Boy, this is great news. As tensions over Iran’s mysterious capabilities and goals ratchet up, a familiar bunch soft-shoe their way into the national spotlight. Look who’s back for a bite of the war apple: the stupid neocon lobby. From your familiar torture criminals . .

The Case for Military Action in Iran
John Yoo · Dec. 28, 2011

. . the United States should not be limited by the UN Charter, which limits the use of force to self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council . . The Charter rules have never described state practice and have the effect of keeping dictators in power and preventing the United States and its allies from maintaining peace and security in the world. The United States should have the legal right to use military force when it removes dangerous threats not just to our security, but to regions and the world — and that is, I argue, exactly what is posed by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons.

. . to the neo-Neocons . .

Time to Attack Iran
Matthew Kroenig | ForeignAffairs.com | Jan/Feb 2012

. . But skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease — that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.

The sights of these ‘serious’ admonitions are so appalling they almost defy a reply (by those of us lucky enough to have survived the last ‘emergency’ with rudimentary communication skills). We just pulled out of a war that cost us thousands of our friends’ and fellow citizens’ lives 23 DAYS AGO. But here we are again with multiple ‘foreign policy experts’ calling for America to go to war in the Middle East.

And, no, they haven’t even bothered to change their tune. It’s the same: The United Nations are stupid and illegitimate. America alone sets the tone for morality and security in international affairs. Time is slipping away, and the unseen dangers are too great to ignore. And since we do everything better now than we’ve ever done it before, the costs will be minimal.

Thank gawd at least one person calls bullshit up front:

The worst case for war with Iran
Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy | December 21, 2011

If you’d like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as “analysis,” I recommend Matthew Kroenig’s forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option.” It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there’s something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.

Stephen, too, has seen this:

There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don’t act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice’s infamous warnings about Saddam’s “mushroom cloud”?) . . Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren’t that great . . Kroenig’s piece follows this blueprint perfectly.

They’re all constructed that way. It’s as if the Middle East Socrates Group never saw their disastrously retarded and evil recommendations for Iraq as less than acceptable. For all they know, everything went fine and they’re held in high regard. For all we know, Republicans now put as much faith in them as they ever did.

Values candidate Rick Santorum just before Iowa, the shortest:

Values candidate Rick Santorum just before Iowa, the shorter, with more morals:

We must go back to traditional American values. We haven’t been in a second war for two weeks and one day.

From the Serious People Foundation:

Let’s consider both sides, shall we? Seeing as how we invited ourselves in?

We lost 4,000, they lost . .

Let’s just take a middle estimate of 150,000 dead. If they pay us 25 times what we pay them for every death, we owe them more. If a sense of fairness intrudes, we might go the equal compensation route instead. If we pay the same for our soldiers and their women and children? We owe them much, much more.

9/11. Terrorism, destruction. Death. Horrors beyond description.

Also: bad memories. Like the way liberals complained about Iraq. That sucked.

The anniversary of that terrible day has dredged up some lingering wingnut anger at us. Why did we have to go on and on criticizing the War in Iraq? How could we be so self-righteous, so conceited, so blind? Why didn’t we understand terrorism? Or existential threats? How could we be so stupid?

I don’t know. It comes naturally, I suppose. Anyhoo, among those posts, I found a particularly charming one on a site called, um . . I don’t know. And here it goes:

Was Eugene Robinson paying attention?
September 9th, 2011

Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post columnist who won a Pulitzer prize in 2009 for cutting and pasting Obama campaign press releases, today explains why the war against terror is over in his column “Post-9/11 permanent state of war should have ended long ago“ . .

[Eugene lying and lying]

He goes on to trot the old “Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11″ excuse.

Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Aaaannnd thhheerrreee iiiitt goooeess . . . Run, boy! Run! Fetch the appeasement!

. . So was Robinson paying attention when George W. Bush declared war against terrorists and said we wouldn’t differentiate between terrorists and the people/nations who supported them?

Saddam had nothing to do with terrorism either. Why didn’t we take these people seriously, again? I can’t remember.

It wasn’t a call to war directed at solely Americans, it was a call to war for the whole world.

Ring. Hello? Dear sole-ly Americans. Yes? Go to war.

Wait. Who is this? George?

