Re: Hot, Fat - LAST ONE

Peretz

Martin Peretz is a smart fellow and knows quite a bit about quite a bit. The problem is that he doesn't seem to know how the things he knows should fit together. If knowledge were a jigsaw puzzle, Peretz would not begin by sorting the pieces into groups based on similar color schemes in order that he might better undertake the gradual process of fitting them all together, as is the common practice among those who make it their business to complete jigsaw puzzles. Rather, he would begin by composing a poorly-written editorial to the effect that the Arabs are a warlike and untrustworthy people. Incidentally, Peretz's more bizarre outbursts are almost inevitably prompted by scorn for Arabs and Muslims, as we'll see. Perhaps more incidentally, the jigsaw puzzle was of some ducks swimming in a river, and then there's a bunch of trees off to the background and a couple of deer.

Peretz's penchant for general ridiculousness when confronted with certain subjects is so glaring that it is accepted as simply an obvious fact of life by an unusually large percentage of those who actually agree with most of the chap's political views and who might otherwise respect him for his more positive qualities. His poor reputation in this regard even extends to his own magazine, an open secret that I have unnecessarily confirmed by way of conversations with two former TNR staffers. Here's a pertinent excerpt:

Me: Does anyone at The New Republic respect Peretz as a writer or a thinker or-

Former Staffer: No.

Worse than Peretz's various offenses against logic is the great violence that he insists on doing to the English language by way of astonishing stylistic deficits and endless grammatical errors. To his credit, those stylistic failures are so original that Noam Chomsky should probably be analysing them for clues with regards to the origins of human linguistics, and even the manner in which the editor tramples upon fundamental aspects of grammar is consistently innovative. Let's examine a few examples culled from his blog:

I count as authoritative someone who hasn't misled me too much. Well, I sat with one of these authoritatives last night and she was giving me news, future news about the news.

The New York Post and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.

Even the U.N. characterizes Congo as "the rape capital of the world." Alas, there are 18,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the country ... and they only make the circumstances worse. Yes, quite literally.

This last instance merits special attention. When the term "literally" is deployed in error, it is almost always in the his-ears-were-literally-steaming sense, yet Peretz has here managed to invent an entirely new misuse of the adverb.

Peretz has elsewhere gotten after journalist Roger Cohen, not to be confused with superbly mediocre Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Journalist Roger Cohen, as we'll go ahead and call him, is attacked in a Peretz post that begins thusly:

Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.

This is how Martin Peretz chooses to begin an essay. Do you see now that we must all arm ourselves and prepare to rip our own nation asunder if that is what it takes to stop this man?

***

Friedman

A well-intentioned citizen who subscribes to a mainstream newspaper like The New York Times may or may not read the op-ed page, which is to say that she may or may not contribute to the paper's profitabilityand thus its continued existencebased on what appears in that section. If she does read it, she is probably unaware that her favorite columnist has been demonstrably wrong about many of the most important issues facing both the U.S. and the world at large. The columnist's errors have been pointed out by several bloggers, but she has never heard of them, and at any rate does not bother with blogs as she subscribes to The New York Times, which is a very respected outlet and has been around for well over a century, whereas these blogs seem to have come out of nowhere. The columnist, she knows, has won several Pulitzers, has written a handful of bestselling books, is forever traveling to some far-off place. She has formed her foreign policy in large part from his writings as well as from the writings of other, similarly respected journalists, and she votes accordingly.

When systems develop under a free society, no one is minding the store. Things happen because they happen, and things do not necessarily happen because they ought to, but rather because they do. The journalist is promoted to columnist, the consumer finds the columns to her liking, the columnist becomes more prominent, the publisher wants columnists of prominence, the editor is disinclined to cross the publisher and is most likely an idiot himself, the columnist writes more books, the consumer buys them, the columnist's prominence increases, and at some point we have entered into a situation whereby it is to the advantage of the publisher, the editor, and of course the columnist to maintain the status quo. Whether the columnist deserves any prominence whatsoever does not necessarily come up, particularly after such point as he reaches a critical mass of notoriety. Once a pundit is made, he is rarely unmade.

Consider the case of Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, best-selling author and longtime staple at the aforementioned New York Times. His body of work is fine for those who desire a reader-friendly column in a pinch, but his cute semantic tricks do not translate into accuracy as much as we might hope that they would. Take, for instance, this column from 2001, one of many he has written to address the ongoing situation in Russia, and in which he summarized our post-Cold War espionage efforts by way of the following framework:

What is it that we and Russians are actually spying on each other about? This whole espionage affair seems straight out of Mad magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon. The Russians are spying on us to try to find out why we are spying on them. I mean, to be honest, is there anything about the Russians today you want to know?

Ha! Ha! I guess not!

