Unglued

If nothing else I hope this lead to the phrase “Rovian Podium” being added to the lexicon. It says so much in so few words!

Wasn’t “hysterical” sterotypes given to women back in the 50′s and 60′s, Joe? Come on, take it like a man Joe, you ARE as hysterical as a woman from the 50′s and 60′s.

Joe, certainly you understand that, as Matt Yglesias noted this morning, Neo-Neocons are Still Incredibly Dishonest.

Im not biting this time but Joe I don’t blame you for not allowing the Wehner cat to smear you.

I’m glad you posted this info, Joe.

Joe; have a safe trip: you are going to the proverbial badlands. I am glad to see some reporting on Gen Petraeus encouraging other points of view. I mentioned at the end of another thread that Petraeus encouraged this during his first posting in the north. Like you I hope all turns out well in the end for the Iraqis and our troops and civilians serving in Iraq.

God forbid anyone should ever get the idea that Joe Klein was less-than-worshipful of Petraeus.
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Does anybody else get the idea that Wehner is working the “Joe Klein hates General Petraeus!” angle so that Joe has to (or at least feels he has to) defend himself to keep his anonymous sources placated?
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Doesn’t that sort of sound like what this is all about?
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Is the deal that Joe properly praises Petraeus and the surge, and that staff continues to allow Klein insider access, and the rightist idiots at Commentary know how touchy Klein is about upsetting that relationship?

Speaking of unglued–here’s Bill Maher:

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2009/03/30/bill-maher-is-a-waste-of-oxygen-smears-our-troops-yet-again/

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Gotta wonder, Joe Klein will impugn Sam Brownback’s patriotism, but I wonder what he has to say about Maher’s./

Will any melons be crushed today?

Will any melons be crushed today?
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I do my bit to save the world’s melons by ignoring.

Well, Ivy, just remember, your buddy SG thinks six-on-one racially motivated assaults are commendable. Say what you want about me, but that’s who’s with you. Enjoy your company.

SZ — you could very well be right in your assessments, but to me this looks like JK not wanting the wingnuts to get away with doing what they always do and what they have been engaged in full throttle for the last few weeks and that is revisiting the recent past and revising the record in their favor.
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Now your beef with JK may very well be legitimate, but it seems like you have decided that any other aspect of this post is of no importance because of your beef with JK. Is that really how you feel?

Extra point, Joe, for using “berserk” as a verb. Made my word geeky day.

Dee:
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it seems like you have decided that any other aspect of this post is of no importance
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No, no, not at all. I’m just wondering aloud at this remarkable “personal tiff” (as Joe puts it), and putting out an angle on it that I hadn’t thought of before.
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your beef with JK
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Which beef do you mean (that’s a serious question)?
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Do you mean my beef with him being a centrist in general, or my beef with his Petraeus-worship, or my beef with his trepidation at calling Ricks’ assessment what it is, or my beef with his Friedman-unit-esque take on progress in Iraq generally, or my beef with his cost-less approach to Afghanistan policy, or some other beef I can’t think of?

Given JK’s backhand reference to Brownback’s patriotism, he has no room to complain about others going beyond the pale in attacking him.

Well I’m thinking in general that you are not a fan of the Klein. And I can’t fault you for thinking as centrists they have largely ignored the reality-based left as if they were beyond the pale while acknowledging the wingnuts on the right as if they could ever be mainstream. However, I think lately, JK has been evolving. Now this might not absolve him of all the wrongs in the past, I am willing to acknowledge change.
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From the recent posts between you and SG, I’m thinking that no matter what JK does its not acceptable because of his centrism. I just want to make sure that we don’t lose sight of the fact that Whener and crew are trying to revise the facts sop that i the future historians might be confused.

Dee:
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There is one more thing with which I suppose that I have a beef.
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In his idiotic rightist rant, the ideologue Wehner writes
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On one of the most consequential policy matters of our time, the surge, Klein was as wrong as wrong can be. If we had followed his recommendations, Iraq would have become a scene of mass death and possibly genocide. Militant Islam would have won its most important victory. Iran would have been immensely strengthened. American credibility would have been demolished. And more. None of us can know whether the effort in Iraq will eventually succeed or not; the challenges are still considerable. But we do know that if that we had followed Klein’s counsel on the surge, the Iraq war would have failed and rivers of blood would have followed.

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This is obviously untrue. We know no such thing. It is not certain knowledge at all that, if we hadn’t executed the surge, Iraq would be any more in the throes of mass death and genocide than it was during the surge or it is now. Not everybody agrees that this is the case. It is actually an open question.
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That’s a big part of my point to Joe (in another of these “tiff” posts) about including voices in this debate from farther to the left than his. One of those would be Marc Lynch, who writes in Foreign Policy:
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…I would like to pose the question which rarely gets seriously addressed in this debate: what if there had been no surge?
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None of the current crop of Surge Literature really grapples with this counter-factual, though Ricks comes the closest (see his chapter seven). Most simply assume the worst-case counter-factual, that without the surge Iraqi civil war would have escalated to genocide and the United States would have fled with tail between legs. But this is simply not a sure thing. By the time the surge brigades arrived in Iraq, the Sunni Awakening’s turn against al-Qaeda had long since taken place (in the fall of 2006). The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad was far advanced (and continued through the surge). Moqtada al-Sadr’s calculations vis a vis Iran, competing Shia groups, and the United States were already changing. Strategic exhaustion may already have been setting in. Had the Iraq Study Group been heeded, would Iraq today look much as it does now — only with half the U.S. military presence and a much faster track towards political reconciliation?