Dear sole-ly Americans. Dear sole-less Americans. Dear sole-American community and feetsy peoples of the world: Kill the Muslims. George — is that you?

It was an opportunity for ALL civilized nations to eradicate the vermin who murder innocent people to make a political point. It was a chance for the Spaniards to declare all-out war on the Basques, for Colombia to wipe out . .

WOW. Now we’re getting somewhere. Consider the more than two million Basques of the world, and we’re finally looking at a proper Spanish genocide. The military, I imagine, will have no qualms about swarming Southern France to chase “the vermin.” AKA “the people who live with the sheep.” And since when do militaries have qualms? Pish.

If you’re additionally concerned about the descendants of the famous fishing, stinking Basques, you might call an armada. Half of Chile’s inhabitants are proud net/grenade throwers. And those people are plenty dangerous: they’ll have you out of the water with their fingers in your gills lickety-splish. One minute you’re at home, quietly flaying the cat, the next minute you’re dockside, upside-down with the terrorists. Say ‘cheese.’ I see a lemon enema and a tinfoil suit in your future. That’s a decent Friday night. In Chile. If the intercontinental war crime seems a bit far-fetched for mere Spaniards, put whoever wrote this post in charge of Invasion Santiago. He’ll have a pile of college Republicans crawling the ramparts of Hormel, Inc., before you can say, “The country! Not the food!”

. . to wipe out FARC, for the world to battle against the Tamil Tigers, the Filipino Moros, the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan. It was a missed opportunity for the United Nations to outlaw terrorism as a political weapon.

Ooooohhhh we have to check. Don’t we? Pardon . .

[*clackety*]

. . yep:

Measures To Eliminate International Terrorism
Ad Hoc Committee established by General Assembly resolution 51/210 of 17 December 1996

In 1996 the General Assembly, in resolution 51/210 of 17 December, decided to establish an Ad Hoc Committee to elaborate an international convention for the suppression of terrorist bombings and, subsequently, an international convention for the suppression of acts of nuclear terrorism, to supplement related existing international instruments, and thereafter to address means of further developing a comprehensive legal framework of conventions dealing with international terrorism . .

He’s unfamiliar with the U.N. I am shocked, yes, no, I am not shocked.

The left likes to say that Bush squandered the good will we’d earned from the world on 9/11, but it was the world who squandered an opportunity to stand up to the terrorists of the world. An opportunity that may not come around again.

We may never have another September the Eleventh? Wow. Just, hmm. Will my dreams still be in color, or will they all be black and white? Geh, no, I’ll be alright.

So, in reality, Robinson is correct, it’s time for his side to declare victory…for the terrorists. The European hand wringers and American intellectually vacant hippies, the gutless wonders, won it for them. When the next terrorist attack kills scores of Americans they can point with pride at that which they have wrought.

Look! I did it! I killed everybody! Say, Chauncey, why didn’t we take these people seriously, again? I can’t remember, buddy. I’m kidding, I remember, they’re silly.

Don’t you just love the Washington Post? No? C’mon– what about their editorial board? How about those guys? Aren’t you a fan? Ahh, yes, I see your face lighting up.

Ten years after Sept. 11: The gains outweigh the mistakes
By Editorial, Published: September 9

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold. Yes, the nation made big mistakes over the past decade. When has America ever geared up without excess and error? But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon alerted Americans to genuine dangers that only a relative few had previously noticed. We have lived safely for the decade since not because we misread those dangers but because we responded to them in a manner in which, on balance, Americans can take pride . .

Soul palm. Do you “take pride” in 100,000 bodies littered across Iraq? 20 million bones? You’re good with that? I didn’t think so. You can stuff this ‘opinion’ in a sewer.

UPDATE: Something wasn’t quite right, apparently. The piece got a new title:

Much better. WaPo wouldn’t want you to think all those cadavers were “gains.”

Wingnut Joe Scarborough, handsome golden retriever granted the full run of MSNBC’s kennel, isn’t exactly the warmonger you figured (chickenmutt? poodlehawk?). Really. Turns out he has the soul to write country style-ish protest songs against the war. Against the war. Really!

