Author: Jonathan Schwarz

What does Thomas Jefferson have to say about the Kos & David Brooks & Newsweek & Jason Zengerle brouhaha? Let’s ask him:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, tho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests.

In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object. The last appellation of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

That’s all there is to say about this. The people who own the New Republic, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Democratic National Committee are Jefferson’s Aristocrats. They fear and distrust regular people. So they’ll attack anything that allows regular people to organize themselves and have some voice in how things are run.

That can be unions, or DailyKos, or the AARP, or in 2397 A.D. the Association of Alpha Centauri Moisture Farmers. It doesn’t matter. The important thing, from their perspective, is to destroy anything that allows regular people to talk to each other, discover their common interests, and act. In this particular case, the Aristocrats will not stop trying to destroy the blogosphere until (1) they succeed or (2) they or the blogosphere switch parties.

As you may have seen, Noam Chomsky was recently invited to speak to a class of cadets at West Point. For all our flaws, there aren’t many other countries that would allow such an unyielding critic of their foreign policy to speak to their officers-to-be. (In fact, in most places the people here listening seriously to Chomsky would have been hunting down and killing him.)

Moreover, it was broadcast nationwide on C-Span. It’s all such an embodiment of our best traditions it makes me a little verklempt.

Dennis Perrin describes it like this:

The real fun comes during the Q&A, and I hope these young officers were taking serious notes. If Noam could impress someone as gung-ho as Pat Tillman, then he can reach pretty much anyone in uniform. And that’s a good thing.

Notice, too, how much respect the cadets show Noam. Of course, part of this is their training, prefacing each question and comment with “sir.” But I get the impression that the kids kinda dug the old man, who easily and graciously handled every query thrown at him….

When I was in the Army, we didn’t get speakers like Noam. We had to sit through assholes like Woody Hayes, the now-late Ohio State football coach. Hayes blustered on about the glories of war, talking about how we really stuck it to the Japs in the Big One. In fact, ol’ Woody dropped the J-word several times, causing a couple of Japanese-American officers to walk out.

The rest of Dennis’ thoughts, plus links to the C-Span video, are here.

I agree that the Zarqawi letter is unlikely to be real. The Associated Press has the entire text here, and after reading it, I’d put the chances of it being genuine as high as 5%.

But given this section, it doesn’t sound like anything the U.S. would produce:

The question remains, how to draw the Americans into fighting a war against Iran? It is not known whether American is serious in its animosity towards Iran, because of the big support Iran is offering to America in its war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Hence, it is necessary first to exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran, and this would be done by the following:

1. By disseminating threatening messages against American interests and the American people and attribute them to a Shi’a Iranian side.

2. By executing operations of kidnapping hostages and implicating the Shi’a Iranian side.

3. By advertising that Iran has chemical and nuclear weapons and is threatening the west with these weapons.

4. By executing exploding operations in the west and accusing Iran by planting Iranian Shi’a fingerprints and evidence.

5. By declaring the existence of a relationship between Iran and terrorist groups (as termed by the Americans).

6. By disseminating bogus messages about confessions showing that Iran is in possession of weapons of mass destruction or that there are attempts by the Iranian intelligence to undertake terrorist operations in America and the west and against western interests.

Instead, it seems transparently to be the work of the Iraqi government, perhaps with an assist from their Iranian friends.

I think there’s a larger lesson here, too. The uranium-from-Niger forgeries were so blatantly stupid you’d assume they couldn’t be the work of the U.S. or Italian intelligence services. But generally speaking, subtlety and competence are not the strong suit of people who do this kind of thing. If they were subtle and competent they’d be in another line of work.

I know an embarrassing amount about the Iraq/WMD story. One side effect of being familiar with all this crap is I’m acutely aware of the precise way in which every claim made by war proponents was inaccurate. I mean that literally: every claim. Moreover, I don’t mean in hindsight, I mean based on what was known at the time.

Sometimes their claims were 20% false, sometimes 80% false, and sometimes 100% false. But they never once got things 100% right. And curiously enough, every “error” always fell in the same direction, that of making their case appear stronger.

One of these people was then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart, whom I’ve previously said unkind things about, here. So out of idle curiosity, I fact-checked one of Beinart’s statements in a recent interview (reg. req.) about his new book The Good Fight.

Guess what?

I won’t post here everything I wrote, because it’s long and frankly kind of boring if you’re not a huge freak. But if you are a huge freak, you can follow the link and get 100% of your daily recommended allowance of freakitude.

Max Sawicky:

JAKE TAPPER IS AN IDIOT

Unbelievable…

Whoever said Cindy Sheehan et al were infallible? Not a single fucking person. MaxSpeak will donate $20 bucks to the charity of your choice (I’m no Bill Gates, so back off) for anyone who can produce a quote from someone not posting to Democratic Underground to the effect that Ms. Sheehan or the 9-11 widows are infallible or above criticism for their substantive remarks.

The real problem with said critics is that it is not so easy to immediately dismiss them with ad hominem, the preferred mode of discourse for jingoists, economic royalists, and other political prostitutes of the Right. Ann of a Thousand Remainders is really complaining that she can’t employ her usual tools as easily, though for her it wasn’t much more difficult, as we have seen.

The mainstream media pundit machine cannot disintegrate into a smoking pile of rubble soon enough for me.

The rest is here.