"Their War Too" The War Pundits Are Called on Their LIES for War.

[leftchick]

I saw Mr. Harold Meyerson this morning on C-span and I had to check out this article. He calls out...

Charles Krauthammer: W.’s Maggie

William Kristol: The Strategist

Victor Davis Hanson: The Analogist Apologist

Thomas L. Friedman: The Enabler

Christopher Hitchens: Trotsky in Baghdad

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10113



<snip>

For its war in Iraq, the Bush administration relied on and benefited from the cheerleading of a group of pundits and public intellectuals who, at every crucial moment, subordinated the facts on the ground to their own ideological preferences and those of their allies within the administration. They refused to hold the administration’s conduct of the war and the occupation to the ideals that they themselves professed, or simply to the standard of common sense. They abdicated their responsibilities as political intellectuals -- and, more elementally, as reliable empiricists.

They went far beyond just making the kinds of mistakes that pundits make … In the information age, wars are not made by governments alone. This is especially true of wars of choice. When America has been attacked -- at Pearl Harbor, or as on September 11 -- the government needed merely to tell the people that it was our duty to respond, and the people rightly conferred their authority. But a war of choice is a different matter entirely. In that circumstance, the people will ask why. The people will need to be convinced that their sons and daughters and husbands and wives should go halfway around the world to fight a nemesis that they didn’t really know was a nemesis.

The delusions for which they were apologizing weren’t only the administration’s; they were their own as well. There was an odd sort of integrity to their dishonesty; they believed (most of them did) all the theories that justified the war. But they didn’t present these theories as theories. They presented them -- misrepresented them -- as facts.

Yet by some curious code of Beltway etiquette, the war hawks are still sought out for their judgments on war and peace, geopolitics, and military and political strategy. They are, in varying degrees, the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld -- authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place. Herewith, five of the top offenders.

.....much more

[jackster]

1. Did you hear the nutjob

from Leominster, MA - didn't make a lick of sense. He supported the war though !!! He was cut off pretty quickly though when it appeared he was about to rant on delusionaly!

[leftchick]

2. all of those war supporters are nutjobs

I heard the last one who said he was "aiding the enemy". LOL! These people are delusional.

[Gabi Hayes]

3. I heard the whole thing, and was VERY disappointed that Myerson

didn't call that ahole on his ridiculous lies about the papers being found that PROVED the Iraqis had restarted their nuclear weapons program

he just let that one hang there, as if it was true

it would have been SO easy to let everybody know that the guy had less than zero credibility on that front....all he had to do was say something about the FACT that Kay and Deulfer, who had asserted that they'd find evidence of nukes, admitted that there was NOTHING, and that the best the dumbass could come up with was his idiotic "evidence of nuclear weapons related program activities"

he was way too wishy washy for me, ESPECIALLY when he said that Krystol and Hitchens were "principled" men, but then contradicted himself in the same sentence when he said they LIED during their statements during the run up to the war. Does that mean they were principled liars, or what?

he could have been MUCH more assertive, also on Friedman.

[zara]

4. What is the art footer on your post? is it goya? rabelais?

[Gabi Hayes]

5. bosch