Wow. That’s some . . singing? Anyway, while it’s not exactly clear what war he’s against or how he isn’t pandering . . now . . as we’re leaving . . ehh. Hmm. I did see RawStory point out a previously angry Joe Scarborough:

“I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types,” the MSNBC host said in April 2003. “I just wonder, who’s going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: ‘Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong’? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war…”

“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes.”

The peaceable disgraces and mistakes are ours. Right. Now meet sobbin’ Geetar Slim:

I sit listening alone
To that message on the phone
He said a prayer then he whispered ‘goodbye’

Now our boy is a man
And I call him when I can
How I hope that he don’t hear me cry . .

Now still I cry
Underneath September skies
Ten years on but my nightmare goes on

In an endless war
Tell me please how many more
Have to die before my sweet boy comes home . .

Aw you got me all choked up. Bawling like Lonesome Joe.

The Obama administration has decided to drop the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of the year down to 3,000, marking a major downgrade in force strength . .

Joe’s ear may be bad, but his timing’s pretty good.

Take that lash out of the President’s hands! Hear me, sir: you shall refrain from beating such kindly men of good will.

Mean streak: Obama is not as nice as he looks
Washington Examiner Editorial | 04/16/11

. . The speech was advertised by the White House as a major address in which the president would join the serious conversation initiated two weeks ago by Ryan in his detailed proposal for cutting spending. What Obama instead delivered, with Ryan sitting in the front row, was, in the Wall Street Journal’s unsparing description, a “poison pen” speech dripping with mean-spirited partisanship, gross misrepresentations of fact, and sophistry of the lowest sort concerning Republicans’ alleged desire to hurt old people, the poor and mentally challenged children. It was the sort of harangue one would expect from a rabidly devoted partisan hack, with no relation whatever to the thoughtful appeals to reason and common values that historically have characterized presidential leadership in this country.

Ha! Do you have to be mentally ill to write something like this? No, but it certainly helps.

Wasn’t anybody at the Washington Examiner alive during the Nixon years? Didn’t the President authorize his ‘Plumbers’ to break into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to get enough dirt on the guy to destroy him?

Nixon tells his aide Charles Colson: “We’ve got a countergovernment here and we’ve got to fight it. I don’t give a damn how it’s done. Do whatever has to be done to stop those leaks.… I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done.”

Yep. Dick, by way of Kissinger, also wiretapped reporters and employees because of their non-Nixon thoughts and opinions. He was kindness and civility personified.

George W. Bush and his buddies were similarly presidential, respectful and kind. George’s Vice President, Richard Cheney, got so annoyed with Senator Pat Leahy that he snapped “Go fuck yourself.” Because he’s so civil, this Dick not only refused to apologize for it, he actually crowed to Dennis Miller about it.

“That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.”

From the horse’s mouth, Dick’s life never got any better than that. Although it might have — Dennis would have gladly fellated his hero.

When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took to the New York Times to criticize the administration’s false claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium from Niger, Cheney and his aide Lewis Libby outed his wife, Valerie Plame, as a spy for the CIA.

That ended her career. In an investigation of the affair, Libby lied so thoroughly about his actions that he was convicted of multiple crimes. This is a routine consequence of acting civilized. The President, appearing presidential and non-partisan, commuted Libby’s sentence.

George’s penchant for trucking in class and mutual respect is legendary.

In a chapter entitled “The Smirk,” Dr. Frank offered abundant evidence for Bush’s sadism and destructiveness, from blowing up frogs as a child to rubber-stamping the execution of a record number of death-row inmates while governor of Texas.

George thought the executions were hilarious. Once he got to be President, after failing fatally to protect America on 9/11, he invaded two nations and waterboarded detainees. Nowadays, 60% of young Americans believe it’s okay to torture people, so Bush’s “thoughtful appeals to reason and common values” prove, unfortunately, to be contagious.

Perhaps Americans will avoid mimicking the cruel and nasty ways of this current President. He’s the type of guy who retaliates against his enemies with hurtful words, this way:

. . tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that’s not what happened.

They would do better to act like a guy who’d leave 100,000 corpses rotting in the Iraqi sun. Those people never did anything bad to George, but he murdered them anyway. Now that’s a mean streak.

Unappreciated . .

Yet another thing we need to teach Iraqis: masochism.

