Andrew Sullivan’s on the “We Read These Idiots So You Don’t Have To” beat:
Mitt Romney’s embrace of the dusted-off nostrums of the Iraq war architects as his foreign policy – more defense spending! more! where’s Max Boot? which Kagan are you? – is a sign of how tenacious neoconservatism is. Just as none of the leading neocon figures have suffered an iota of prestige-loss in Washington because they concocted a foreign policy disaster that cost tens of thousands of lives to no serious effect, so they have, almost to a man, refused to cop to a single error in the process. Their partisan discipline is only matched by their unchanging Stalinist ideology. So what if the Iraq war was a disaster? It’s time for a new war with Iran!
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If you think I’m exaggerating the chutzpah, check out the Bill Kristol piece that woke Les Gelb up. It’s a carbon copy of the memo to invade Iraq. Worse, actually:[Iran] is a brutal dictatorship. And it’s seeking nuclear weapons while denying it’s doing so. It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force. And now we have an engraved invitation to do so. The plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was a lemon. Statesmanship involves turning lemons into lemonade.Let us pause to note that for Kristol, war is like lemonade. It’s a good thing: delicious, refreshing, innocent…
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Repeat after me: Romney = Cheney’s return. And if your purism demands staying home next year, do not complain when a global religious war breaks out. They’ve told us quite plainly that’s what they want. Like a cold, sparkling drink on a hot summer day. War as a cocktail.
To be fair, I think Romney=Cheney is only true in the foreign policy arena. Willard Romney doesn’t seem to have Darth Cheney’s delight in other peoples’ suffering, if only because he doesn’t pay that much attention to other people. But true north on Romney’s moral compass is “What’s best for Mitt Romney, at this point in time?”, and since the Neocons can promise the best short-term gains on the foreign policy market (while blithely ignoring any horizon beyond the Friedman Unit), their arguments interlock nicely with his MBA vulture capitalist training.
Rob Wolfe
I thought y’all read Sully so we didn’t have to. Now he is being elevated?
dmsilev
Sullivan reads himself? How very meta.
Maude
Thank the FSM McCain isn’t Prez.
General Stuck
To be unfair, Romney is what Romney needs to be on any given day. If the OWS goes US viral, the slimy shit bag will show up in a Nerhu sweater with a green tambourine
TenguPhule
Its hard to take Sully seriously when he sucks these cocks domestically then complains about their foreign policy.
TenguPhule
Also, Bill Kristol’s head is long overdue for a spike on a pole. Just saying….
NobodySpecial
….and now we know two things:
1) Why the front pagers love Sully so much.
2) Why the commentariat sounds so much like Republicans.
Maude
@General Stuck:
LOL
dmsilev
If Romney does become Pres, and the neocons do successfully push us into a war with Iran, what are the odds that Sullivan pulls a reprise of his “fifth column” views? Better than even, I’d say.
Steeplejack
@Rob Wolfe:
They read Sully reading other people so we don’t have to. It’s like recursion. Or something.
BGinCHI
The only difference between Kristol/the Neocons and Hitler is focus and opportunity.
/Godwin
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Steeplejack:
To me, it sounds more like the Transitive Property
Ron Beasley
To be honest I think that multiple choice Mitt would have condemned an announcement by Obama that we were leaving troops in Iraq. No substance – just politics. That’s mittens in a nutshell.
Mark S.
Shit, bring it on. Make this the centerpiece of your foreign policy, Willard. The American people do not want another fucking war, especially one that would be ten times worse than Iraq was.
Citizen_X
So Sully is now a Fifth Columnist? Who knew?
Morzer
It does seem as if Andrew bin Sullivan might be turning over a new leaf. On the other hand, he has an awful lot to make up for.
Delia
@Citizen_X:
It’s always hard to tell with Sully. It depends on how he’s feeling on any particular day or who he’s miffed at.
PeakVT
Just as none of the leading neocon figures have suffered an iota of prestige-loss in Washington because they concocted a foreign policy disaster
Has Sully suffered any prestige loss for anything that he’s been epically wrong about? And no, the BJ commentariat doesn’t count here.
Linda Featheringill
@General Stuck: #4
LOL! I can see it, I can see it.
BGinCHI
I have an idea.
Let’s fly over Tehran and drop Kristol onto the city and see if the impact causes a general spread of stupidity.
It’s like the opposite of a smart bomb.
SteveinSC
Well, maybe the only way Mitt thinks he can handle the stain of (in) his magic underwear is to end-around the Hagee’s and other end-timers by sucking up to the neocons, who play these rubes like a violin. Talk of a war to satisfy AIPAC will go a long way in herding the bible-thumpers along.
