Credit where credit is due: at last a Republican conservative hack propagandist journalist is not running away from Dubya’s war record. On the contrary, Eric Bolling seems positively smitten with Bush’s presidency because … Mission Accomplished!
Commenting on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, Fox News host Eric Bolling claimed invading the country was former President George W. Bush’s most intelligent move.
I mean, what better means were available for Dubya to throw trillions of dollars down a rathole, kill hundreds of thousands of people, re-introduce the tactical use of chemical weapons by the US Military to the battlefield, refuse to raise taxes to pay for a war thus metastasizing the federal deficit, outing a covert CIA operative because her husband said the stated reason for the war was bullshit, and raising the stock value of Halliburton, his Vice President’s former company?
Who cares if casus belli for the Iraq War was all based on lies? Who cares if it strengthened Iran and destabilized Iraq and the rest of the Mideast for years to come? It was absolutely effing awesome!
Just ask Eric Bolling, Bush’s newest Iraq War cheerleader.
Why I hate anniversaries and need to avoid listening to all that bulls**t again!
After US invasion and occupation of Iraq: Wednesday March 20, 2013:
My recent diary – Empire Wash-out: Iraq War a Catastrophe in the Making.
I think I need to step away from the news for a few days. I am just steaming mad when I think about it.
But Saddam tried to assassinate his Daddy. so…no biggie.
After the anger I’m moving into more of a ‘how’s that shovelling going on that hole of yours?’ mood.
Rummy’s Twitter blew up when he tried the same thing. Polling has told us that Americans wanted out of Iraq; that we didn’t felt the war was worth it; that there were no WMD’s; that Bush’s admin was at fault for the economy imploding.
So where’s the advantage of playing to the Deniers when you’re trying to get your ratings back up to pre election size? Where’s the effort to be taken credibily? To listen to the next generation of Rep leaders who are trying to undig their way out of Bush and Cheney?
So while Fox is polishing their coverups and their #’s are dropping, MSNBC is running HUBRIS on Friday night. Oh, and congrats to Steve Kornacki for getting the UP gig on weekends. I hear MSNBC’s #’s are moving up.
I’m an immigration lawyer who frequently represents asylum claimants and torture victims. This morning while driving to immigration court I had the nauseating experience of listening to an NPR “Morning Edition” interview of Neocon Richard Perle, now “a fellow [wingnut welfare recipient] at the American Enterprise Institute.”
Pearle’s defense of the indefensible was brazen. According to him, ALL the intelligence reports indicated that Saddam had WMD (at least the chem-bio kind, no Condi-mushroom clouds on this guy’s event horizon). I mean, “who knew” it was all a lie?
Further, according to Pearle, we had almost no choice in invading Iraq because, having been attacked by WMD once [sic, yeah he actually said that, I guess airplanes are the same as A-bombs to him) we had to look at the possibility that Iraq “could have used them against us.” Thus, it was somehow necessary for us to launch a preemptive war without a scintilla of evidence that an actual threat of such attack by Iraq existed.
The “reporter” left these logical flaws unchallenged. Instead she asked “what the Administration’s biggest blunder in the war was.” To Pearle, it was that we allowed the invasion to become “an occupation.” So, I guess, we should have invaded, killed Saddam, totally wrecked the country and its infrastructure and political institutions, and then just pulled out, “Mission Accomplished.” Where oh where was Ahmed Chalabi when Merika needed him?
Of course, Chalabi went unmentioned, so we were left with Pearle’s apparent excuse that, when it comes to America, if you break it you don’t have to buy it, or love-means-never-having-to-say-you’re-sorry, or whatever.
I was disgusted when the NPR reported also let that steaming pile just sit there without comment.
Did someone once say the NPR was “liberal.” Hell, it sounded like Fox News to me. The Neocons have learned nothing since the Invasion, and neither has the media.
Ah yes, the supposedly unanimous intelligence reports of Saddam’s “WMDs” (which related to imagined chemical weapons, never nuclear–also never explained). Interesting how all those intelligence appraisals were continued to be seen as infallible even when Blix’s UN weapons inspectors found nothing in “suspected” site after suspected site in Iraq. And that Cheney precipitously ordered the weapons inspectors out as their daily finding of nothing, nowhere became ever more embarrassing…
But I’m sure Perle would have something to say about all this as well, dissembling is his stock in trade and pays the mortgage(s). The question is why our esteemed national public radio producers decided a woefully incorrect neo-con ringleader was the proper person to explain how things went wrong. And I’ll bet there was no other guest to challenge Perle, because we certainly know the “reporter” on hand doesn’t consider it her “job” to push back on the Great Expert. Unseemly.
Seems to be a series in honor of the ten year anniversary of the multi-trillion dollar war. A daily platform for the neo-cons that average Americans have never heard of to repeat all the Bush/Cheney lies and pretend that back in 2002-03 they were unquestioned facts. Next week NPR will highlight someone from the BushI administration repeating that Iraq soldiers were tossing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators. After that, they can host Kissinger to repeat all the lies of the Nixon administration’s case for escalating the Vietnam War.
Yes, that interview was nauseating but the message wasn’t different from the one with Stephen Hadley on NPR a couple of days ago. But as euzoius notes below, the neocons are now engaged in shaping/controlling the long-term narrative about the Iraq debacle. They aren’t talking to you or me but those that once supported the war and later soured on it and those too young to have consciously lived through it. Telling them that they weren’t wrong; that their support allowed this country to do the right thing in real time and it’s only subsequent events or time that has changed the perspective. Given their remarkable success in rewriting the Vietnam War (Gulf War I with its 90% approval rating was about killing off the “Vietnam Syndrome} and the general propensity for violence as a solution in the US, I’d say their chances to succeed this time are good.
Of course it makes the blood boil, but remember that all rightwing authoritarian movements engage in massive revisionism to conceal their catastrophic past failures. Thus, the Hitler movement pushed the lie that the Kaiser’s infallible imperial sturmtruppen were “stabbed in the back” by “impure” elements in the Reich. And that Imperial Germany, by invading Belgium and France without cause and wreaking unprecedented mass destruction, was “really” engaged in a “defensive” war. That Imperial Germany was really the “victim” of the war. (Victimology is also a common element of rightwing nationalist movements)
Thus American “conservatives” successfully portrayed the Civil War as “really” being about (nobly) protecting “states rights” (certainly not preserving slavery! Heaven forbid!) And we have a long history of American rightwing efforts arguing that our Vietnam debacle was “absolutely” winnable if traitorous lib’ruls hadn’t tied the grunts hands (our rightwing version of the stab in the back) and that that absurd war was absolutely necessary to the nation’s “security”. Our illegal Iraq invasion is now being placed in that category of falsehood. Every war effort is and was noble and grand and virtuous to “conservatives”.
War is always the answer for authoritarian nationalist movements and the American “conservative” movement without question consists of this repulsive sewage. Their quasi-fascist movement has a lot of work to do to propagandize the American boob into “understanding” that Cheney’s War of Oil Aggression was really a great success. Now that memories are fading, revisionism will be the order of the day for our vile Neo-cons and other militarist “conservatives”, with the complicit corporate media enabling each and every new version of their Great Iraq Lie. It’s now everywhere on display.
“…invading the country was former President George W. Bush’s most intelligent move.”
Bolling may actually be right…the bar is set pretty low…
I was going to make a similar comment. I like yours, mostly because it is accurate.