Now this is a compelling political story.

A smart, talented, highly motivated guy, albeit one given to romanticizing himself, commits a war crime, and then he joins the Tea Party. Wow.

I could easily write a couple thousand words on this guy, but I’ll keep it short, for today: he’s the Tea Party candidate in North Carolina’s 7th district. He beat fellow Republican William Breazeale in the primary and takes on incumbent Democrat Mike McIntyre for the congressional seat. Polls have him trailing McIntyre by up to 12 points for the traditionally Democratic spot.

After serving in the first Gulf War, he returned to the states and began to put together a career, working at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere. Putting down roots, getting married, having kids.

After 9/11, the desire to go back into the service overcame him, and he joined the Marines, went to officer candidate’s school. He shipped off to Iraq and was serving as a Second Lieutenant when the Iraqi insurgency began.

On April 15th, 2004, Lt. Pantano led his platoon to an area near Mahmuhdiyah, outside of Fallujah. While the rest of his men went through a compound suspected of holding insurgents, Pantano and two of his men detained a car containing two men that had exited the compound. They pulled the men out, cuffed them with zip ties, and went through the car, finding some suspicious looking wires. The Marines who ransacked the compound found AKs, mortar stakes and more wires.

Pantano ordered the men un-cuffed. He ordered his own two men to stand watch at the front and rear of the car, which they did, turning their backs to the scene. He ordered the two detainees to kneel inside the open front and back doors of the car, to pull the interior apart again to prove to Pantano they weren’t secreting anything else, which they did. When they began to talk to each other, he told them in Arabic to be quiet.

And then Pantano began shooting. After emptying one magazine into the two detainees, he pulled a second magazine and loaded it, and then emptied that magazine as well. 60 bullets in all.

After the shooting, he fashioned a placard with his favorite Marine motto: “NO BETTER FRIEND, NO WORSE ENEMY”. He left the placard against the window of the car.

Eventually, word of the shooting got around to Marine authorities, and he was brought up in court martial. He was charged with pre-meditated murder, among six other charges, and faced a possible death sentence.

But one of the two men at the scene was a bad witness (and probably a spotty Marine), and the charges were dropped. Pantano’s career essentially over, he was honorably discharged and returned to the U.S.

And now, years later, he’s a Tea Party guy. This is no surprise. In reading about Ilario Pantano and his history (see this New York Magazine article — also: Time Magazine, The Guardian, Raw Story), one thing becomes clear: he can romanticize himself at any time.

. . as a child, Pantano dreamed about rescuers. He wanted to be Lancelot, knight of the Round Table. “He thought it was such an important job,” his aunt recalls. Then he wanted to be a samurai, practicing for hours with a sword. “There was something that was so powerful to me about being a protector of others,” Pantano says. It was a way, as he put it, “to order the chaos.”

That is Pantano. After 9/11, when his father told him that, at 30 and with a family already, he didn’t have to join the Marines, he said:

“No, Daddy,” Pantano told his father. “I want to be a Marine.” He explained, “The Marine Corps was the closest I could get to a knight.”

So, after returning stateside, when word got round of his exploits, or his crimes (depending on your mindset), you understand why he found no reason to resist writing his autobiography once asked. It is “Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” (Amazon).

The far-right are absolutely gaga over this guy. Michael Savage thinks he’s a god. Others, too:

–North Carolina Third District Representative Walter B. Jones introduced House Resolution 167 which expressed the support of the House of Representatives for Pantano. On February 25, Congressman Jones wrote a letter to President Bush asking for his support for Pantano.

–On April 14, 2005, the Association for Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs sent a letter to then President Bush endorsing House Resolution 167 in support of Ilario Pantano.

On The Congressional Record:
–House Resolution 167 in support of 2LT Ilario Pantano, March 17, 2005.
–LA Deputy Sheriff’s endorsement of HR 167, April 14, 2005.
–Congressman Walter Jones’ public statement of support, May 5, 2005.
–Congressman Walter Jones’ endorsement of Pantano’s memoir, June 6, 2006.

But certainly not everybody. Iraq War veterans included, like the Republican candidate Pantano beat in the primary:

Will Breazeale, a former lieutenant colonel who served in both Iraq wars, says Pantano has “no excuse for what he did.”