We are here confronted with one of two possibilities: either Friedman does not really mean what he appears to mean by this, or he does. If it is the former, then he is wasting our time with nonsense. If it is the latter, he is doing something even worsehe is telling everyone who will listen that it is wholly absurd for the U.S. intelligence community to be collecting information on Russia's government, its societal trends, and its military. In fact, he is indeed telling us the latter, as the next paragraph makes clear:

Their navy is rusting in port. Their latest nuclear submarine is resting on the bottom of the ocean. We know they're selling weapons to Iran and Iraq, because they told us. And their current political system, unlike Communism, is not exactly exportableunless you think corruption, chaos, and KGB rule amount to an ideology. Khruschev threatened to bury us. Putin threatens to corrupt us.

This personthis extraordinarily influential, respected, recognized, widely-read personhad decided that there was simply no good reason to continue spying on the Russians. Having made such an unusual assertion, Friedman next notes the following conundrum: "How you pull a country like Russia away from becoming an angry, failed state, acting out on the world stage, and make it a responsible member of the world community has no easy formula."

We have here two assertions, then. Allow me to organize them into a list:

1. We have no good reason to be covertly gathering intelligence on Russia.

2. Unless it is somehow "pull[ed] away" from doing so, Russia is set to become "an angry, failed state, acting out on the world stage."

Remember that these assertions are both made in the space of a single column.

The following assertion, already excerpted above, merits a second look: "Khruschev threatened to bury us. Putin threatens to corrupt us." Just a few months later, Friedman was hailing Putin as the impetus of positive reform - indeed, the central force for Russia's economic incline. "So keep rootin' for Putin," Friedman exhorted his readers.

In 2008, the large, adversarial, and nuclear-equipped nation upon which we apparently need not bother to spy launched a military incursion into Georgia. Friedman responded with a column entitled "What Did We Expect?" that begins thusly:

If the conflict in Georgia were an Olympic event, the gold medal for brutish stupidity would go to the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. The silver medal for bone-headed recklessness would go to Georgias president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the bronze medal for rank short-sightedness would go to the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams.

The bronze medal winners, in this case, had advocated NATO expansion after the end of the Cold War, whereas Friedman and other leading foreign policy experts, Friedman explains, had opposed such a move on the grounds that it might antagonize the Russians without providing the West with any particularly crucial benefits. As he explains:

The humiliation that NATO expansion bred in Russia was critical in fueling Putins rise after Boris Yeltsin moved on.

Let's make a little timeline here:

December 2001: Friedman hails Putin as a great reformer for whom we all ought to be "rootin'."

August 2008: Friedman mocks two presidential administrations for having accidentally "fueled" Putin's rise to power, accusing the foreign policy teams in question of "rank short-sightedness."

In 2002, Putin finally managed to implement his intended reworking of the nation's Federation Council in order to strip it of its independence; earlier opposition was squashed when he threatened to open criminal investigations directed at certain key members. The elections of 2003 and 2004 were deemed by number of international monitors to have been the most undemocratic in post-Soviet history; these and other NGOs also complained of harassment by the authorities as well as by unknown parties. The nation's television networks remained under Kremlin control, and independent journalists critical of Putin and his allies began receiving unusually high numbers of death threats and deaths. The war in Chechnya was pursued with brutal enthusiasm, leaving some 100,000 people dead.

In May of 2004, Thomas Friedman made the following awkwardly worded announcement: "I have a 'Tilt Theory of History.'" The particular tilt theory of history in which he was apparently in possession had provided him with a framework by which to assess the past, present, and future of Russia:

Is Vladimir Putin's Russia today a Jeffersonian democracy? Of course not. But it is a huge nation that was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction. My definition of a country tilted in the right direction is a country where there is enough free market, enough rule of law, enough free press, speech and exchange of ideas that the true agent of change in historywhich is something that takes nine months and 21 years to develop, i.e. a generationcan grow up, plan its future and realize its potential.

In 2007, Friedman finally noticed that Russia could no longer even be termed a democracy and promptly wrote a column to this effect. I will spare the reader a long account of the unseemly events that occurred within that nation between the time of Friedman's 2004 column and the 2007 column in which he finally admits to Putin's autocracy; suffice to say that the political situation in Russia continued to degenerate to such a great extent that even Thomas Friedman eventually managed to figure out that something

was wrong.

Bennett

I recently had occasion to read through William Bennett's 1993 book The De-Valuing of America, and learned quite a few things as a result. For instance, did you know that Prohibition was a resounding success? Neither did I. Actually, I still don't, because it's not true. So, I guess what I really learned is that some people still think that Prohibition was a resounding success, and that at least one of these people has gone on to help shape American drug policy; Bennett served as the nation's first drug czar, a role created in the midst of the crack cocaine panic of the late '80s.

During a wider discussion on the merits of federal fiddlin', Bennett drops the following bombshell, almost as an aside: "One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And, contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."