Hunter Gathers
@General Stuck: It would also be incredibly easy to pick him out of the crowd at such a thing. Sure the tambourine may mask him a bit, but the $300 loafers would be a dead giveaway. He’s also the type of weird motherfucker who would leave his daily pint of pomade in his hair while trying to pass himself off as a hippie. He’d stick out like the undercover cops do at Phish shows.
TenguPhule
But what if its contagious?
Better to incinerate the remains, just to be sure.
Martin
Tunisia is holding the first Arab Spring elections. Up to 70% of eligible voters are expected to vote. Of course, the teatards are going to reject the outcome of the elections as fraudulent because they aren’t requiring that voters show eleven forms of ID, so if they elect some kind of soçialist, Obama-loving leader, they can blame it all on ACORN.
Dougerhead
That was an awesome post. Glad you linked to it, Sully-haters be damned.
BGinCHI
Ignore the Dougerhead troll.
He’s obviously high on nachos and vodka.
ETA: Kristol is crushing Sully in the hate derby.
SteveinSC
Where’s ABL? She needs to get on the Mittster’s case. Mormons didn’t decide that Blacks had souls until the 1960’s.
Dougerhead
@BGinCHI:
I’m a Sully-skeptic, but the full-on haters miss that he makes some great points sometimes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dougerhead: One notices that you aren’t denying the nachos and vodka allegations.
BGinCHI
@Dougerhead: I hear you, and share that view. But mostly it’s Mitt-hate and Kristol-hate at this point.
At least until eemom shows up.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Trust, but verify.
Man, you should see his countertops. Shiny.
RossInDetroit
@Dougerhead:
Well he’d have to just by chance. He never shuts up. Blind squirrel/acorn…
Shawn in ShowMe
@Dougerhead:
So does Ron Paul. At the end of the day, he’s still the enemy.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
@NobodySpecial:
Heh. Since no candidate is perfect, there can be no true purism in a vote for anyone; every vote is “pragmatic” for balloonbaggers.
Also too, if your Cult of Personality demands voting for a spineless, double-talking Reaganite weasel, do not complain when pointed criticism breaks out.
.
.
gogol's wife
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
Aw, go suck an egg.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: Some day I’m gonna understand one of his posts.
Today is not that day.
soonergrunt
@General Stuck: He’s already flip-flopped on the 99%.
BruceFromOhio
Um … doesn’t that apply to, um, like, *all* of them?
ETA: What @TenguPhule said.
Amir Khalid
I can’t say that I find these thoughts at all impressive.
So neocons want the US to start wars whether they make sense or not. So they go into denial about being wrong when the wars they advocate turn out badly. So they feel no shame because no one of significance dares call them out on their errors.
Wow. Nobody ever figured that out before. Andrew Sullivan is a man of uncommonly keen insight. Yay Sully.
Comparing Romney and Cheney is absurd. Romney doesn’t have Cheney’s pigheadedness. As a spineless panderer, he’s Cheney’s exact opposite. President Romney would go to war with Iran not because he wanted to, as Cheney did, but because the right wanted him to.
BruceFromOhio
@Amir Khalid:
So … Romney = Bush? So who plays Darth Cheney in this remake? And will he be made of Legos?
jl
I heard a few GOPper pols and GOP presidential pimaryites talking vicious nonsense on the radio airwaves.
From what I heard, Nobama ‘lost’ Iraq by not getting an agreement to keep US troops there, apparently, forever. I did not hear any interviewer mention that GW made the basic agreement, so if Obama tried to keep troops with immunity from prosecution and other perks, he had to ask for a ‘do over’.
Apparently the GOP wants the US to help liberate every country that has
oil,mineral resources,money,that we hate, suffers under oppression and bring it FREEDOM, and then keep our troops stationed there forever, so we can make sure theydo what we want forever, exercise their US provided freedom responsibly.gnomedad
AL reads Sully reading people so we don’t have to so we don’t have to.
Southern Beale
I don’t think that’s entirely true. The Iraq War architects definitely are not front and center as they once were, their reputations are suspect. They aren’t doing the Sunday Bobbleheads (save perhaps Fox), they aren’t writing Op-Eds every Sunday in the WaPo and NYT. I think they are very tarnished. While it’s an embarrassment to admit that torture man Alberto Gonzalez is going to be teaching at the Belmont Law School (literally walking distance from my house, jeeebus creeebus), let’s remember the school is NOT ACCREDITED.
So I think their prestige will always remain within conservative circles but in the foreign policy community at large? Nasomuch.
Just my opinion.
Southern Beale
@BruceFromOhio:
Rubio?