“To shoot two unarmed prisoners 60 times and put a sign over their dead bodies is inexcusable,” Breazeale told The Daily Beast. “And once people know the real story, he has no chance of winning in November. I know people think it’s sour grapes, but I have nothing to gain by opposing him except clearing my conscience and fighting for good government.”

I don’t blame Breazeale. With everything that I’ve read about the shooting incident, there’s no indication that the ‘threatening’ Iraqis ever managed so much as to get up on their feet. Many, if not most, of the bullets were fired into their backs. But the case has long since been adjudicated, it’s over.

So this is your North Carolina Tea Partier, Ilario Pantano. If nothing else, I’m confident I can say this about him: he’s the most talented, most accomplished person the Tea Party has ever had. He’s probably the most dangerous, too.

General Hugh Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 through the events of 9/11, has written a memoir which details what was happening behind the scenes in the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks. Titled ‘Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior’, reviewed by Thomas E. Ricks and excerpted at RawStory, it levels harsh criticism at Bush’s neo-cons and, especially, Donald Rumsfeld:

The US had no reason to invade Iraq in 2003, and only did so because of “a series of lies” told to the American people by the Bush administration, says Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served for four years as the US’s top military officer . .

“President Bush and his team got us enmeshed in Iraq based on extraordinarily poor intelligence and a series of lies purporting that we had to protect Americans from Saddam’s evil empire because it posed such a threat to our national security,” Shelton writes in his memoir.

Runsfeld gets described as being bent on taking America to war, as an arrogant and reckless Secretary of Defense uninterested in the advice or opinions of anybody but himself:

According to Ricks, Shelton states that, in order to get the war going, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “elbowed aside Gen. Richard Myers and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also intimidated and flattered Gen. Tommy R. Franks while working directly with him, and so basically went to war without getting the advice of his top military advisors.”

As a result, Shelton says of Rumsfeld’s tenure: “the worst style of leadership I witnessed in 38 years of service.”

When Rumsfeld was proven wrong in a meeting, Shelton says, he wouldn’t admit it, but rather would press on and do “his best to stay afloat amid the bullshit he was shoveling out.”

At one point, Rumsfeld utterly rejected a plan for how to deal with Iraqi attacks on U.S. warplanes in the old “no-fly zones.” Shelton liked the plan how it was, so when ordered to revamp it, he let it sit on his desk for a couple of weeks, and then sent it back to the defense secretary with a new label on it: “Rumsfeld Auto-Response Matrix.” “He loved every word of it,” Shelton reports with unconcealed contempt.

These descriptions of Rumsfeld as a conniving, narcissistic bureucrat jibe with previous descriptions of him. Here, he pasted Biblical quotes on the covers of Department of Defense reports to gain favor with his born-again boss. Here, he and his ‘snowflake’ memos attempted to micro-manage every aspect of the war, including the psyches of the American people.

Heavens — wake the nursing staff and tell them to bring up some smelling salts. Have the au pairs escort little Jodie and Vance out the side door, to the guest house — we wouldn’t want them to countenance Mummy and Daddy in such a state, no.

A psychic jolt just struck a few of the safe and well-to-do. A comprehensive and righteous agitation seized them, and they’re no longer happy, for a minute.

A big-mouthed liberal said something which wasn’t complimentary of former Vice President Richard Cheney. Or his callous daughter. Mike Malloy responded to Liz Cheney’s accusation that President Obama intentionally leaves Americans vulnerable to terrorism this way:

I don’t know why I give this psychopathic misdirected woman — you ought to be there planning your father’s funeral, Liz, because I’m sure all the nation’s bigwigs, especially the Republicans are going to fall all over themselves to worship in front of his coffin. That’s what you ought to be doing instead of making your filthy, insane, gratuitous statements about what the American people expects their president or an administration to do to protect us from terrorist attack. Shame on you, Liz Cheney. Go plan your father’s funeral. Just do that. Do at least one thing in your useless life that will have some meaning. Go plan his funeral.

Well. Why was it, do you think, that Mike got so mad? This?

He died. And this:

I imagine the boy died, too. They weren’t the only ones.

Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people died. Why? Because Dick Cheney had enough post-9/11 political power to drive America into invading the boogeyman nation of Iraq.

