Author: Jonathan Schwarz

So this is how interested Bush was in the Iraq Study Group report:

[Lawrence] Eagleburger said…that when the group met with Bush, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

The Iraq Study Group people shouldn’t take it personally, however. Bush apparently has never had any interest in Iraq. Here’s a passage from Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

On the afternoon of July 28 [2003], Tenet told [David] Kay he should sit in on the CIA’s daily morning briefing of the president the next day…

In the room with Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Tenet, Rice, Card and other aides…[Kay] couldn’t avoid the bottom line: He had found nothing. As for the trailers, he said they were probably not bioweapons labs, as the CIA had claimed.

Kay discerned no disappointment coming from Bush…the president seemed disengaged. “I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive,” Kay recalled. “He was interested but not posing any pressing questions.” Bush didn’t ask, Are you sure? He didn’t ask about the prospects of finding actual weapons. Or whether WMD had been hidden or spirited away.

It’s tempting to joke that Bush acts like this because there are no stupid questions, and thus he feels he shouldn’t ask any. But to be fair, there’s at least one subject that Bush really IS curious about:

Der Spiegel: With all your access to high-level sources, have you come across anyone who still thinks it is a good idea for the US to torture people?

Suskind: No. Most of the folks involved say that we made mistakes at the start. The president wants to keep all options open because he never wants his hands tied in any fashion…

Der Spiegel: So the average interrogator at a Black Site understands more about the mistakes made than the president?

Suskind: The president understands more about the mistakes than he lets on. He knows what the most-skilled interrogators know too. He gets briefed, and he was deeply involved in this process from the beginning. The president loves to talk to operators.

And:

“He was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was constantly asking folks inside of CIA, ‘What’s happening with interrogations? Are these techniques working? Can we trust what we get?’ The president … is involved — some people say too involved — in the granular day-to-day grit of this war on terror.”

Not only is the president of the United States an eight year-old, he’s an unpleasant eight year-old, the kind you’d want the guidance counselors to keep an eye on.

Be sure to go back and read the stupidest thing ever written, produced by the Weekly Standard on April 21, 2003 (via Mahablog). It’s their 1000-word sneer about all the soft-brained tree-hugging peacenik Saddam-lovers who’d claimed this wasn’t going to be The Most Fun War Ever. For instance, it quotes what it calls “the world community of jackasses” saying preposterous things like:

“[I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself”—Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002

Wow, how humiliating to have said that.

But while it’s always tempting to sneer back at the 23 year-old Dartmouth Review alumni who produced this rancid offalicious brawn, I’m getting tired of that. The problem isn’t the individual pinheads who produced this. As my friend Rob says, they grow these people in vats. Maybe you could shame these particular ninnies into foreswearing all forms of communication with others until the day they die. But who cares? Rupert Murdoch would just go to the vats in the back and pluck a few freshly-hatched cretins.

In other words, the real problem is the International Army Of Killer Billionaires who own our media. When their lackeys write things like this, it isn’t some kind of “mistake.” They’ll never be fired for being nimrods, because being nimrods is the job for which the Killer Billionaires hired them.

I have a prediction: if the U.S. ever deteriorates to the point where we’re rounding up Muslims in extermination camps, Victor Davis Hanson will criticize Americans who oppose this as “appeasers” who “haven’t learned the lesson of Munich.”

One thing always bugged me about that picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam: it was so fuzzy. Fortunately, better technology now allows us to see our leaders shaking hands with blood-spattered maniacs in fine-grained detail. E.g., Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq:

SEE ALSO: Robert Dreyfuss on “Bush’s Meeting with a Murderer”

Jumping off from the freaky Michael Richards explosion, Dennis Perrin cogitates on one of the most difficult comedic endeavors: Laughing At Or With Hate?

Racism exists and probably will always exist in some form because humans possess tribalistic minds. The various social divisions we tolerate and help to enforce take on different features, depending on the level of society and the immediate need for distinction. It can be institutional or personal, but we all do it, no matter how “good” our overall intentions. At best, we can water it down over time, as Martin Amis once put it in relation to his father and to his son. His father was more racist than he, and through exposure, experience and education, his son will hopefully be less racist than he, and so on down the generational line. And that’s just white people we’re talking about here.

…in a comedic context, there is ambiguity, especially if white performers and writers attempt to attack a racist word or set of beliefs. Are white comedians really trying to breakdown and expose hateful attitudes, or are they hiding behind the Rush/Coulter dodge?

The rest.