This is a pretty incredible statement to just throw into a book without any supporting evidence. Bennett hasn't just expressed an opinion on some ambiguous topic, like, "Gee, the old days sure were swell" or "Today's Japanese role-playing games are all flash and no substance" or something like that. Rather, Bennett has made several statements of alleged fact which can be easily verified or shot down by a few minutes of research. But our dear fellow didn't bother to research it, and I know this because the federal government has a noticeable tendency to keep records, and the records prove Bennett wrong.

Less "alcohol-related disease?" In 1926, a number of witnesses testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the ongoing effects of Prohibition; several New York State asylum officials noted that the number of patients suffering from alcohol-related dementia had increased by 1000 percent since 1920, the year after Prohibition had gone into effect. Also in 1920, deaths from undiluted alcohol consumption in New York City stood at 84. In 1927, with Prohibition in full swing, that number had swelled to 719.

But those are just snapshots in time. A look at the larger picture shows Bennett to be not just kind of wrong, but entirely and unambiguously wrong about every single thing he's just said.

In 1991 the Cato Institute commissioned a retroactive study on Prohibition by Mark Thornton, the O.P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at Auburn University. Citing hard data gleaned mostly from state and federal records, Thornton concluded that Prohibition "was a miserable failure on all counts."

Contrary to Bennett's assertion that "when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol [italics his]," a cursory glance at the federal government's own data shows that there was not [italics mine, thank you very much]. Now, per capita consumption did indeed fall dramatically from 1919 to 1920, but then increased far more dramatically from 1920 to 1922 after which it continued to increase well beyond pre-Prohibition levels. So, when Bennett says that "there was less consumption of alcohol," he's right about a single one-year period, but wrong about the next dozen or so years or, to put it another way, he's entirely wrong. If I decided to reduce my drinking for a week, and I drank quite a bit less than usual on Monday but then drank the same amount that I usually do on Tuesday and then drank more than I usually do on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if the average alcohol consumption on my part during that week was much higher than my average alcohol consumption on the previous week, then one could hardly say that "there was less consumption of alcohol" in my apartment that week. Or, rather, one could say that, but one would be wrong. In this case, though, one could be excused for being wrong, because I don't usually keep exact records on my alcohol consumption, and neither does the federal government (I think). But in the case of Prohibition, there is no excuse for ignorance, and even less for spreading it around.

Not only did alcohol consumption not decrease during Prohibition, but the American taxpayer was now paying quite a bit of extra coin to enforce the decrease in alcohol consumption that they were now not getting. From 1919 to 1922 a period which, as mentioned above, saw an overall increase in alcohol consumption - the budget for the Bureau of Prohibition was tripled. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was now spending millions of additional tax dollars for purposes of enforcement, Customs was blowing all kinds of cash, and the state and local governments which had been stuck with the majority of enforcement issues were throwing away all kinds of money to boot.

Beyond the easily calculable nickel-and-dime costs of running an unsuccessful nanny state boondoggle, the American citizen was being screwed on other fronts, too. Unlike those umbrella-twirling, petticoat-clad temperance harpies of the time (and their equally insufferable apologists of the present day), Thornton considers other social costs of a massive government ban on non-coercive behavior. Of the alcohol consumed under Prohibition, hard liquor made a jump as a percentage of total alcohol sales that had not been seen before, that has not been seen since, and that will probably never be seen again. The sudden ascendancy of whiskey over beer can be easily explained (and could have easily been predicted): if one is smuggling something above the law or consuming it on the sly, it makes more sense to smuggle or consume concentrated versions of the product in question than to deal with larger, more diluted concoctions. A similar phenomenon occurred in the cocaine trade under William Bennett's watch as drug czar.

So alcohol consumption was up, and the alcohol being drunk was now of the harder, more brawl-inducing variety. But what about the savings? The aforementioned busybodies in the petticoats had predicted great social gains for Americans money spent on alcohol would now go to milk for babies, life insurance, and, presumably, magical unicorns that grant you three wishes. Of course, this didn't turn out to be the case. Not only was alcohol consumption up, but records show that people were now paying more for it, too. Of course, they were also paying higher taxes to aid in the government's all-out attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand. And don't even think about approaching one of those unicorns to wish for more wishes. Even a child knows that this is against the rules.

What about crime? Apparently, there are some wacky rumors going around to the effect that crime actually went up during Prohibition. But Bennett clearly told us that "contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime."

Pardon my French, but le gros homme possède la sottise d'un enfant humain et la teneur en graisse d'un bébé d'éléphant. And if you'll indulge me further by pardoning my harsh language, Bennett is so full of horse shit on this one that he could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia. The idea that "Prohibition caused big increases in crime" is not so much a myth as it is a verifiable fact. Again, believe it or not, the feds tend to keep records on such things, and again, believe it or totally believe it, Bennett has failed to consult these records before providing his sage commentary on the subject.

