias:
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When I was a kid, I remember hearing that cockroaches would not only survive the sure-to-happen US-Soviet nuclear holocaust, but actually emerge stronger than ever as they devour our irradiated corpses. Similarly, there’s a new think tank in town, headed by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesguy Dan Senor. Senor’s inclusion is especially interesting, since neocons of the Kristol/Kagan ilk ostensibly now believe that the early years of the war were catastrophically mismanaged. And yet here they are with the public face of the mismanagement as their partner in warmongering.

Joe: Thanks for the post and link.
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It seems to me that you could make “Just Go Away…” a weekly Swampland feature.
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Or, a companion piece to the inevitable “Obama’s First 100 Days”. Call it: “Just Go Away: Wingnuts’ Last 100 Days”

The folks at Commentary certainly need to be quarantined, given the catastrophes for America they have wrought and cheerled. So this is a useful enterprise.
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Still, at this point, the favorability rating of Commentary allies like Cheney, Limbaugh, and Bush hovers around the same level as that of herpes and John Wilkes Booth. Would it be asking too much for you to turn your criticism to people like Chuck Todd, Ruth Marcus, and Richard Cohen? They are not, of course, as relentlessly, militantly, unerringly wrong as the Commentary squad– in fact, they each can be quite insightful. But calling out their biggest mistakes might be more important work.

I second Elvis Elvisberg. Joe you have made a number of references to the mindless output in Commentary. Now that kagan and Kristol have a “new” think tank perhaps Commentary will have a steady flow of garbage in/garbage out articles and blogposts.

Why not turn your sights on the White House Press Corp, other Village residents? Last night I saw the first half of Hardball – I can never see it through to the end. Tweety was visibly upset with the President directly talking with the people across the US and a local audience made up nurses, teachers, small businessmen and ordinary folk, without a Tweety filter. It is Tweety’s job to interpret what real America says, and to hold the President accountable. He was worked up. Looking at future unemployment????? Look for more inter-active events, and the re-routing of the President’s message without a Beltway filter.

Joe, thanks for the diary.

And Elvis makes an important point.

The Limbaugh spew demonstrates that if you take enough Oxycontin and Viagra, the output is pure anal with no recognition of the responsibility for having created the mess.

Cheney learned from Nixon that if you are going to act questionably, you don’t record your sessions (let alone make them public). That is why the Enron energy meetings were all off the record and “confidential” just like the Halliburton involvement with Iraq as a “war of choice.”

As Adolph said (THAT Adolph), “If you tell a lie often enough and loudly enough, enough people will actually believe it.”

It is “strange” that almost all of the criticism of Obama is not for the problems he created, but for the problems that his actions and solutions might create, and almost all of THAT criticism comes from the people (and or idiots) that actively supported the policies that created the problems that Obama is trying to solve.

It almost seems that “Conservative” and “gullible” have become synonymous.

Fiasco, notwithstanding its considerable virtues, is the ur-text of the Petraeus cult. Historians of a Petraeus presidency will write that Thomas Ricks was the guy who started it all. But the neocons are nothing if not Straussian opportunists, and they only embraced Petraeus when it was no longer possible to defend Bush and Rumsfeld. If Petraeus were King Lear, the neocons would be Goneril and Regan, while Ricks would be Cordelia.

kth, Well said.

[...] I get the impression that he doesn’t know much about Iraq. Here is Joe Klein’s response. The odd thing about Wehner is that he must think he is supporting the military by tearing me down. [...]

[...] has written two more posts about me over at his blog at Time. He is enraged at me for my responses (here and here) to some of Tom Ricks’s arguments. In his latest outburst Klein writes that, to the [...]