Commnter WEC points me towards a section in Doug Feith’s wiki titled “Professional Praise”. Get ready:
Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
“Doug Feith, of course, is without question, one of the most brilliant individuals in government. He is – he’s just a rare talent. And from my standpoint, working with him is always interesting. He’s been one of the really the intellectual leaders in the administration in defense policy aspects of our work here.”[17]
[….]Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Peter Pace
Doug Feith is a patriot. It irritates me, not that anyone would question his thoughts or his policies – that is absolutely fair game – but that anyone would question his loyalty or his motives. I have watched this man for four years. He cares only about what is best for the United States. He works hard to understand as much as he can about the policy arena, and he works hard to articulate what he believes to be true.[20]
I guess the question is this: would anyone who wasn’t a colossal fuck-up have a section in his Wiki titled “Professional Praise”?
Wile E. Quixote
I noticed that too. Everyone should go over and edit that out. If neocons are that ghey for Feith then they should get a room, or a stall in an airport restroom and not shoot their sticky neo-con spooge all over Wikipedia.
DougJ
That’s why I credited you. Good catch.
Jon H
" Everyone should go over and edit that out."
Nah, leave it, but add the "stupidest person on earth" item.
21cdb
It’s sort of disturbing how the biggest editor of his page in the 06 timeframe is the Sausage King of Chicago.
Zuzu's Petals
Well, to be fair, there’s also a section called "Professional Criticism" and it includes the Tommy Franks quote.
Though I’ve never seen a Wiki page put together quite this way.
BTW, if you’re curious about who put what in, click the "history" tab and compare an edit with the prior version. Sometimes the screen name will tell you something (remember all the Palin edits by someone named "Young Trigg"?). Heck, even IP addresses can sometimes tell you something if you’re really interested.
dr. bloor
He’s not a traitor, but yeah, he is the stupidest fucking man on the planet.
Boy, we should all have Professional Praise equally as glowing for our own wikis.
Redhand
Very funny. Really!
Joshua Norton
"Professional Praise"
I don’t quite get how having a shipwrecked crew of washed-up neocons provide testaments for another discredited crew member is somehow considered covering him with glory.
It just makes him and them look ridiculous
TenguPhule
It’s like they’re trying to put DougJ out of a job in snark or something.
bago
Go figure. Of course this post would come after the post about crack.
Joe Buck
Go further down to the criticism section, and you’ll see the famous "dumbest fucking guy on the planet" quote.
Brick Oven Bill
Censor me all you want DougJ on the 7:49 thread, but we are everywhere.
justme
Feith’s idiotic, self-centered smirk is second only to Bloody Bill Kristol’s for inspiring in me the desire to visit upsetting and irreversible violence upon the wearer. I am generally a pacifist, as much as is practicable. Those two, though, and their expressions that fairly scream "Of course I know that everything I’ve ever said is complete bullshit and has led directly to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Fuck you. I’m gettin’ mine." really twist my last nerve.
Here’s hoping something horrible befalls the both of them.
Jeff Fecke
That’s one clusterfrak of a biography right there; neither the "professional praise" nor the "professional criticism" sections should be there; if you’re going to put that together, you note that some criticized, some praised, and Feith is the dumbest fucking guy on the planet — that being objective truth.
Punchy
Doug needs to have faith in Doug Feith
wilfred the shoe thrower
Feith didn’t fuck up. He did exactly what he was supposed to do – further the neo-con agenda and serve the interests of Israel. that’s why Pace defends his loyalty – since Rice and others frequently questioned whose interests he actually served.
He’s actually one of the few success stories of the Bush Administration as he knew exactly what he wanted and had a fair amount of success in achieving it. Only Eliot Abrams did better.
Mazacote Yorquest
"he knew exactly what he wanted and had a fair amount of success in achieving it."
It’s the Josef Mengele Gold Standard.
Warren Terra
I know a couple of people have said this, but please don’t go deleting factually accurate information from Wikipedia; if you have a problem and think something is truthful but misleading, try adding more information instead of deleting. In this case, as one might expect, it looks like that’s already happened.
And in any case, an endorsement by Rumsfeld would hardly be mistaken by any sentient reader for an actual positive. I’m with what I take to be DougJ’s insinuation, that all this protestation could as easily be artful and deliberate undermining as it could be genuine tone-deaf puffery.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Escorts and Porn Stars. Though, since they fuck for a living, and sometimes up, they probably meet the "colossal fuck-up" exclusion criteria.
.
Medicine Man
I agree with Wilfred on this one. Feith, Kristol, Abrams, and all the other little blood-soaked, Israel-firsters were successful at their chosen purpose. They are a fine bunch of war pimps.
This is the same sort of success W. Bush was as a president actually. If you view Dubya’s main purpose as redirecting wealth and power to his class allies, then he wasn’t a total failure.
None of this challenges the original point of this blog item though. This puffery is merely a distraction from the fact that Feith and his like-minded comrades had many goals and ideas that were bad for the majority of the US. Predictably so.
Tim P.
I suppose it’s sort of an accomplishment to have the top 5 google results for ‘dumbest fucking person on the planet’, no quotes, all point to you.
Michael D.
I notice the praise section has disappeared from Feith’s wiki page.