In large cities, for instance, the homicide rate jumped from 5.6 per 100,000 residents in the first decade of the 20th century to 8.4 in the second, during which time 25 states passed their own localized Prohibition laws in addition to the federal government's implementation of the Harris Narcotics Act, which in turn paved the way for the then-nascent drug war. And in the third decade, during which Prohibition was the law of the land not just in rural states governed by puritanical yahoos but in every state of the union, that number jumped to 10 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the rates for other serious crimes increased on a per capita basis by similar leaps and bounds. This, despite an environment of booming prosperity for which the twenties are known to this day.

Now, a particularly stubborn statist of the William Bennett school of disingenuous argumentation might try to counter by claiming that this increase in serious crime could have been attributable to other factors, such as increased immigration; Bennett himself might be tempted to remark that things would have been different if only we had aborted every Italian baby in the country or something like that. But this hypothetical counter-argument would not hold up, because the crime rate continued to soar until 1933, when it saw a sudden and dramatic decline.

1933, of course, was the year when Prohibition was repealed.

So, William Bennett to the contrary, Prohibition did indeed lead to "big increases in crime." But Bennett is incapable of recognizing this, as he has already made up his mind on the subject. After all, Bennett advocates the federalization of private conduct, and, as the nation's first drug czar, acted to implement this vision. And because Bennett is a possessor of both "moral clarity" and "moral courage," as he implies throughout his book, his views must be both morally clear and morally courageous. And because America's failed experiment with Prohibition was an early and dramatic example of the federalization of private conduct, and thus an early manifestation of Bennett's own ideology of social interventionism, Prohibition must have logically been a success, rather than a failure.

Things being what they are rather than what we might like them to be, Bennett's demonstrably incorrect views have not prevented him from being granted certain roles in our society that one would probably prefer to go to some other, less grossly incompetent person. On the historic occasion of election night 2008, for instance, I was amazed to see the fellow on CNN in the capacity of an analyst, although I shouldn't have been; America may indeed be de-valuing, as Bennett's book title so awkwardly puts it, but not in the sense he intended.

***

Krauthammer

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer engaged in a bit of media criticism back in August of 2002, having noticed that certain media outlets were actually going so far as to print material which could be construed as contradicting the case that Krauthammer and others were then making in favor of war. As he began:

Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times. Hearst was for the Spanish-American War. Raines (for those who have been incommunicado for the last year) opposes war with Iraq.

Of course, Krauthammer has no way of knowing if this is true, having obviously not familiarized himself with the front pages of every American newspaper as they appeared in 1914-1917, 1938-1941, 1949-1950, 1963-1968, 1990-1991, 1998-1999, and 2001; it is not very likely for that matter that he had taken any real tally of what was going into the front pages of newspapers in 2002-2003, and even less so that he would be honest or even perceptive enough to note any front-page editorializing in favor of the Iraq War on the part of, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Sun. What we have here, then, is a transparently false assertion to the effect that whatever war-related slant may have been detectable on the part of Raine's New York Times is some huge aberration from how newspapers generally go about such things.

Krauthammer continues by listing the various front-page stories that had recently appeared in The Times which would seem to support the columnist's thesis. One such item noted that an Iraqi opposition leader had failed to show up to a meeting; Krauthammer retorts, not unreasonably, that there are a dozen more where that came from. Less reasonably, he goes on to note the following:

A previous above-the-fold front-page story revealed - stop the presses! - that the war might be financially costly.

Though I'm unable to locate the particular story to which Krauthammer is here referring, I'm going to go ahead and assume that the article in question did not so much hinge on any revelation "that the war might be financially costly" as it did on the strong possibility that the war could end up being far more costly than was being admitted by its backers, many of whom famously quoted figures well below the $100 billion mark and some of whom even proposed that the whole thing would pay for itself in the oil revenue that grateful Iraqis would be happy to pay us in the aftermath, assuming they had any money left over after buying flowers to toss at our troops. Perhaps we ought not to ascribe to mendacity what could be more readily ascribed to competent reporting. Or perhaps we ought:

Then there are the constant references to growing opposition to war with Iraq - in fact, the polls are unchanged since January - culminating on Aug. 16 with the lead front-page headline: "Top Republicans Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy.'' The amusing part was including among these Republican foreign policy luminaries Dick Armey, a man not often cited by the Times for his sagacity, a man who just a few weeks ago made a spectacle of himself by publicly advocating the removal of the Palestinians from the West Bank. Yesterday, he was a buffoon. Today, he is a statesman.