Mike’s actually talking about that: Dick’s Exercise of Conservative Philosophy that eviscerated Iraq, Iraqis and his fellow Americans. A seven year nightmare that will give thousands of good Americans nightmares for decades to come. An unspeakable horror for which Dick remains proud and free. Someone deserves to be severely punished for the blood-gushing and dismemberment of 4,200 Americans, now deceased, for 30,000 Americans wounded, and for the cadavers of at least 100,000 Iraqis, many of them once women and children.

Any American who slaughters that many people, he deserves justice. And he deserves it more surely than any routine criminal. Otherwise, can you imagine prosecuting people for, say, vehicular manslaughter while letting Charles Manson go free? Because we were scared of him, or because he was popular? Manson did have his fans. But Manson will die in jail, and that’s appropriate. Dick Cheney deserves to be hanged from the neck until he’s dead. I don’t believe an execution is a civilized response, but, in Dick’s case, it’s warranted.

Mike Malloy, by contrast, deserves . . what? After all, he just talks. And all Mike said to Liz was “Do at least one thing in your useless life that will have some meaning. Go plan his funeral.” Goodness.

But this was Conservative ‘News Buster’ Noel Sheppard’s reaction:

What the hell is happening to this nation?

Oh me. Thousands of Americans must have heard Mike’s comment.

. . I’m speechless and need desperately to go take a shower hoping with all my heart I can scrub this filth from my memory.

You go do that. And forget Cheney’s Policy Assault Force who daily washed the Iraqis’, or their own, or their buddies’ blood, bone and brain matter from their skin. My, aren’t those words of Mike’s dirty? Don’t they stain?

Dear me, Noel — what has the radio liberal done to America? It’s unclear. What has Dick Cheney done to America? That’s obvious, with all the funerals and all the good people trying to walk around without the legs they were born with.

So, Liz? Some advice to you: forget Mike’s telling you to do something useful for yourself, you can do better. Do something useful for America. I guarantee you that the prosecution of your dad for his pet-project war will make us a better nation. No American with that much political power will ever look at invading a country the same again. There will be real and personal consequences for the unjustified use of violence, and that’s exactly how it should be.

Hand him over to a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and then go plan your father’s funeral.

Feew bad fowe Meg:

I Wuz Wrong
AUG 27 2010, 11:52 AM ET
The Atlantic

Tyler Cowen and Brad DeLong are fessing up. It’s a Friday in August, with nothing to report but the dismal GDP figures we were all expecting. So I’ll start with the Iraq War:

Meg is bowed. I hate being bowed.

1) I erroneously believed that I could interpret the actions of Saddam Hussein. He seemed to be acting like I’d act if I had WMD. Whoops!

No! Whoops!

. . I wasn’t an Iraqi dictator, which left huge gaps in my mental model of Hussein.

None of us wuz bad owe’ Saddam. Yet a howe bunch of us said “No! Don’t go! Peopowe wiw die.”

2) I erroneously extrapolated the experience of World War II to Iraq. This took several forms:

Dat wuz a wong, wong time ago. And wuzn’t it mostowy Sawdi Awabians dat sneak attacked us at Peaw Hawbow? Whoops!

a) I overlooked the fact that Japan and Germany were both stable bourgeois nations with solid industrial bases long before we got into the act.

Wuzn’t Veewetnam in duwh Sixties? And Seventies?

b) I overlooked the fact that we completely destroyed this nations before occupying and reconstructing them.

‘. . this nations’? Whoops! And isn’t dat onwy two? Not ‘several’?
Wet’s see: a) . . and . . b). Whoops!

3) I was insufficiently empathetic in imagining how Iraqis would feel about our invasion.

You should hab twied to get fuwthew inside Iwaqis’ heads. Like Saddam Hussein — what wuz HE dinking? Oh — whoops! Whoops!

We liked the French for giving us military help during the Revolution. Now imagine that France had invaded in order to liberate us from the British. Even if they really did eventually leave, this would have had much worse results. Looking back, my confi-dence in our liberatory powers seems terribly callous, and it doesn’t really do the dead Iraqis much good that I’m sorry for it.

Meg’s owdew now, smawtew now. Vewy matchew.