The Pantload -- Now Doughier Than Ever!

Seems the LA Times, in the misplaced spirit of outreach to the mentally-impaired community, has sacked longtime contributor Robert Scheer, and filled his column space with the Pillsbury Waterboy. Talk about a step down.

Goldberg's veritable treasure trove of foreign policy knowledge and insight was spotlighted earlier this year, as you may recall. He got into a notorious pissing contest with well-known Iraq analyst Prof. Juan Cole, in which Cole essentially sat on Goldberg's chest and smacked Goldberg upside the head with Goldberg's own spindly arms, all the while saying, "Why're you hittin' yerself, Jonah? Why're you hittin' yerself?" To say that it was ugly is a serious underestimation. Goldberg's momma is merely ugly; Cole's smackdown was downright fugly.

So Goldberg is well-established as a reckless cheerleader for the gang of pelf-hungry fabulists running this country. He's gotten by to this point on his mommy's connections and a pop-culture bonhomie that would be charming in, say, a lifestyle columnist, but not in someone who purports to be a serious pundit.

So what does Goldberg choose to subject his unwitting audience to in his inaugural LAT column, that couldn't already have been gleaned from his tiresome excursions at The Corner of J-Pod Alley and K-Lo Cul-de-sac?

What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush's critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He'd be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and — most certainly — impeachment fodder. Even Bush's defenders agree that if Bush lied, it would be a grave sin.

Already the Doughboy is vacillating between "so what?" and "no shit, Sherlock". So at least he's consistent.

But do you remember way back when, back in the previous benighted millennium, when it wasn't about the sex, it was about the lying? You know who two of the more exhaustive media whores were for that homespun aphorism? Doughboy and Mama Doughboy, Luciferanne Goldberg. So it's interesting to see some inferential data demonstrating that perhaps it was about the sex after all.

Perhaps we could take up a collection to get Goldberg a blowjob, and get him out of our media channels once and for all. Come on, Fatboy, we'll all chip in so you can clean out the pipes at long last, and get on to something more useful, like inventing a new flavor of SnackWells.

My friends at the Journal are right to suggest that some Bush critics are paranoids, but here's the thing: Luce wasn't slandering Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the evidence that FDR lied is far greater than the evidence that Bush did.

....

Roosevelt won his unprecedented third election on the vow that he wouldn't send American boys to war: "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This was almost surely a lie.

"Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor," writes the historian Thomas A. Bailey. "He was faced with a terrible dilemma. If he let the people slumber in a fog of isolationism, they might fall prey to Hitler. If he came out unequivocally for intervention, he would be defeated" in the 1940 election. This view was seconded by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a rave review of Bailey's book in 1949. Schlesinger now spends his time lending gravitas to the moonbattier "Bush lied" table-thumpers at Arianna Huffington's website.

Heh. It never fails with these chumps, but FDR is an over-reach of truly, well, Pantloadian proportions, when comparing Chimpco's perfidy in getting us into this mess. For one, the strategic alliance between Germany and Japan was one that was running full-tilt through their respective neighbors. By the time we finally got into it, the Japanese had brutally subjugated Manchuria and were headed straight for control of Indonesian oilfields and Philippine commercial sea lanes. And Hitler and Mussolini were headed into North Africa, because the Wehrmacht needed oil, and the biggest European source at the time was Romania, which obviously wasn't nearly enough to feed the monster. So they were acting very quickly and forcefully, and we almost waited until it was too late to jump in as it was.

This is a difference on an order of magnitude with what Saddam's thuggish crime family was doing in Iraq. Yes, they picked fights with two of their neighbors -- the much bigger one fought them to a draw in a conflict that killed over a million people, and the much smaller neighbor called its much bigger friends to squash the problem. So Saddam was not exactly a keen military strategist who could pose a serious threat to his neighbors without practically advertising it. Was he working on nuclear capability and WMD? Probably. So was North Korea -- successfully. So was Iran -- also successfully. In focusing on the weakest bad apple, the much stronger two got even further ahead at their own nefarious games -- with a little help from our "friend" Pakistan. So, you know, nicely done all the way around there, fellas. Anything else you want to fuck up royally while you're down there?

See, the brain surgeons in the Goldberg claque, in thinking they were so much fucking smarter than all the hippy dippy trippy moonbats, thought they were going to make a big, bright, shining example out of Iraq. They would demonstrate that people around the world, envious of American excesses, would welcome the opportunity to throw off the chains of Saddam's Stalinist state, and eat at Mickey D's and watch porn on their satellite systems.

Suffice to say that this gamble didn't pay off, and the upcoming third historic election (in one year, no less, three momentously historic elections, each more so than the last, no doubt) unfortunately won't change that. And all Goldberg and his ignorant ilk have been able to conjure up is reflexive snide foolishness about how the people who are observing the facts dispassionately really don't want it to work.

It really is difficult to figure how a set of people, supposedly college-educated and relatively intelligent, could reach such an abhorrent conclusion in any remotely honest manner. Yet they have, and continue to beat the non-existent point into the ground as if it were some sort of triumphant proof -- even though they've been wrong about everything the entire time. They were wrong about Saddam's capabilities; they were wrong about how to go about securing the borders. They were wrong about gutting the army and the Baathists, leaving a lot of broke unemployed pissed-off men with nothing to do, and lots of seething rage at the daily humiliation of being occupied and pushed around. They were wrong about buying into that snake Chalabi's bullshit about being greeted with candy and flowers.

