And our commenters will usually sum things up better and more succinctly than I can. I’ve been mulling writing something about the neocons’ constantly shifting attitude towards the events in Iran and their bizarre claims (here; here; via) that Bush’s Freedom Agenda is what set all the good things going on in Iran into motion, but ninerdave has already said it all:
What is funny to me is the wingnuts rooting for an overthrow of Ahmadinejad at the same time the wingnuts are rooting for an Ahmadinejad win. All of this is without acknowledging Mousavi, was one leader in the Islamic revolution. He’s not going to be some liberal, DFH that the wingnuts think he is. Nor is he going to be the flaming hate monger Ahmadinejad is.
OF course no matter what the outcome: Obama fucked it up and the NeoCons were right. This will be played out on the Sunday talk shows for a while and also.
I don’t think that’s an exaggeration at all. Here’s what Ari Fleischer actually said:
No one yet knew the final outcome, he wrote in an e-mail to our colleague Glenn Kessler, but “one of the reasons there is a substantial reform movement in Iran — particularly among its young people — is because of George W. Bush’s tough policies.” He noted that Bush’s policies in Lebanon also helped in the recent elections there. …
So “I think it’s fair to say the George Bush’s Freedom Agenda planted seeds that have started to grow in the Middle East,” Fleischer concluded.
In other words: no matter what happens, it proves that Bush was right.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
At this moment, CNN is running a footer that says “Breaking News: GOP Attacks Obama Over Iran” over shots of demonstrators gathering in front of the White House.
Mojotron
Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up
Osamas staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out
America wont turn and run once the fighting has begun
Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too
Syria is forced to leave, dont you know that all this means
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave
All over the middle east, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don’t know what they’re gonna do,
their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, theyre all wondering whos next
Ted Kennedy- wrong!
Cindy Sheehan- wrong!
France- wrong!
Zell Miller- right!
Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive
Angry liberals can’t believe it’s cause of W’s policies
Unemployment’s staying down, Democrats are wondering how
Revenue is going up, can you say “Tax Cuts”
Cheney was right, Condi was right,
Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, we were right, The Right was right and
Bush was right
Bush
was
right
I also think we should eat irish babies
tc125231
El Cid
Once again, I guess it just doesn’t matter that the Hezbollah coalition actually won the Lebanese elections with 55% of the vote (though they’re about 1/3 of that coalition) and the reason didn’t ‘win’ the seats is that seats are determined by a post-civil war agreement which distributes seats by a calculation based on religious sect, ethnicity, and geography.
gnomedad
Once you’ve heard the “nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, nyah-nyah” melodic line, you don’t need to hear the lyrics. Kinda sums up wingnuttery.
Bill E Pilgrim
Or here’s Kagan’s take on this, which I commented on here a couple of days ago (but I think in the middle of the night) where he demonstrates the heads-we-win-tails-you-lose position in his own unique way:
Unpacking all of that would take an entire moving crew, but some highlights: So there’s a great irony, Kagan implies, a hypocrisy even, in people who didn’t agree with invading countries and bombing them into dust now rooting for a country’s own citizens to bring about change themselves.
Yes, how contradictory can we be. fer hevvin’s sake? Back then I was saying that the citizens of the country should decide for themselves, and now look at me, having the hypocrilicious nerve to say the same thing.
He ends with the reverse half-gainer version of the “all good things flowed from Bush” theory you mention, the idea that the darn liberals want to actually think that non-extremist Iranians could have been encouraged by Obama reaching out to them in a speech.
What an idea! Everyone knows that calling entire countries “evil” is the way to get them on your side, and they’re clearly just responding to Bush having done so, now.
There are many trying this kind of up-means-down logic in the Wingnut world, but Kagan shows how he rose to the top, this is the full nutty.
Comrade Darkness
Belligerent enemies have always made the U.S. favor electing the most pacifistic leadership possible. I don’t know why the left doesn’t get that that won’t be the case for every other country in the world, especially those with authoritarian regimes.