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My beef with Klein here is that he doesn’t take that question seriously, and so he ends up having to agree with the neo-conservative line on the surge.
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For all of Joe’s talk about what huge “berserking” idiots the rightists at Commentary are for criticizing him, he doesn’t actually disagree with them in their god-like, absolute certainty-filled pronouncements about how The Surge Succeeded and how There Would Be Genocidal Failure If We Hadn’t. He’s not even open to entertaining legitimate questions about this notion. It’s remarkable.
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So that’s my other multi-beef with Klein:
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1) on the question of the surge’s “success” he’s far to timid in taking to heart Ricks’ sober assessments (Ricks basically says that it failed)
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2) on the question of whether without the surge we would have been “swimming in rivers of blood all the way back home in defeat” he’s just as inflexibly dogmatic as the rightists at Commentary –he can’t even bring himself to publicly question that assumption
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I wish that Joe would answer that question in public:
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Does Joe Klein agree with the neo-conservative dogmatists like Pete Wehner at Commentary that it is an empirical certainty that if the surge had not been implemented, the situation in Iraq would have been a forced, dishonorable retreat from an Iraq-wide genocide after which “Militant Islam” would have been correct in declaring total victory?
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Wouldn’t such a refutation of that fundamental neo-conservative premise be even more of a rebuke of the idiot rightists, and their bankrupt foreign policy ideology, Dee?

Dee:
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From the recent posts between you and SG, I’m thinking that no matter what JK does its not acceptable because of his centrism.
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I know that SG’s posts seem to imply that this is the case for me, but it’s not.
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One only has to look at my praise for Joe Klein’s courageous defense of a realist policy with respect to Israel/Palestine to know that my problems with Joe aren’t reflexive. Criticizing Joe Klein is a post by post necessity, IMO.
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One of the ways that people who are interested in winning arguments try to discredit their opponents is by casting them as being angry ideologues who are only interested in criticism. I’m not saying that you are resorting to this kind of non-argument, Dee, I’m just saying that people who do that are usually taking the easy way out when they don’t want to admit they might not have a winning case.
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You hear it all of the time: “the angry left” or “the far left”. We heard it a lot during the Bush Administration’s reign from the Beltway press about our criticism –it couldn’t be valid, because it was the product of “Bush Derangement Syndrome”.
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I try to be really intellectually honest, and agree with people like spob when I (rarely) think they’re right about something. If I’m willing to be honest to my political enemies on the right, why would I be less than honest in my criticism of political enemies in the center, Dee?
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Consider carefully the arguments that refute my (or your) claims by merely saying that I (or you) have a personal or ideological problem. Beware arguments that obfuscate the real meaning of what I (or you) are trying to say. These sometimes indicate that the opponent isn’t arguing in good faith, and would rather score points for their political team than get at the truth.
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I hope that this clarifies things, Dee.

SZ, speaking of Israel/Palestine, did you happen to catch the news today. Seems Fatah isn’t so jazzed about Palestinian girls performing for Israeli Holocaust survivors . . . .
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Why anyone in the world thinks those clowns can be “partners for peace” is beyond me.

SZ: glad to note you sound as if you are feeling well. Good if that is so. Take care.

JK: Well, I hate to become involved in journalistic tiffs, but since I don’t care for neocons, I feel obligated to defend you. The guy is obviously suffering from a combination of Opedial Complex and Penis Envy. He wants to kill his father and have sex with his mother. However, he realizes he lacks the tackle to do this successfully. He’s taking it out on you. It’s called transference. I’m not a trained psychologist, but I did browse through a mental health magazine once while waiting on my work ordered therapy session. I hope I’ve helped.

sacredh –

I was going to suggest the solution was more immediately at hand – that Pete Wehner is spob – but I like your elegant solution better.

FlownOver: Thank you. We just went through a Suicide Prevention interactive training course at work and I only put two cases in caskets before I managed to save my patient. I feel as if I’m somewhat of a expert now.

bitterpill8:
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Thank you so much.

Joe – So if Wehner is intentionally misrepresenting you (um, lying) then don’t promise you won’t correct again in the swampland. Don’t give him permission to slander you with impunity.

[...] how self-destructive a blog can be in the hands of a perennially angry man, Joe Klein has decided to respond to my posting. You can read the exchange for yourself and see if I was “berserking another [...]

“Pete is indulging in the big lie techniques that sustained his President Bush and Patron Rove during their noxious run”
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“Noxious run”?, Joe, shouldn’t you be a trusted diarist on the DailyKos?

spob:
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How could Joe be a contributer to DailyKos, when he doesn’t have the guts to say that, by the time it actually happened, the surge might not have been necessary?
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Joe doesn’t even back up Ricks (who he knows is probably right)!
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Toeing the neo-conservative line on the surge after it happened doesn’t particularly separate Joe from Wehner’s gang of self-convinced, omniscience-claiming, historical psychic-hotline operators.

“…Pete is indulging in the big lie techniques that sustained his President Bush and Patron Rove during their noxious run.”
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You make it sound like something specific to a discrete group. All professional Republicans are gross liars (you could say it’s their stock-in trade), not just the former denizens of the Bush Administration.