Driftglass makes a solid point about Rachel Maddow’s perturbation at the booking of Iraq warmongers on television to talk about the situation there as if they are experts.
…MSNBC shares several floors of a building with NBC.
And they cross-pollinate all the time.
If Dr. Maddow really wants to find out why the fuck “we” keep booking “people who were so, provably, terribly wrong” and “treat[ing] them like experts on the very subject they were wrong about” all she has to do — literally — is grab a video camera, walk down the hall and ask her colleague David Gregory or his bookers and producer why they do what they do.
Then air that footage.
And then we’ll all know.
It would be one thing if they invited the Bill Kristols and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world on in order to demand an explanation and perhaps some apologies, but to solicit their opinions on what to do in Iraq now?
After all the documented propaganda and lies? After all the poor prognosticating about every single little detail of what would happen if we invaded, how we’d be greeted, whether there would be sectarian fighting, whether it would put a damper on extremism, who would benefit in the region, how much it would cost, how long we’d have to stay, whether they had anything to do with 9/11, whether or not they had weapons of mass destruction, and so on?
It’s not that they can’t make interesting guests in kind of the way that Joseph Goebbels would have made an interesting guest had he not killed himself, his wife, and their six children.
“Welcome back to Hardball, Herr Goebbels. Seems like Poland and West Germany have hit kind of a rough patch. How do you think the chancellor should handle it?”
When you lie your country into a war that leads to utter catastrophe, you should lose your right to be treated as an expert on foreign affairs. That the Republican Party has no bench of substitute experts isn’t anybody’s fault but their own.