Josie
Bill Kristol is such a loathsome weasel. What kind of sick mind could compare war to lemonade? Can we parachute him into the middle of one so he can test out his comparison?
darkmatter
“Romney of the Uncanny Valley” is the most perfect tag. I highly approve and hope it is used at every opportunity.
Shawn in ShowMe
@BruceFromOhio:
Cheney = The Red Skull
Mitt = Batroc the Leaper
Joseph Nobles
@Josie: Or at least invent a time machine and swap him out for Vonnegut at Dresden.
eemom
@BGinCHI:
feh, I am done trying to save you people from yourselves.
I love Sully/I love Sully not. It’s the new Russian Roulette on Titanic deck chairs. Or something.
eemom
shit. Got modded due to a gaming word, I guess. Can’t we get a smarter moderation-thingie?
Mike in NC
@Amir Khalid:
If elected, any one of the clowns in the GOP field would be like putty in the hands of the neocons, but Krauthammer has been fluffing Willard lately. Chuck is a creep but no dummy, and understands that Romney is the most viable candidate who’d attack Iran in order to protect Israel.
Cliff
Andrew Sullivan’s on the “We Read These Idiots So You Don’t Have To” beat
Yeah, but see, it’s Sullivan, and on his good days he doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
I already knew Kristol is an odious piece of human trash. And you don’t have to be goddamn Nostradamus to guess that Romney will whore himself out to the neocons if he gets into office.
James
In fact, the first major reason that the Kristols and the Kagans haven’t “lost prestige” in spite of being dead wrong, catastrophically wrong about the Iraq War, Going Into is precisely because virtually everyone in major media supported going to war at the time (cf Bill Keller’s piece a few weeks back*).
I can’t read Sully any more, but I’ll give him this: just like John Cole, Sully owned up to his catastrophic mistake like a man, and has never made excuses for himself, and has spoken out about this catastrophic blunder at every opportunity. That’s a lot more than the Keller-types and the minor cheerleaders of the war — almost every single print and cable political reporter in the mainstream media. They all had a major war hard-on, if you recall, and as Keller admits.
The second reason is they all belong to the same elite social circle. They all yuk it up in their elite salons and to call out someone publicly on a trivial issue (to them) like war policy is just not done.
*Too lazy to link.
ornery
o sully said sumthing thank you for the very important information.
ms badger
@SteveinSC: 1973 was the date for Black people suddenly developing souls if I recall correctly. So sudden!
Arundel
Since this is open thread, can we talk about what a bloody awful hack Frank Bruni is at the NYT Op-Ed page? He is so wretchedly dreadful, he actually makes Douthat look better. An utter mystery why this food writer got elevated to that perch- filling a gay quota perhaps? (I’m gay.) He is simply terrible.
Today’s Sunday column: After harping and whining that OWS “doesn’t have a message”, he’s now saying that because celebrities like M. Moore,Alec Baldwin Sarandon, Russell Simmons etc. have been down there to show their support..something something it’s hypocritical because they are rich and famous. Thus, he concern-trolls that OWS is undermined by these celebrity visits. Because they all got rich working for corporations, or something!
Never mind that they might have an interest in a healthy stable society too- no, Bruni presents it as some strange hypocrisy. He is seriously a terrible, terribly shallow writer and thinker. He really is an inch deep, and the Times’s bench of op-ed columnists has become a disgrace, the Krug excepted.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I kind of wish Obama had announced that he had worked out a preliminary agreement with Iraq to stay, and then two days later announced that the two sides had decided to go their separate ways. That way we could see those on the right criticize him for both decisions in the same week. Not that wingers would care, but there would be some great commercials of indeciders come the general election.
AA+ Bonds
Neoconservatism (n): the act of turning lemons into pitchers full of American blood, lined up on the floor of a hangar at Langley, stretching out into the distance
AA+ Bonds
I think it is probably time to switch into full-on anti-Romney mode, he only has two or three months to throw this thing somehow, other threats appear to be neutralized and it’s worth pointing out that Romney will kill American soldiers as fast as possible.
AA+ Bonds
Vote Romney: He Will Kill Thousands of U.S. Soldiers To Get His Way
AA+ Bonds
Another one I like is “Mitt Romney: 2012’s John Kerry?” because it’s a good comparison and then you get assonance like “Is Romney Kerry?” and “Romney=Kerry?” in the churn
Amir Khalid
@Arundel:
Some of this was discussed on the OWS thread headlined Occupado, but not specifically related to Frank Bruni’s column. I certainly agree, it’s not hypocrisy for a rich and famous person to support OWS, and Bruni has no business suggesting that it is.
wilfred
Romney has surrounded himself with the same neocon cohorts that sold the war in Iraq: Feith, Cohen, et al. Now why on earth would he do that?