Tom
This fits snugly into the “If something good happens during Obama’s presidency, it’s because of Bush, if it’s bad, it’s clearly Obama’s fault.” The origin of this meme, of course, being “The Next Terrorist Attack On American Soil.”
demkat620
Shorter Wingnuttia:
You know what would show the Iranians we support them? Bombing them. They’d welcome us with sweets and flowers.
Dumbasses. It’s not about us.
Karatist Preacher
The Neocons don’t know very much about Iran, other than their late night games of Risk.
Mike Pence was confronted on CNN with the history of American meddling in Iranian politics and his eyes glazed over – just totally ignored historical facts and kept spouting his talking points.
burnspbesq
@El Cid:
Oh, come on. You’re an American, yes? Then surely you are familiar with the idea that winning the popular vote isn’t the same as winning the election (we have this little gizmo called the Electoral College, yes?). Show me a governing coalition that includes the Hezbollah-backed parties in government in more than a token way, and then we can talk about whether Hezbollah won the election.
If Hezbollah didn’t like the way seats are allocated, it could have boycotted the elections. It didn’t. You show up for the game, you play by the rules, and if you don’t win, then you go sit down. You don’t pretend that you won because you would have won if the rules had been different.
My personal view is that the last thing Hezbollah wants is to be in government, because then it has to, like, govern.
Max Peck
YouTube is one of the internets better traditions
I was 1 when he sang this.
El Cid
@burnspbesq: Did I say one fucking thing about whether or not Hezbollah should be in the government? Did I complain about the electoral laws of Lebanon?
No — I corrected the fucking idiot talking point that because of [Magic Precedent A] that Hezbollah was prevented from taking over Lebanon because the people all voted against them. Clearly that is not the case.
tc125231
@Bill E Pilgrim: Kagan is a complete idiot, and a dishonest one at that. His continued publication demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of the American media.
The good news, as I posted earlier, is that America is having a breakdown. No one knows what will happen.
It’s like the I Ching hexagram of fire over water –danger and possibility constrained within the same space.
And you know what? It’s up to us.
MikeJ
Bullshit. When has America ever had a president who wasn’t gung ho to go kill a bunch of foreigners?
The Grand Panjandrum
Here’s a June 16th tweet from Patrick Ruffini:
Comrade Darkness
@MikeJ: sorry thought I posted here enough to not need the /snark tag.
Especially with that comment.
R. Porrofatto
Shouldn’t that be George Bush’s Freedom Agenda®™?
For the neocons, policy is tantamount to marketing, which really doesn’t require anything to be true, just properly branded.
demimondian
@El Cid: I rather think that burns was snarking here. As a matter of reality, Hisb’allah *is* the de facto government of the Southern portion of Lebanon, and has been for the last decade and a half.
(Now, there’s a good deal of disagreement among the local commentariat about how effective a foreign policy they’ve pursued, but they’re the government there, all right.)
MikeJ
My apologies, CD. I’m just now having my first coffee of the day and it’s almost noon.
Kryptik
This sounds good for the McCain campaign!!
Death By Mosquito Truck
He’d fart and laugh, then confuse vindication with vilification, then make a joke about shoe-throwing Iranians.
El Cid
@demimondian: Oh, if that’s the case, sorry to b. for my obtuseness. You often do get a blog response to any mention of basic facts about actually existing governing coalitions in Middle Eastern nations with the equivalent of ‘oh yeah well if you love Hizbullah so much why’on’t ya marry em traitor!’, so I guess that’s how it sounded.
Svensker
@MikeJ:
I’m thinking that was sarcasm.
kommrade reproductive vigor
As I remember it, when Bush flapped his lips prior to the election in Iran the people elected Amalamadingdong.
Of course I don’t have access to the GOP’s Big Book of Alternate History, so what do I know?
Edit: Nice to see the Bushites haven’t given up the habit of taking credit for other people’s efforts, though. Dance Iranian puppets!
Leszek Pawlowicz
I think there’s a simple way to reconcile the neocons’ apparently contradictory statements. They wanted Ahmedinejad to remain in power because this made it easier for them to argue for military action against Iraq. But now, they know that public pronouncements by the US in favor of Moussavi and the protestors will make it far less likely for the opposition to succeed, and far more likely that Ahmedinejad will stay in power. And, as a bonus, it might inflame the situation to the point where more people will be injured or die in protests, making Ahmedinejad look more horrific, unbalanced, and illegitimate. This will bolster their arguments that we need to take military action against Iran.
