Memo
to Chuck and George; Looking serious, sounding serious is not being
serious.
On
Fox News Special, they pooh pooh Donaldo calling him a rodeo clown.
Yah know, I've always thought the guy was at least giving that
appearance. Was he crazy like a fox, using a garish style to attain
goals?
I
think he's phony. I remember hearing his commercials about how he,
along with some guy who I think was named Kiyosaki, was going to
teach me to be rich in some seminar or something. If I were a
billionaire, the last way I'd spend my time would be going around the
country, staying in motels, giving courses on how to be as rich as
himself.
That
said, our goofy friend is saying things directly that so called
serious people merely dance around. We have no southern border and
your man has noticed. That strongest field, as Krauthammer put it,
is mute.
As
to being the jester at the horse competition, one might point out,
this is not the first rodeo for either Willie or the Krautster. Both
lads were all for going into Iraq. Georgie was sure the reign of
heaven would descend and said so in
an October 8, 2002 interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose:
I think the answer is that we believe, with reason, that democracy’s infectious. We’ve seen it. We saw it happen in Eastern Europe. It’s just — people reached a critical mass of mendacity under those regimes of the East block, and it exploded. And I do believe that you will see [in the Middle East] a ripple effect, a happy domino effect, if you will, of democracy knocking over these medieval tyrannies . . . Condoleezza Rice is quite right. She says there is an enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy. And there’s an enormous ahistorical error when people say, “Well, we can’t go into war with Iraq until we know what postwar Iraq’s going to look like.” In 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, did we have a clear idea what we were going to do with postwar Germany? With postwar Japan? Of course not. We made it up as we went along, and we did a very good job. . . .
Kind
of the crazy talk that would make a real professional clown like
Emmet Kelley blush. Of course, wisely, EK never spoke.
Charlie
was equally voluble and wrong about Iraq. He never admitted he was
wrong, but changed the justification he claimed for the war.
DeTocqueville
observed that democracy separated the generations. In our era, not
only are the generations separate, but we are different minute to
minute, if not second to second. The two pundits' words of a war ago
are as distant as Rome's invasion of Britain. By the time you read
this, there recent words will be forgotten by most and they will go
on to speaking fees and other emoluments.
Krauthammer
has not always felt so badly about Mr. Hair. His feelings about
Trump evolve as he saw some dignity in the man once,
Krauthammer took a phone call from Donald Trump in April of 2011 and somehow came away with the impression that Trump was going to make a genuine run for the White House. Krauthammer’s reasoning was this: “But as a person, I thought more highly of him … because of the gracious way and the calm and courteous way he discussed the issues.”
At
least Will has learned something as he wrote in a column:
The last 11 years have been filled with hard learning. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history, coincided with mission creep (“nation building”) in Afghanistan. Both strengthened what can be called the Republicans’ John Quincy Adams faction: America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
What
is lacking, as far as we can find, is the owning up that he himself has had to learn
something. No admission of error.
It
does boggle the mind that these men continue to be taken seriously.
At least they should be made to wear greasepaint makeup and big red
noses as they bloviate on whatever outlet puts them on.
The
Atlantic's Peter Beinart, who supported the Iraq war and honestly
admits the error put it nicely,
To a degree that will baffle historians, the political-intellectual complex that made the Iraq War possible remains intact, and powerful. Amnesia is part of the reason why. If Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Benjamin Netanyahu knew that before denouncing the Iran deal they’d be required to account for their views on Iraq, they might not show up in the green room. If they did, their television appearances would take a radically different course from the course they generally take today.
We
all know the accounting will not take place.
Ah
well, On to Teheran.