Iran. Just remember all this critical thinking when the push really starts. Obama is out trying to get even more sanctions, which would amount to a blockade.
AA+ Bonds
Mitt Romney: He’ll Lead Us To War
gogol's wife
@Arundel:
I keep starting to read his column automatically, thinking half-consciously that it’s by Frank Rich, then I think, “Why is Frank Rich writing this tripe?,” then catching myself and saying, “Why are you reading Frank Bruni?” The column today LITERALLY put me to sleep. I just woke up a few minutes ago.
Suffern ACE
@Arundel: When he was elevated, the release said that he was going to put a different perspective on a well covered event or write about events that might not have been noticed in the past week. We’re still waiting for that.
AxelFoley
That’s just as bad, IMO.
AxelFoley
@ms badger:
Just so happens to be the year I was born, so I made it in time!
Thymezone
War as lemonade? Well, we do know that Mr. Romney’s view of taking his dog on vacation strapped to the roof of his car was that the dog liked it.
I don’t think he’d have a problem with the War As Lemonade model.
serena1313
Anne Laurie
I think the more worrisome candidate is Rick Perry wrt a religious war. There are 5 Million Christians in the US who are not registered to vote. There is an effort on Rick Perry’s part by religious organizations to get them registered & to the polls. They have already found 500,000 in 12 states.
“Champion the Vote,” a nationwide campaign seeking to register an additional 5 million Christian-conservative voters this fall.
See: Secretive Religious Right Group’s Plans for 2012 @ Daily KOS:
It may turn out that a non-profit agency funded by conservative Christian Silicon Valley money men called United in Purpose may be the most important Religious Right agency in the 2012 election cycle.
Here is a primer on what we know so far:
First there was Rick Perry’s giant prayer rally, The Response, organized by Texas operatives who are leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation. (An international network of dominionist evangelicals.) This Christians only event drew some 20,000 people — unprecedented in the history of American presidential politics.
Then The Los Angeles Times reported that Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Foundation sent an email to people who had registered to attend The Response, promoting a project of United in Purpose.
United in Purpose is using sophisticated data-mining techniques to compile a database of every unregistered born-again and evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic in the country.
Through partnerships with Christian organizers and antiabortion groups, United in Purpose hopes to recruit 100,000 “champions” to identify unregistered Christians and get them to the polls as part of its Champion the Vote project. Profiles drawn from its database, which numbers more than 120 million people, will enable organizers to target potential voters with emails and Web videos tailored to their interests.
Towards this effort, according to the Orlando Sentinel, United in Purpose paid the expenses of some 800 pastors in Florida to attend a secretive private briefing, and heard speeches by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry.
In addition to hearing Perry and Gingrich, the pastors came to participate in “Champion the Vote,” a nationwide campaign seeking to register an additional 5 million Christian-conservative voters this fall.
For that campaign, Stemberger, the pastors and other participants, including Dallas, were producing a DVD video on the potential voting power of Christian conservatives. The video is to be distributed for a nationwide coordination of church and house parties on Nov. 12 called “One Nation Under God.”
Dallas, chief executive officer and spokesman for United in Purpose, responded to e-mail requests for an interview by replying he was busy making the DVD.
The One Nation Under God project is already being promoted on the Champion the Vote web site. The house parties will be connected by a live televised seminar to prepare people for the 2012 elections. Speakers will include Gingrich, Christian historical revisionist David Barton, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose, and New Apostolic Reformation figure, Samuel Rodriguez.
WHAT DOES ONE NATION UNDER GOD REALLY MEAN?
We’ve lost sight of our great heritage as a nation founded on Biblical truth, and the consequences are dire: schools are failing, the divorce rate is climbing, and our society is rife with scandal and corruption. It’s time to reclaim our Biblical heritage and bring God back to the center of American life. Where do we start?
ONE NATION UNDER GOD PREMIERE EVENT ON NOVEMBER 12
On Saturday, November 12, United in Purpose presents One Nation Under God – a national, two-hour premiere event featuring top American thinkers and political leaders who will bring the truth about God and America to people gathered in homes and churches across the nation.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/23/1029158/-Secretive-Religious-Right-Groups-Plans-for-2012
Pat In Massachusetts
Sorry, but I’m still digesting our president mowing down teenaged cousins with drones because maybe possibly one of the kid’s dad’s talked to terrorists groups.
Fuck Bill Kristol. I’ll try to absorb what he has to say on another day.