Cynical? Sure. But these are the same people who used 9/11 as a rationale to invade Iraq.
CalD
Peristroika in Iran was a lot further along in 2000 than it is now. And not only did the younger generation coming up not hate America at the time, from all reports they dreamed of being America. Certainly political reform in Iran was a fledgling movement that had achieved only very modest and very hard won gains up to that point, but the hard right turn that got them where they’ve been for the past few years now happened as a direct result Bush’s half-witted Axis of Evil speech and the invasion of Iraq — a country they actually did hate in 2000. It needs to be remembered that it took an asshole like George W. Bush to make a rock star out of an asshole like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Mike in NC
Try Aisle 5 in WalMart. Might be sandwiched between whatever BillO and Coulter are offering this month. Comes with a “USA #1” t-shirt in size XXL.
Marnie
And no matter what happens it is another big problem left undealt with, except Bush’s threats, by the Bush administration.
The Bushies failures and incompletions are uncountable.
They stirred up the Middle East, their crises left unsolved.
Zach
Whereas in the real world, George Bush’s policies are responsible for marginalizing the reform movement in Iran for nearly a decade. Iran was a willing, helpful partner post-9/11, until Bush decided he needed to spin a broader narrative of which Iraq was only a part:
The Iranian President at the time is one of the primary players backing Mousavi today.
So, to summarize, taking it to the terrorists and kicking some axis of evil ass may lead to a democratic cascade and a revolt that brings to power someone roughly equivalent to Iran’s President 8 years ago.
Zam
Someone needs to ask the neocons what they would have said and done if the European Union had decided to publicly side with Gore in 2000.
matoko_chan
This video means the regime is done.
It will go viral.
They can’t stop the signal.
El Cid
Good luck to the Iranian ordinary citizens. They’re entering some dangerous territory.
John Hamilton Farr
Utter, massive, incomprehensible FAIL for the “progressive” blogosphere on the Iranian situation. My faves have never been more useless. What’s there happening now wouldn’t be possible without the Internet, something the so-called netroots ought to recognize.
If the American people had 1/100 the courage of the Iranian people, we’d have health care, clean water, and no more wars.
harlana pepper
So now they are laying the groundwork for a “W was to the Middle East what Reagan was to Russia” narrative, basically?
Disclaimer: please don’t jump in my shit for the bad analogy, it’s not mine but is gonna be theirs, you betcha.
demimondian
@harlana pepper: Actually, that would be a great analogy to establish — it would allow us to remind the rest of America how little Reagan *actually* had to do with Perestroika.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@MikeJ:
Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981?
El Cid
The ‘progressive’ blogs I usually read don’t know that much about Iran and aren’t setup for detailed updates and foreign reporting. This is not new, either — when I really desired to follow a situation arising in Mexico or Colombia or Venezuela, I don’t look to progressive / liberal blogs either, but local media and international news sites.
So, yes, obviously people should look to blogs carrying relayed twitter accounts and international news sites. I’ve been very impressed with the coverage by the Independent (UK) as well as the BBC and Al Jazeera, as supplemented by varying in-depth analyses and arguments by such types as Juan Cole or Helena Cobban.
matoko_chan
The refuglicans might be able to scam their low information base about Iraq and Iran, but they can’t scam them about Palin.
Palin is the doom of the refuglicans.
She is the “realdeal”…..and the GOP leadership sees that now.
A dimwitted uneducated venal Jill Sixpack.
Plucked from snowy obscurity, the GOP leadership thought they could groom her to be another stealthy elite to rule the low information (read low IQ) conservative masses with their traditional dogwhistle race-baiting, cognitive dissonance and classism. Sad day, there isn’t a nanoparticle of l33tness in Palin’s whole whitetrash clan.
And now they are stuck with her.
That is why the GOP is trying frantically to scrape her off their shoes before the next election.
