Vicar of Christ meets the Voice of Sauron
Digby and Tristero have two posts that fit well together.
Tristero, regarding the NeoCon epiphany both for and against the Iraqi War:
...Question: After a war, how much wisdom do you need to gain to recognize the carnage? Answer: After a war it takes only as much wisdom to see it was horrible as it takes intelligence to blame others - Rumsfeld, the beaurocracy - for the failure of your crackpot plans. And that is exactly how much wisdom Perle has gained.
Why did Perle underestimate "the depravity" the world would see from a Bush/Iraq war, and spectacularly underestimate it at that? I have no idea, but it was not because he's never seen a war up close. I haven't either and I never underestimated the depravity to come from this war. Why did Perle fail to weigh carefully the very real probability that the Bush/Iraq war might result in a failed state where you'd get "all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating?" Again, I don't know, but once again, I didn't.
And I was far from alone.
Most of the world knew what was going to happen if Bush invaded Iraq. And to make absolutely sure Perle knew that we knew, and to bring the possibility that the Bush/Iraq war would end in chaos to his attention, just in case it happened to have escaped his brilliant mind, tens of millions around the world marched, not once, but twice, in protest. Millions of us wrote our governments begging them to do something, anything, to avert the inevitable disaster. Helen Caldicott even urged that the ailing John Paul II travel to Baghdad to become a human shield. And the Pope himself, face to face with George W. Bush, counseled a peaceful solution.
And then the war came. And the casualties began to mount. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dead or horribly mutilated. Tortures and beheadings. Atrocities even worse, too horrible to describe. And no end in sight no matter whether the US stays or goes - and the US isn't going anytime soon.
And it took all this to provide Perle with his learning experience. To finally have Perle say, maybe we could have looked at other means than war in dealing with the very containable threat of Saddam Hussein.
But you'd have to have been "delphic" to know that, Perle says. Yes, delphic... As if Richard Perle was a half-crazed woman ranting oracles in the mists. And Perle, he tells us this straight out, that's the last thing he wants anyone to think Richard Perle could possibly be.
But this post really isn't about Richard Perle.
When I first saw that article, like many of you, I was entertained by the spectacle of these scoundrels having to eat crow. But then I remembered that poor kid whose parents were killed and whose legs and an arm were severed by a bomb I paid for.
And I remembered that a television anchor asked the reporter on the scene whether the shocked, traumatized beyond all belief, child really understood that all of this happened to him for a good cause, the liberation of his country.
And after I remembered that I felt ashamed of my schadenfreude towards Perle. For he is among those directly responsible for the murder of that child's parents, and for that kid's own permanent mutilation. And he implicated me, and you, in that murder and gore as well, despite the fact that we protested loud and long. And he helped create the ghastly environment of immoral self-righteousness reflected in that anchor's remarks. And he urged it happen. He wanted it to happen. He rejoiced when it happened. He wants it to happen again in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere.
And I felt ashamed that this country's public discourse is even now still so unspeakably corrupt that people as morally sick as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Ken Adelman still have access to a wide public. And I felt furious that while Vanity Fair fusses to find the most elegant way to fling Perle's shit at America, the rest of us can only wait anxiously for the inevitable catastrophes, the direct result of the advice and avid support of these people, to unfold, with little opportunity to guide the discourse back to anything close to sanity.
A longtime ago, the summer of '03, I think it was, I wrote a private letter to Josh Marshall. I had just seen a video of him and Perle on a panel at, I think, American Enterprise Institute, discuss the Iraq War. Perle was unbearably coarse, surly, and contemptuous, even personally nasty towards Josh. And of course, everything Perle asserted was dead wrong.
In the letter, I told Josh that he shouldn't raise Perle's status in the world by deigning to appear with him.
I never heard back from Josh, but I'm pretty sure that one of the things he thought was that I was completely uninformed and had it entirely backwards. Probably he thought I didn't know that Perle, a highly-placed adviser to a president and his war cabinet, was deigning to appear with him.
No, Josh, I knew exactly what I was saying.
It is high time that Perle, Ledeen, Adelman and the whole sick crew stop getting their phone calls returned from the media. And for the media to stop calling them. For truly, Perle is not Joshua Marshall's peer. Perle is Joe McCarthy's. He is Curtis Lemay's. Perle is a nutcase, a madman. He makes Ward Churchill appear a paragon of insight and integrity. As for not being delphic, he makes Anne Heche seem normal...
Here's the trick about Perle and the rest of the American Enterprise Institute pirates: they're lying.
From Big Time Dick on down, they all knew what the War would cost, and would bring: endless war and a bottomless pit of money for the war.
As Digby points out, the TheoConfederacy has almost formally codified the moral justification for unthinkable levels of doublethink:
...neo-cons and faith-based robots have spent the last few years mangling the discourse with so much hypocrisy, so many outright lies and twisted moral reasoning that they may have permanently built an alternate universe that they can turn to whenever the need arises. Witness two events that happened just last week.
First you had the John Kerry flap. After the first news cycle everyone knew he'd blown a punchline. There were even plenty of conservatives who admitted it. But that didn't matter. What mattered was forcing him to apologize for something he never said. It was a pure act of force, as if they put their foot on his neck and demanded that he agree that "up is down and black is white" --- a modern show trial in which Kerry agreed to confess in order to spare his party's chances in the upcoming election. He instinctively resisted, as sane people always do when forced to deny reality. But the sheer power of the coordinated Republican outcry (with the willing help of cynical Dems and the media) finally made it imperative for him to issue an apology for something he never said.
And the Republicans laughed and laughed because once again they had forced a leading Democrat to bow to their will as surely as if they'd physically held him down and made him agree that black was white and up was down. It was all the more delicious because every party to it, the Republicans, the Democrats, the public, the media and John Kerry himself all knew the real truth. Now that's power.
They pulled off a different, but related, gambit with something that was far more important. The administration tried to spin the irresponsible dumping of nuclear secrets on the internet as proof that the Iraq war was justified despite the fact that the documents were from before the first Gulf war. Even the secretary of state went on conservative talk radio and pretty much said "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes." Since it happened so late in the election cycle, it got lost in all the gay, meth snorting, joke blowing Republican effluvia of the campaign, but it is still one of the most audacious attempts at reality denial we've yet seen...
...The real point of this total disregard for reality is to force others to be complicit in their falsehoods.
They succeeded in getting everyone to agree that John Kerry should have immediately apologized for something he never said and they managed to at least partially spin what should have been a public relations disaster --- Bush personally ordering a project that resulted in arabic language nuclear plans winding up on the internet at the behest of their political fringe --- into a positive story that proved the Bush administration case for war.
These are bold, in-your-face challenges to what we all commonly perceive as reality. Frum's perverse moral view of Haggard's hypocrisy and dishonesty is the same thing. It's where the faith-based, the Limbaugh nation and the neocons come together in a Straussian orgy of lies and myths and pure brute force.
Winning this election will not change this. The political establishment has been trained in this method for almost two decades now and the Republicans are actually better at wielding this power as the opposition. I have no answers about how to deal with it. It's one of the most difficult challenges we face.
Justification of lies as furthering a moral cause that is in itself a lie.
But don't run. We come in peace.
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