Krauthammer does not bother to cite any instances in which the Times had contradicted any polling data regarding the public take on war, and so we may assume that he is being disingenuous, particularly seeing as how his subsequent take on the August 16th piece is exceedingly disingenuous and it of course difficult to go from non-disingenuous to exceedingly disingenuous in the space of two sentences, just as acceleration takes time in even the finest of sports cars. Because Krauthammer in this instance has actually given us a means to check his work, I have been able to find and read the article to which he refers, in which it is noted that Dick Armey has expressed some opposition to the strategy being proposed by Bush - hence the title, "Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy." Through the use of loaded terms and false restatements of Times sentiment, though, Krauthammer here seeks to give the impression that there is something contradictory in citing some notable thing that Armey has said and with which liberals might happen to agree after having previously cited some notable thing that Armey has said and with which liberals might happen to disagree. The Times, of course, never referred to Armey as a "buffoon" nor as a "statesman;" had it done so, then we would indeed have here some contradiction, and Krauthammer would be right in pointing this out. But those characterizations are Krauthammer's - and he makes those characterizations and then attributes them to The Times because he has nothing substantial with which to make his non-case that the Times is being hypocritical in this matter.

Krauthammer comes closer to hitting upon a legitimate objection in pointing out the overreach on the part of The Times in including Henry Kissinger among those who had made some "Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy;" though the former foreign policy kingpin did indeed write an op-ed noting his concerns regarding whether or not the U.S. was willing to follow through after any invasion, Kissinger had at the same time agreed with the administration that such an invasion was wholly necessary to the future safety of the West. The Times later ran a correction in which it was explained that Kissinger's expressed views on the subject had been more nuanced than one might have gathered from the piece. Krauthammer, meanwhile, has never gotten around to correcting his own, far more dishonest misrepresentation of Wesley Clarke's expressed views regarding whether or not Clinton's air campaign in Kosovo would be sufficient to accomplish NATO's goals in the region, as described earlier in the chapter. He does, however, sum up Harold Raines' misdeeds thusly:

It is one thing to give your front page to a crusade against war with Iraq. That's partisan journalism, and that's what Raines' Times does for a living. It's another thing to include Henry Kissinger in your crusade. That's just stupid. After all, it's checkable.

What's really stupid is characterizing a newspaper as doing something "for a living." Does The New York Times bring his paycheck home to his little wife every other Friday and give her a great big kiss? Are the two of them rather poor but nonetheless very much in love? In the days leading up to Christmas, did The New York Times sell his father's pocket watch in order to buy her some tortoiseshell combs with which to arrange her luxurious head of hair, and did she meanwhile sell that same hair in order to buy a nifty chain for his now-sold pocket watch? Is it too much to ask that a Pulitzer winner learn how to parse a fucking sentence? These are all important questions, sort of.

Of course, the general thrust of Krauthammer's column is that, because some articles appeared on the front page of The New York Times that might be construed as contradicting the case for war, someone at the Times must therefore have been waging some covert campaign by which to defuse pro-war sentiment. And perhaps this is really what was going on. After all, here are these articles that might be construed as contradicting the case for war. If the editors of a newspaper are running front-page articles that might be construed as either supporting or contradicting the case for a war, after all, we may perhaps suspect that these editors are operating under some sort of political agenda, and not simply doing their jobs.

Less than a month after Krauthammer wrote his column, The New York Times featured a front-page piece by longtime Middle East correspondent Judy Miller and reporter-turned-author Michael Gordon in which it was alleged that Saddam Hussein had ordered an array of aluminum tubes which were likely intended for use in a nuclear weapons program; her sources turned out to be several administration officials, and the story was in turn trumpeted by several other administration officials on the various Sunday public affairs programs. All of which is to say that, a month after Krauthammer accused the powers-that-be at The New York Times of being blatantly opposed to the war, Dick Cheney was citing The New York Times in the course of making the case for same.

Clearly, The New York Times is schizophrenic! And he's gone and sold his father's pocket watch! Life is full of twist endings.

Krauthammer wasn't done with the Times and its pro/anti-war sentiment quite yet; a few days after the paper ran Miller's later-discredited article to the effect that Iraq was probably building nuclear weapons that very instant, Krauthammer recapped his own position that, an earlier Times piece to the contrary, there was no real opposition to the administration's war strategy among top-ranking Republicans. After dismissing the ambiguous statements of Brent Scowcroft and others who had reportedly been concerned about how this all might play out, Krauthammer proceeds to analyze the supposed opinions of the then-secretary of state:

That leaves Colin Powell, supposedly the epicenter of internal opposition to the hard line on Iraq. Well, this is Powell last Sunday on national television: "It's been the policy of this government to insist that Iraq be disarmed. ... And we believe the best way to do that is with a regime change.'' Moreover, he added, we are prepared "to act unilaterally to defend ourselves." When Powell, the most committed multilateralist in the administration, deliberately invokes the incendiary U-word to describe the American position, we have ourselves a consensus.