Good work!
Comrade Baron Elmo
Shorter General Pace: "Doug Feith doesn’t sweat much for a fat girl."
SGEW
I was going to mention that he failed even upon this measurement (after all, even the top 1% is feeling the economic bite nowadays*), but then I was reminded of this:
So, yeah. Mission Accomplished.
*Oh noes! Our plutocratic overlords must cut back on their corporate jets and world-class hookers! Oh, the Humanity!
kommrade reproductive vigor
Praise from Rumsfeld is like praise from Atilla the Hun. Not a recommendation I’d want on my CV. And then there’s this:
Yeah and I believe the purple squirrels live in my pants and I work hard to articulate that belief. Where’s my cookie, damn it?
SGEW
Nonsense. Khagan Attilla was a very successful man, remember, who conquered more land-mass than any individual save the Khan himself. Contrast with Sec. Rumsfeld, who was, mildly speaking, a nincompoop.
cosanostradamus
.
Any article on Wikipedia that’s about a subject that’s the least bit controversial in nature is suspect. I got into a hullabaloo over some articles about the Hawaiian Island of Molokai, which had just suffered a royal screwing by a group of foreign investors who were literally cutting their water off.
The psuedonymous authors of the articles depicted an anti-development, "anti-Western" and openly hostile local population, like they were talking about some foreign country. As different as Hawaii is from the Mainland, it’s as American as pineapple pizza pie, alas. As we speak, Molokaians are getting ready for Superbowl Sunday along with the rest of the nation. They’re headed down to the grocery store in their SUV’s & pick-up trucks to stock up on Budweiser and snacks, and they’ll spend all day watching whatever sports are on TV, as on nearly every Sunday.
As to hostility, Molokai is known as the Friendly Isle, and Hawaii people go there to relax, recharge their batteries and get back in touch with Old Hawaii, when "aloha" really meant something. As to development, they’ve been hurting on Molokai since the local sugar biz died, pineapple started dying, and ferry service to jobs on Maui broke down. They’d be happy to have any work at all.
What they didn’t want was a huge development of million-dollar homes that would cut them off from their own land & sea, and provide few if any permanent jobs, while destroying the laid-back Old Hawaii culture of farm-workers and very small businessmen that still exists on that tiny island.
After I made objections and corrections in addenda to the Wikipedia articles on Molokai, my additions were immediately removed. I protested and restored them, but they were then edited by person or persons unknown. I checked a few other pages about Hawaii, and found that they were all produced by the same small group of people. They did not seem to be Hawaii residents, or fully up on local happenings and attitudes.
They reminded me very much of the Mainland-financed Mainland Republicans who are conducting an on-going campaign here to stop any moves toward even the most limited Hawaiian sovereignty. They have filed several Bakke-like lawsuits challenging State and private foundation practices meant to help native Hawaiians, as "discriminating" against whites. The ham-handed way they’ve done this has in fact created racial tension here. The tone they set was quite like the one I saw on Wikipedia.
Bottom line, Wikipedia is fine for stuff supplied by hobbyists, fanboys and techie types. Anything the least bit political has to be taken with a fistful of salt. Auwe!
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headpan
Mission Accompleeshed. Heh.
Praising Feith is like saying how awesome the H-bomb is at clearing land for commercial development.
DougJ
@cosanostradamus
Interesting story. You do know that Hawaii is a foreign, exotic place, though, right?
kommrade reproductive vigor
Better?
SGEW
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Vastly.
Charity
Whatever happened to "References available upon request"?
cosanostradamus
@ DougJ
‘ Interesting story. You do know that Hawaii is a foreign, exotic place, though, right? ‘
Yeah. Tell that to my old man. He served in WWII on a ship out of Pearl. Or my grandfather. He was a ship’s carpenter on a whaler from the East Coast that stopped in Maui every year. Or my great grandfather… Oh, never mind.
I got history here, and I’m a native New Yorker.
Hey, ya wanna buy a phony birth certificate? We got Buddhists here, Al Gore supporters, who can run ya one off in a heartbeat, right in the temple. Born in Panama, or the Sovereign Nation of Alyeska? No prob. Five bucks extra. You could run for President. Or VP!
Well, gotta go. Superbowl Sunday, y’know. Makin’ a quick run to the 7/11 for a case ‘a’ Bud and some Dorito’s. Exotic foreign food turns da wahine on, big time, Brah!
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joe from Lowell
Sure they would. They just wouldn’t have it chock full of praise from people who were also colossal fuck-ups.
Hey, Donald Rumself thinks he’s really smrt!
Wile E. Quixote
DougJ
Sorry, I was confuzzed. Wikipedia is turning into a massive load of shit. I mean it’s a great idea, and it’s good if you want to look up tech stuff or information about episodes of Star Trek but outside of that it’s become almost completely untrustworthy. How many times have we heard stories recently about a set of Wikipedia edits being traced to some politician’s office? The whole idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to fails when some contributors are sufficiently motivated to provide false or misleading information.
Ecks
I love how Pace was damning him with faint praise.
"Look, he has good… intentions. Not saying he ain’t a moron, but, uh, can’t argue with what he THOUGHT he was TRYING to do."