During the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.

The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.

A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.

Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:

“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.

“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.

Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)

The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.

Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”

THE EXCERPT is from “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, my new WND.COM column, now (Sept. 12) on Taki’s:

“Given the perpetual parade of ‘intellectuals’ who are not intelligent in our media — Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS and the ‘parrot press’ — I don’t expect you to be familiar with political philosopher Paul E. Gottfried. Nevertheless, Paul (he’s a friend) is one of the most important intellectuals in America.”

“Historian Eugene Genovese calls Paul incorruptible, ‘an American intellectual of superior talent.’ Author and historian John Lukacs praises Professor Gottfried as ‘a very profound thinker.’ And L. Brent Bozell III salutes his ‘amazing intellectual courage’ — courage in the face of the malign, philistine forces of the liberal and neoconservative mainstream.”

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Professor Gottfried pursuant to the publication of his many books. I do so again on the occasion of the publication of “Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.”

READ THE interview, “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, now on WND.COM. And on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update I (Sept. 11): Please note that the always-genial and brutally candid Paul Gottfried has replied to his detractors in the Comments Section. Some of the critics have been quite harsh (and this forum is moderated).

Update II: Randy, the war on Iraq is not going to be adjudicated again here, not ever. I chronicled the invasion of Iraq at great length, applying fact and every ounce of reason in my possession to repudiate and denounce that war crime. The case is closed! Neoconservative ideologues stand in the dock for aiding and abetting a war crime. Any reader is welcome to read my article archive on the topic (search the blog archives too). I can well imagine that many ideologues who supported the war urgently need to make peace with their maker, or consciences, for their role in a crime of such moral and material magnitude.

Update III (Sept. 12): Hayim, one doesn’t have to endorse everything Paul Gottfried writes or espouses to appreciate his contribution and steadfast principles. As someone who is ostracized by even more factions than Paul, I recognize the strength of character it takes to resist group pressure to conform and compromise one’s notion of right and wrong.

As to the article you cited, and which I skimmed: I have quoted Dershowitz on Israel and find his commentary worthwhile. I do not appreciate the dichotomy—or hypocrisy—the likes of Dershowitz evince in that they are hard-core rightists when it comes to Israel’s right to preserve its ethnic identity. But anyone arguing that the preservation of the historical America is essential to the preservation of freedom itself is a racist in Dershowitz’ books. That aspect of the Jewish Diaspora sickens me. Israelis are nothing like these American Jews.

In “Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians,” I expressed exactly what I thought of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Norman Finkelstein I include among “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants. Noam Chomsky (‘The Godfather’), Steven and Hillary Rose … Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.”

Where I agree with Paul is in his assertion that there is among the anointed Jewish leadership a crass abuse of “the Holocaust for propagandistic purposes.” No doubt about it. And it’s repulsive. To the extend Finkelstein exposes this, to that extent he makes a valid point. The Holocaust industry makes even me turn away from a catastrophe that has truncated my own family tree.

I also find the premise of the Daniel Goldhagen book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, appalling.

I think that on the whole Joan Peterson’s book is pretty good. If there are a few factual problems—and I don’t know that there are—they serve in this context as a fig leaf for those who would deny the central truth about the Jewish settlement of Israel:

“The territory within which the State of Israel was established did not form part of any larger state that opposed its creation. The territory was, moreover, one where Jews formed a majority on land they had purchased legitimately.”

Unanimously, this Jewish majority issued a declaration of independence promising that ‘the State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants,’ not for the benefit of mankind. They promised that the country would ‘be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel”; that it would ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,’ and ‘safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”

It is a joke to claim, as the anti-Israel right does, that Israel doesn’t respect the rights of all its inhabitants, Arabs included. Let the Raimondos of this world—hopefully there is only one of his kind—go live/or vacation in the Palestinian Authority.

Above all, it is undeniable that Arabs had trashed the Holy Land throughout their occupation of the place. It took Jews to dry the swamps—they died in droves of malaria doing so—to plant orchards, start industries, and generally build from a howling wilderness a prosperous country.

You won’t find me lamenting that wonderful achievement.

After visiting South Africa, Eli Kedourie, “noted student of nationalism,” wrote in the South Africa International:

“If majority and minority are perpetual, then government ceases to have a mediatory or remedial function, and becomes an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by the majority. … The worst effects of the tyranny of the majority are seen when parliamentary government on the unalloyed Westminster model is introduced into countries divided by religion or language or race. Such for example was the case of Iraq … where an extremely heterogeneous society came to be endowed with constitutions which made no provision for diversity, and where the result was tyranny of one groups over the other groups in the society.”

Kedourie was not the only sensible scholar who pointed out the obvious. But that’s history—South Africa is history.

Why are such voices not heeded today? America’s make-up is changing. Through mass immigration, it too is moving toward becoming a racially and ethnically stratified country, in which democracy will be ever ruthlessly wielded as a weapon of the usurping majority. Yet the din for democracy grows among the conservative and neoconservative cadre.

From “Exporting Democracy”:

Political democracy on the other hand, is a “leftist” idea. Why? Because it inevitably leads to a massive consolidation of power, centralized especially in the national government.

Democracy, like leftism, is un-American. It is, in fact, a foreign pollutant that wafted over the Atlantic from the French Revolution. And like a wild weed, it took root in the republic’s soil, growing out of control.

Update I (July 2): The post addresses a specific aspect that makes democratic mass-society unworkable. The premise of Mr. Kraus, hereunder, is that all cultures are equally prone to the principles of the Enlightenment. Nothing a little show of Western pride won’t fix. I vehemently disagree. The historical population of America is becoming progressively more ignorant of the principles of freedom by the day. But dissolving the American people and electing another—which is what America’s centrally planned immigration policy aims at—will ensure freedom is never revived, as immigration policies privilege Third World immigrants. Please refer to my immigration archive. Democracy, for what it’s worth, works in small, relatively homogeneous societies, like Denmark (although that country too is becoming too riven by religious and racial strife to work).

Update II: Mr. Kraus, there is nothing “unorganized” about the “multicultural noise machine.” Identity politics is highly organized and emasculating. If the latest affirmative action case tells you anything it is that by nature, the Anglo-American WASP tends to go quietly into that good night. He is expected to so do. (In fact, others of their ilk on this blog have reprimanded Ricci for daring to seek redress, instead of doing what WASPS do; hunker down and get used to losing.)
Empires have been decimated by the barbarians from within and without. You can’t do much about your own barbarians, except try and educate them. But why import more?

GI JOE AND GI HO ARE BACK IN THE NEWS. “Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

The images are among photographs included in a 2004 report into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison conducted by U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba.

Taguba included allegations of rape and sexual abuse in his report, and on Wednesday he confirmed to the Daily Telegraph that images supporting those allegations were also in the file.

‘These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency,’ Taguba, who retired in January 2007, was quoted as saying in the paper.”

[SNIP]

Yes, and as I chronicled, the story of “Redacted,” dramatized by De Palma, was all true too.