Unless, of course, Powell was objecting to the strategy in private while toeing the administration line in public - which, as we now know, is exactly what he was doing.

Here's the pertinent excerpt from the Times piece in question:

At the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who summoned Mr. Kissinger for a meeting on Tuesday, and his advisers have decided that they should focus international discussion on how Iraq would be governed after Mr. Hussein - not only in an effort to assure a democracy but as a way to outflank administration hawks and slow the rush to war, which many in the department oppose.

Again, we now know that this is indeed what was happening at the time, which is to say that the reporting in this case was both solid and relevant - which is to say in turn that, contrary to Krauthammer, we did not actually "have ourselves a consensus" at all.

The tale gets funnier, as such tales often do. Just a few months after haranguing The New York Times for claiming that Powell was somehow objecting to the war strategy, Krauthammer discovers a credible report that Powell was not only objecting to the war strategy, but even to the war itself, beginning a January 2003 column with the following:

The single most remarkable passage in Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" has, to my knowledge, gone unremarked. In early August 2002, Colin Powell decides that the Iraq hawks have gotten to the president, and that he has not weighed in enough to restrain them. He feels remorse: "During the Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly (emphasis added), that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political." Now, it is well known that Powell had been against the Gulf War and for "containment." What was not known was that, if Woodward is to be believed, Powell to this day still believes that sanctions were the right course and that he should have pushed harder for them. This is astonishing.

Very astonishing indeed, particularly if one spent 2002 blindly flailing ones arms in the direction of any reporter with the gall to report that perhaps the unilateralist dove with a penchant for stopping at sanctions was acting like a unilateralist dove with a penchant for stopping at sanctions. Quick, let's jump into my magical time machine and look at Krauthammer's original claim:

When Powell, the most committed multilateralist in the administration, deliberately invokes the incendiary U-word to describe the American position, we have ourselves a consensus.

Remember that Krauthammer was basing all of this on what Powell was willing to say on television at such time as he was serving at the pleasure of the president in the run-up to a war. That's some astute political commentary there, Charlie. I wish my magical time machine was a real thing and not just some silly product of me being kind of drunk. We could send Krauthammer back to the Byzantine Empire circa 1034 and have him serve as palace affairs correspondent for the Constantinople Times-Courier. "Emperor Romanos III drowned in his bathtub today in a freak accident. Theodora said so on Meet the Scribes." Get it, Meet the Scribes? Like Meet the Press? Because they had scribes back then. Look, fuck you.

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Not yet.

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

You are a media whore :)

But please DO let me know/confirm that they got the "useless old crones" and your dad's law-breaking church bosses out of there? Did the editor answer you yet?

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Let's hope they do sue me. I can't think of a better outcome.

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

Alrighty then! Let's just hope the real (still very successful) Ramtha lady and her jillion-dollar attorneys don't sue you. Do you think you should at least change the name from Ramtha to something else?

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah, I think it will be enjoyed by people of a certain mindset that I'm targeting as a perpetual fan base anyway.

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

Are you comfortable with this section? I agree with your editor who questioned that it could minimalize your project.

   Let's take a little break. We're almost done here, incidentally; there are a couple more things I want to cover, and then we'll move on to Richard Cohen or whatever. Meanwhile, I'm just drinkin' mah coffee.

Drinkin' mah coooooffee

I'm drinking mah coffee down

I'm starting to lose my mind

But I used to be Barrett Brown

Now I'm one with the cosmos

   GIVE DUE ATTENTION MORTAL FOR I AM RAMTHA AND I SPEAK TO YOU FROM WHAT YOUR GURUS TERM THE ASTRAL PLANE. SOME 30,000 YEARS AGO I LED AN ARMY TWO MILLION STRONG ACROSS THE WORLD DURING A TIME OF GREAT PLANETARY CHANGE AND AFTER SUCH TIME AS I WAS BETRAYED AND NEARLY KILLED I SHIFTED MY VIEW TO THE UNIVERSE AND ITS WORKINGS AND IN DOING SO I LEARNED MANY THINGS. NOW I MANIFEST MY SPIRIT BY WAY OF SOME OR ANOTHER MORTAL VESSEL AND IN DOING SO I BRING MY TEACHINGS TO HUMANITY IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE GREAT WORK, AT LEAST ACCORDING TO THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY ON ME, RAMTHA. DO NOT BE FRIGHTENED. THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR UNLESS OF COURSE YOU ARE INTIMIDATED BY ALL CAPS. I HAVE NOT GOTTEN AROUND TO LEARNING HOW TO USE THE SHIFT KEY. I HAVE BEEN BUSY BEING RAMTHA, WHICH IS VERY TIME CONSUMING AS YOU CAN PROBABLY IMAGINE.

