Okay, so we missed Blogroll Amnesty Day, again. But I’m taking this opportunity to mention that HTML Mencken, my favorite of all the Sadlynauts, is back in furious action at Sadly, No!:
Elliott Abrams — also known by his nom de criminel Mr. Kenilworth — has written an account of Israel’s bombing of Syria’s al Kibar nuclear reactor. At the time, Abrams was one of George W. Bush’s deputy NSAs and so his version of events is an insider’s. Since Abrams is a self-described “gladiator,” a patron of butchers in Central America, a smear merchant and liar, husband of a genocidally-minded homophobic fascist, brother-in-law to one of same sentiments, son-in-law of a certifiable madman, and author of a book which demands of his co-tribalists a more ethnic purity by denouncing Jewish-gentile intermarriage in the strident tone of an old Southern anti-miscegenation tract, his story of the strike on Syria, published in his family’s magazine Commentardy, is bound to betray a certain authorial slant. And he doesn’t disappoint.
First he provides some background. Mean Condi Rice had relatively soured relations with the Israelis. She, like the rest of the administration, was fine with Israel blowing the shit out of Lebanon for a while but she didn’t want it to go on indefinitely. Bad Condi! Then the story takes off….
“Holding a grudge” has always been considered un-American — between genocide against the previous occupants, the violent & frequently criminal pasts of the proto-American immigrants, and our Founding Fathers’ “compromises” on that messy, unpleasant slavery issue, isn’t it just more patriotic to pretend that history extends no further back than the last presidential election?
But in politics there are no lost causes, only abandoned ones… a bias that the Republicans have been manipulating, greatly to their advantage, since at least Nixon’s embrace of the ‘Southern strategy’. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, or at least to have their (our!) enemies repeat it upon us.
Open Thread: A Good Grudge Should Be CherishedPost + Comments (30)