But the base won’t let them.
Delicious, succulent, irony. The GOP is going to get exactly what they have pretended to want all this time. The “realdeal”.
Like Bacon said……
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
mr. whipple
time for chemical ari to go back inside his bunker.
Svensker
@Zam:
Why? They have no empathy and can’t imagine themselves in anyone else’s shoes. As Masters of the Universes and Princes of the Greatest Country in the World they have no need of empathy.
Svensker
Dang, the stupid s h o e s moderation. Facepalm.
Doug H.
@John Hamilton Farr: The courage to stand up for a moderate theocracy ‘n nukes supporting leader over a more extreme theocracy ‘n nukes supporting leader? That, um, sounds rather American if you ask me.
I think the ‘progressive’ movement has it right when they don’t hail Mousavi as the next coming of Lech Walesa.
Comrade Darkness
@John Hamilton Farr: I’ll see your “progressive blogs staying out of the way” and raise you one “John Sidney McCain singing a really stupid and irresponsible ditty about Iran *during the last election cycle*”.
robertdsc
I can’t wait for tomorrow’s talking heads to vouch for the neocon call for more intervention. The weaksauce Dems who go on won’t make a dent in that cacophony.
tc125231
@Svensker:
dbrown
Bush is getting the same treatment by the wingnuts that the other asswipe – Raygun got; the bullshit that ‘he’ won the cold war and now all success in the middle east is due to the new asswipe. Neocons will never stop lying about the truth.
drillfork
Bush’s policy in Lebanon: “Go ahead and bomb them to smithereens, Israel!”
Ya Ari you miserable piece of crap, that made all the difference…
Yutsano
I can make this easy DougJ.
NeoCons = EPIC FAIL.
I love easy formulations.
Zach
In other news, here’s Michael Leeden calling for war again (by quoting a friend):
We have no diplomatic leverage with Iran what-so-ever. There’s no chance of immediate military intervention, and we’d probably be hesitant to arm the rebellion based on past experience (who am I kidding; we don’t learn from mistakes).
Broken
To the neocons, the reformist government of Iran under Katami was part of the Axis-of-Evil. Now they cry that Obama isn’t doing enough to help these same reformers.
Broken
And, of course, we owe this Iranian uprising to Bush, the man who spurned the Katami reform government’s attempts at diplomacy with the US. Black is white, white is black.
eric k
Since the neo cons are going to be trying to rewrite history this timeline needs to be communicated a soften as possible:
’97 reformers win Iranian elections
’01 reformers win Iranian elections
’01 after 9/11 Iran tries to cooperate with the US against the Taliban
’02 Bush lumps Iran with North Korea and Iraq as the Axis of Evil
’03 Bush starts his merry adventure in Iraq
’05 Hardline anti-american candidate wins Iranian elections
Hmm, what could have changed between ’97-’01 and ’05?
omen
unsuprisingly, jimmy carter’s role in helping to topple the soviet union is given short shrift.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Zach: To save the freedom loving people of Iran, we must nuke the freedom loving people of Iran.
Of course, if Obama did too much* there would be shrill cries of “See! He sympathizes with Mooslims!!”
*Don’t ask me how these wankers would define too much.
Yutsano
Are we back on the “HE’S DOING TOO MUCH! HE’S NOT DOING ENOUGH!!” meme again?
drillfork
Couple of interesting pieces:
First, Marcy Wheeler on that money BushCo invested in destabilizing Iran:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/06/20/meddling/#more-41144
Then Paul Craig Roberts, arguing that the elections were anything but fraudulent:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts269.html
I guess if you’re a neocon, it’s all good. And by “it,” I mean people being beaten in the streets…
omen
@drillfork:
money BushCo invested in destabilizing Iran:
oh good, marcy points to the NGOs telling bush “we don’t want your stinkin’ money. you’re causing us more problems than helping.”
Chuck Butcher
I begged to differ a couple days ago
Skippy-san
Why did you link to that stupid song? I could not get it out of my head as we went to dinner last night. Nothing ruins your digestion more than hearing some misguided fool scream “Bush was right” into a microphone.