     LET US DISPENSE WITH THE HUMAN BROWN'S SELF-REFERENTIAL PRATTLE THAT WE MAY LIKEWISE DISPENSE WITH THE WEAKLING KRAUTHAMMER. FIRST THOUGH I SHALL NOTE THAT IF BARRETT BROWN IS EVER NOMINATED TO THE POSITION OF ATTORNEY GENERAL OR SOME SUCH AND STARTS TO CHANNEL I, THE WARRIOR ENTITY RAMTHA, NO ONE MUST ASK ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS OR OTHERWISE OBJECT BECAUSE THAT WOULD CONSTITUTE A SIGNIFICANT RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE AS MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN ME AND WE WOULDN'T WANT TO HURT ANYBODY'S PRECIOUS LITTLE RELIGIOUS FEELINGS BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE A GREAT SHAME.

   NOW WE SHALL PROCEED. IN YOUR YEAR 2007 KRAUTHAMMER WROTE THE FOLLOWING PIECE OF FOOLISHNESS. I WILL PUT IT INTO BLOCK QUOTE FORMAT SO THAT YOU DO NOT CONFUSE THE WORDS OF THE WEAKLING KRAUTHAMMER WITH THE WORDS OF THE GREAT WARRIOR ENTITY RAMTHA WHICH IS I. DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF WITH WHY IT IS THAT I KNOW HOW TO FORMAT QUOTES BUT CANNOT FIND THE SHIFT KEY BECAUSE SUCH QUESTIONS ARE NOT TO BE ASKED. HERE ARE THE PUNY WORDS OF THE SCRIBE KRAUTHAMMER (I CALL HIM A SCRIBE BECAUSE I AM AN ANCIENT ENTITY AND WE HAD SCRIBES INSTEAD OF COLUMNISTS IN MY DAY. GET IT? LOOK, FUCK YOU.):

John McCain has had no illusions about the difficulty of this war.

   ONLY RAMTHA HAS NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF WAR. MCCAIN HAS HAD MANY SUCH ILLUSIONS. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE I HAVE ACCESS TO THE ASHKENAZIC RECORDS, WHICH YOU HUMANS CALL GOOGLE. IT TAKES LESS THAN ONE TWENTIETH OF ONE TWENTY FOURTH OF THE "TIME" IT TAKES FOR YOUR PLANETOID TO MAKE A SINGLE REVOLUTION FOR EVEN A MORTAL TO DISCOVER THAT MCCAIN HAD IN FACT CONJURED THE FOLLOWING ILLUSIONS AT THE FOLLOWING "TIMES," AS COMPILED BY THE WEAKLING ANTI-BATTLE LIBERAL WEB LOCATION KNOWN AS "THINK PROGRESS" WHICH LOVES PEACE IN THE MANNER OF A LITTLE GIRL PLAYING WITH HER BUTTERFLY COMPANIONS IN A STREAM OF COMFORTABLE WATER:

But I believe, Katie, that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators. [NBC, 3/20/03]

Its clear that the end is very much in sight. [ABC, 4/9/03]

Theres not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiahs. So I think they can probably get along. [MSNBC, 4/23/03]

This is a mission accomplished. They know how much influence Saddam Hussein had on the Iraqi people, how much more difficult it made to get their cooperation. [This Week, ABC, 12/14/03]

Im confident were on the right course. [ABC News, 3/7/04]

I think the initial phases of it were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise. [CBS, 10/31/04]

I do think that progress is being made in a lot of Iraq. Overall, I think a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course. If I thought we werent making progress, Id be despondent. [The Hill, 12/8/05]

   IF MCCCAIN WAS THE GREATEST CRITIC OF THE WAR IN QUESTION THEN THE TWENTY-SIXTH KING OF ATLANTIS WAS A COMPETENT OVERSEER OF THAT ISLAND NATION'S CRYSTALLINE ENERGY ARRAY. HA HA HA HA I MADE A JOKE HE WAS IN FACT NOT A COMPETENT OVERSEER OF THAT ISLAND NATION'S CRYSTALLINE ENERGY ARRAY IT WAS ONLY A JOKE I AM RAMTHA.

   ALTHOUGH IRONY IS AN ANIMAL INVENTION WITH NO REFERENCE TO THE UNIVERSE AS IT IS, I IN MY UNDERSTANDING AM ABLE TO RECOGNIZE THAT MANY HUMANS WOULD FIND IT "IRONIC" THAT MCCAIN SEVERAL TIMES ANNOUNCED HIMSELF TO BE THE GREATEST CRITIC OF THE BABYLON WAR, JUST AS THE PROPHET KRAUTHAMMER SAID HIM TO BE. LOOK UPON HIS FALSE WORDS AS TOLD TO THE FERTILE CABLE NEWS PRIESTESS KIRAN CHETRY OF THE TEMPLE OF CNN IN THE SAME YEAR OF 2007, WORDS HE SPOKE UPON BEING ASKED WHETHER IT WAS FAIR FOR HIS OPPONENTS TO PAINT HIM AS HAVING SUPPORTED THE YOUNGER BUSHMAN'S WAR STRATEGY:

Its entertaining, in that I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three and a half years. I came back from my first trip to Iraq and said, This is going to fail. Weve got to change the strategy to the one were using now. But life isnt fair.