Most of all, they clearly had no fundamental understanding of how intertwined the culture is with the faith in that part of the world. They didn't realize that terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas also function as charitable organizations there, and thus have the common man on their side, by and large. And they fired a lot of able translators who could have helped them suss these facts out a lot sooner, because they were gay.

So to turn Doughboy's argument back on him, if FDR did lie to get us into WW2, only a moron would argue that it wasn't for the best possible outcome. And while it calls for speculation, it would be intellectually dishonest to still assert that Saddam could not have been contained, when the only "evidence" ever produced to the contrary was pulled out of Rocco Martino's ass.

Does Doughboy think that nobody knows how to Google this shit, or does he just assume we all take his word as gospel?

Just three days before Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 4, 1941, the Chicago Tribune and Washington Star-Ledger broke the story that FDR had already drafted a plan for war with Germany, a plan that entailed a 10-million-man army invading Germany by the middle of 1943. Democrats and Republicans alike saw this as further proof that FDR had been lying all along. Some suggest that a U.S.-flagged schooner sent into Japanese waters that same day was intended to provoke a fight. Roosevelt got Pearl Harbor instead, which was a surprise but nonetheless "rescued" the president, in Hofstadter's words, from the "dilemma" of needing to start a war the American people opposed.

Does this make FDR a bad president? No. While I have my problems with FDR, most historians are right to be forgiving of deceit in a just cause. World War II needed to be fought, and FDR saw this sooner than others.

Look. I'll admit that even I thought for quite some time that there must be WMD out in the Syrian desert, that Saddam had holed them away thinking he'd be able to hold out or something. Of course, there's no internal logic to this assumption many of us held -- after all, if he had them, why didn't he use them, in the face of being deposed? -- but I think many felt that, with all the ongoing assertions about WMD, Powell's insistence on actual fact-based intelligence, and what we already knew about Saddam, that they must have had the goods on him somehow. No one would go to war on a flimsy Nigerien document, would they?

They would. They did. And they did it on bad faith, with massive amounts of sneering and bluster, firing and retiring any military experts who got in the way of them doing it their way, which as it turns out was the wrong way. So again, comparing FDR's dilemma to Bush's dilemma is not even apples and oranges; it's apples and comic books. Hindsight is not going to absolve Bush the way it supposedly did FDR (to the extent that FDR actually had to be absolved in the first place); indeed, every bit of information that finally squeaks through the wall of secrecy is more damning than the last.

Even the most cursory reading of any presidential biography will tell you that statesmanship requires occasional duplicity. If great foreign policy could be conducted Boy Scout-style — "I will never tell a lie" — foreign policy would be easy (and Jimmy Carter would be hailed as the American Bismarck). This isn't to say that the public's trust should be breached lightly, but there are other competing goods involved in any complex situation.

He's actually right on this. The old A Few Good Men cliché has a lot of merit to it: most people really can't handle the truth, and a great many seriously would rather not know. Everybody enjoys a nice steak or hamburger, but no one in their right mind would want to work in a slaughterhouse.

But that does not absolve citizens from their responsibility to pay attention, stay informed, keep their eyes on the civic ball, and basically try to live up that whole "do unto others" bit we hear so much about. Nobody expects people to be Simon-pure; that's impossible. So we give it another, more innocuous name -- "good faith". It's about making an honest effort to do the right thing, as best you can.

Forget absolute pure honesty for a second. Does anyone seriously believe that this administration went about all this in good faith? Right down to the timing of the marketing of this catastrophe beforehand, they conducted themselves in the utmost cynicism and treachery. They didn't want to roll out their new improved war product in August, so they waited until everyone got back from vacation, and made it an issue for the 2002 midterms, forcing a nervous and exhausted populace -- and their representatives -- in the tenuous position of supporting what they knew in their guts was cynical bullshit, in the futile hope of helping out their team.

The Bush Doctrine is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR's vision, it balances democracy, security and morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein's killing fields, his torture chambers for tots and democracy's tangible progress in the Middle East.

But this is a flat-out fucking lie. Iraq, while no longer the Stalinist terror state it was under Saddam, is not a democracy; it is an Iranian-influenced theocracy. Goldberg and the rest of the purple-finger brigade seem to think that the mere act of holding elections makes you a democracy. Well, Iran has elections; perhaps you heard about the one this past summer. Saddam had elections as well.

Second, the war and occupation have not contributed to our security or the security of the region; indeed, it has undermined it in several obvious ways. (In fact, several major conservabloggers at the time, most notably Steven den Beste, noted that destabilization of the region would be a feature, not a flaw.) It has drained our military and our treasury (but not the precious tax cuts, praise Jeebus). It has killed our credibility with the other 95% of the planet's inhabitants, many of whom are economically ascendant in our wake. And it has taken the focus away from getting the actual people who perpetrated and enabled 9/11.

As for morality -- well, this is actually rather nauseating, especially coming on the heels of yet more reports of the current regime operating their own torture chambers, as well as us (you know, the good guys) melting women and children with "Willy Pete".

And we knew damned well what Saddam was doing to his people back in the '80s, when he was still our son-of-a-bitch. Somehow we managed to put aside our high-handed morals 'n' ethics then, selling him chemicals after Halabja, sending Rummy and Bob Dole over to reassure him of our friendhsip, knowing about his penchant for torturing the children of his political enemies, knowing about the rape rooms and the torture chambers, knowing about the brutal insanity of his evil sons. Some of us, the Pantload might like to know, were pissed about it back then, too.

And if Goldberg wishes to get Simon-pure on that point, and get real about moral responsibility, then I'll be the first to step up and sing amen to that. But like the rest of his career of shameless, tendentious hackery, it's just for show.