Tit for Tat
I didn’t realize the Wall Street Journal was notable for its sense of humor, but Duffy just sent me a piece that appeared last Friday by James Taranto that had me rolling on the floor laughing for a good five minutes. Entitled “Tit for Tat,” it runs down the various misjudgments and errors propounded by Iraq war critics and finishes up with this howler:
It's possible that this was all just a massive failure of intelligence, but we can't help suspecting that war opponents knew better and deliberately misled the public in an effort to establish a pretext for keeping a mass-murdering dictator in power. In either case, they now face a yawning credibility gap. The American people deserve nothing less than a full congressional investigation into the false claims of antiwar politicians, scholars, journalists and activists. If they lied to us about Iraq, how can we ever trust them to talk us out of future wars?
Isn’t that a barrel of laughs? In the style of the great Elton Beard of Busy, Busy, Busy, let’s summarize:
- Because the war critics weren’t right about everything, they must have been wrong about everything (because, they’re, like, always wrong about everything)
- It’s really easy to accuse people of lying, so therefore we shouldn’t accuse anyone of lying, even when it looks like they really are.
- We can pretend to write in the style of war critics and sound like idiots, so therefore they must also be idiots.
Well, gosh, you caught me, Taranto. Every morning when I read through my daily CIA briefing, I pick out the few tidbits that suit my prejudices and send orders to my military chiefs to cook up some more evidence to support my views. Then I send my press secretary out to lie through his teeth at the daily briefing and make threatening phone calls to the editors of any reporters who ask embarrassing questions. After a quick lunch, I go out to the Rose Garden and stand in front of a big American flag and call the UN a bunch of wimps and losers, before wrapping up with a series of closed-door meetings with foreign dignitaries who I bully into line by threatening economic or military reprisals.
Because, after all, as a regular citizen expressing a dissenting opinion, I have access to all the vast, tax-funded apparatus of the government to give my views the same credibility and authority as the President of the United States. And just like him, when I bend the facts or exaggerate a point, it impacts the credibility of the entire nation. I guess, as Ari Fleicher once said, we all have to watch what we say.
It’s amazing after the shameless display these people made to get their grubby little hands on the government in 2001 in spite of the election results, they seem less than enthusiastic about embracing the responsibility and accountability that comes with it.
The President and his people clearly lied about the urgency of going to war. They bluffed about having secret information, they deliberately propounded confusion about connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, they made public every unsubstantiated shred of incriminating information about the Iraqi regime, and scared the daylights out of people with stories about alleged (and utterly bogus) Iraqi nuclear weapons. This is a matter of indisputable public record.
Well, they got their war. Saddam is gone (although we're not sure where), the Iraqi people are arming for civil war, American troops are sitting ducks in a seething cauldron of fanaticism, and we are unwelcome occupiers, hated by our enemies and distrusted by our allies. The honor and intentions of the United States are being questioned as never before in our history, and all Americans are tarred by the shameful lies told in our name. Our democracy has become an aggressive conqueror, reduced to cooking up shabby excuses for toppling weak regimes just to make ourselves feel better (and to distract the masses while our leaders plunder the public treasury).
And – here’s the funny part – who do the “patriots” on the Right blame for this atrocious state of affairs? The critics, of course! That Wall Street Journal – what a barrel of laughs!
Update: Welcome opinionjournal.com readers sent here through the good offices of my new best pal and buddy James Taranto. Thanks, James! Want more red meat? Here's some...
3:24:39 PM 
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