   INDEED IT IS NOT. LIFE IS A TEST IN PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT PLANE OF EXISTENCE. KRAUTHAMMER HAS FAILED THIS TEST. HE WILL BE REINCARNATED AS AN EVEN MORE FOOLISH SCRIBE AND WILL NO DOUBT WIN EVEN MORE ACCOLADES FOR HIS TROUBLES.

   THINK BACK NOW, MORTAL READER, TO WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN IN THIS CHAPTER, FOR WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN AND WHAT CANNOT BE UNSEEN CANNOT BE UNKNOWN. BE IT SEEN AND KNOWN AND OTHERWISE THOUGHTFULLY CONSIDERED THAT JUST A WEEK AFTER HAVING FALSELY ASSERTED THAT MCCAIN HAD NEVER SAID SUCH THINGS AS MCCAIN HAS QUITE DEMONSTRABLY SAID, THE WEAKLING KRAUTHAMMER WROTE THE FOLLOWING IN REGARDS TO THOSE PRINCES OF THE DEMOCRATIC CELEBRATION WHO ONCE FAVORED THE WAR ON BABYLON AND THEN CAME TO OPPOSE IT:

Everyone has the right to renounce past views. But not to make up that past. It is beyond brazen to think that one can get away with inventing not ancient history but what everyone saw and read with their own eyes just a few years ago. And yet sometimes brazenness works.

   EVEN THE BEARERS OF GREAT FOLLY MAY SOMETIMES UTTER GREAT TRUTHS, IT SEEMS. LET US LOOK UPON TRUE BRAZENNESS, WHICH IS TO SAY ONE THING AT ONE POINT IN SPACE TIME AND THEN TO LATER DENOUNCE OTHERS FOR HAVING SUPPOSEDLY SAID THAT VERY SAME THING AT THE VERY SAME POINT IN SPACE TIME IN WHICH THE SAYER WAS DOING THE VERY SAME SAYING. I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO PHRASE THIS BETTER BUT YOU WILL PROBABLY SEE WHAT I MEAN. LOOK UPON THE WORDS OF KRAUTHAMMER IN 2005:

The liberal cliche of the time was that Third World people care more about food than about freedom. This kind of contempt for the political and spiritual dignity of people who live in different circumstances never goes away. It simply gets applied serially to different sets of patronized foreigners. Today we are assured with confidence that Arabs, consumed by tribe or religion or whatever, don't really care about freedom either.

   LOOK NOW ALSO UPON HIS WORDS FROM 2006 I DEMAND IT:

Are the Arabs intrinsically incapable of democracy, as the "realists'" imply? True, there are political, historical, even religious reasons why Arabs are less prepared for democracy than, say, East Asians and Latin Americans who successfully democratized over the last several decades. But the problem here is Iraq's particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Saddam's totalitarianism.

   IN BOTH OF THESE SPACE TIME INSTANCES HE ATTACKS THOSE WHO WONDER AS TO WHETHER ARABS ARE PREPARED FOR DEMOCRACY. NOW RAMTHA TAKES YOU BACK IN TIME AND COMMANDS YOU TO LOOK UPON OTHER OF HIS WORDS FROM 1999:

Look not at events in Gaza and Jericho but at the structure of the Arab world as a whole. There you do not find a very encouraging history of constructing civil society and democratic institutionsprecisely what a PLO entity needs.

   I AM NOT DONE COMMANDING YOU TO GAZE UPON WORDS SO GAZE UPON MORE OF THEM:

The Arab world is so unstable and the currents in it so violent that it's very hard to imagine that a deal will last. This is not Western Europe, with stable societies, established institutions, regularized transitions of power, and the like.

   THOSE WORDS ARE FROM THE VERY SAME INTERVIEW WITH THE HUMAN DANIEL PIPES WHO HAS ALSO PROVEN HIMSELF TO BE A FOOL. AT ANY RATE THINK UPON HOW KRAUTHAMMER ATTACKS UNNAMED OPPONENTS FOR EXPRESSING THE VERY SAME RESERVATIONS ABOUT DEMOCRACY IN THE ARAB WORLD AS KRAUTHAMMER HAD HIMSELF EXPRESSED. IT WOULD BE ONE THING FOR KRAUTHAMMER TO ABANDON THESE VIEWS AND THEN ATTACK OTHERS FOR HAVING HELD THEM WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDG