Happy Krauthammer Day

The first sentence in the 2003 AEI link:

“Victory in war has been achieved; victory in peace seems less certain.”

So many things to ponder with these two sentences. Of course, the content continues:

“AEI will conclude its [2003] war-time series on Iraq with a look at the mistakes of the past and the challenges for the future. Will the Department of State snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Will the Security Council hold the Iraqi people hostage in order to assert “international” control? And what about the Iraqi people themselves? How will they recover from the terror of Saddam’s rule and the trauma of war?”

I guess it’s the State Department’s fault that defeat was snatched from victory in that region. Of course we can blame Obamacare, if we wished.

I am related to people who love Krauthammer dearly.

Well, godoggo’s evidently not having a happy Krauthammer Day.

Anyway, the best thing about this announcement:

Please join us at 9:00 a.m. on April 22 for analysis of military actions in Iraq, hard-hitting analysis, thoughtful criticism, and free-flowing strong black coffee.

is that I’d bet a small amount of money the coffee wasn’t that strong.

Accountability to the facts is a key issue of our time – perhaps the key issue of our time. I’m afraid that I, too, am not having a happy Krauthammer day, given that the SOB still has his job, and our smirking former SecDef can tell Errol Morris that we still don’t know whether Iraq had WMD.

Krauthammer is happy?

That must mean some hapless foreign people were bombed, imprisoned, and/or tortured.

The cherry on his ice cream would be cutting Social Security to pay for it.
~

Sometimes I feel like people have lost sight of true spirit of Krauthammer day since it became all commercialized.

A. Lurker, I think you and and godoggo have identified the premise of the next Peanuts special. As the exasperated godoggo says:

“Oh, for god’s sake, it isn’t about Krauthammer at all.”

“This is my one, very small and likely not very efficacious way of trying to ensure that one of the more egregious of these people isn’t allowed to forget it.”

And good on you I say. These smarmy bastards may have gotten away with their bullshit but that is no reason for us to forget.

Maybe we already missed one of these most holy of alignments : a Krauthammer Day on a full Friedman Unit.

Commemoration is not enough. We need a Krautlandar.

Kraut… did understood punditry strategy however. Put off judgement (of his WMD assertion long enough) and the plebs will forget about the very wrong prediction. It works quite naturally: by the time we are confident there really were no WMD, both the lack of WMDs, and those who used suspicions about WMDs as causus belli are old (now boring) news.

yabonn

We already missed the alignment four times. It occurs every thirty months.

This is my one, very small and likely not very efficacious way of trying to ensure that one of the more egregious of these people isn’t allowed to forget it.

And I truly appreciate it.

Omega at 18: Put off judgement (of his WMD assertion long enough) and the plebs will forget about the very wrong prediction.

I have a recurring fantasy that someone will create a widely used/cited (a la Wikipedia) collection of such predictions, and that the media will face some real level of social embarrassment if they continue to employ known liars mal-predictors.

Barring that, back in the day some local newspaper columnists used to do an annual roundup of “Things I was wrong about last year,” which I always appreciated. Somehow I don’t remember having seen that in the big papers.

Krauthammer’s continued employment at the WaPo is testament to Fred Hiatt’s complete failure editing the op-ed page. Of course, if you read Hiatt’s Sunday op-ed, you have to wonder about whether he could edit a “Barney and Friends” fan zine. And by that, I mean no offense to fans of “Barney and Friends,” most of whom understand US domestic policy better than either Hiatt or Krauthammer.

I fondly remember the Krautmases of my youth, when we all used to gather around the Yule cabbage and pound it with our war hammers. “Suck on this!” we’d cry, in the traditional Krautmas greeting. Oh the times we had. But it’s been many a year since we’ve been able to throw a small country up against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. Or maybe I’m conflating memories from Friedmanpesach? I was raised in a mixed-faith household.

His day will come when the US needs to invade Germany again.

“Meanwhile, on the warhawk front, there’s a lonely shot by the NYT’s war propagandist of the time, Dexter Filkins, in the New Yorker this week.”

My reaction was the same. I stopped taking Filkins seriously when he expressed skepticism about large numbers of civilian dead in the second Fallujah assault because he didn’t see any bodies. But then, as he explained in a NYT Sunday Magazine piece (I think reprinted in his book), he also didn’t see any insurgent bodies until some Marines helped him find one. So by his logic, maybe there was only one Iraqi who died in the November 2004 assault.

Googling, I found a dissertation someone wrote on NYT coverage of the second assault on Fallujah–

link

The dissertation reports that the NYTtook US military claims at face value and downplayed or ignored or were skeptical of claims of Iraqi civilian casualties caused by the US. (Anyone who read the NYT coverage of the Iraq War knows this is true.) Filkins claims that there just weren’t that many civilians present in Fallujah, because he saw very few, though reporting in other papers and the NYT itself said that tens of thousands of civilians were still there.

So, getting back to Roger Gathman’s point, I agree that the propaganda put out by our supposedly liberal news media is more troubling than the output of obvious hacks like Krauthammer.

I have a recurring fantasy that someone will create a widely used/cited (a la Wikipedia) collection of such predictions

I too wait for this day. In the meantime, we’ll have to console ourselves with the Definitive Collection of Thomas Friedman Takedowns. (No really, that’s what it’s called.)

Maybe Palindrome will enjoy it at their family’s next Friedmanpesach — or as we called it, the Eid ul Fried.

js., thank you so much for that. The “Thomas Friedman Porn Title Contest” alone is worth the price of (click-through) admission.

Anyone in particular godoggo or just life in general?

roy, have one of the nurses at your hospital rewrite that in non-insanese.

@ 3 & 37

Ouch-a-doodle!

Palindrome,

You’re welcome! The “Porn Title Contest” is one of my long time favorites.

Thanks for clarifying, Roy. BTW, stream of consciousness isn’t worth much. Writing in clear English is much better.

Is “Roy Belmont” the same person as “roy belmont”?

Well, FWLIW, I quite like the way that (R)oy composes his posts here, and have never felt I didn’t grasp the meaning within them. So I say screw the hall monitors and keep on keepin’ on, (B)elmont…

Roy – relatedly, here’s a diary a German visitor wrote when visiting my hometown nearly 500 years ago

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T100083/index.html

he nails it (pretty much) I kid, I kid.

I’m sure I was far from the only person wondering at the time just how the US and UK governments were getting away with the shit they were spouting at the time of the invasion. It seemed like a case of mass delusion. The political equivalent of a market bubble – a war bubble, if you will.

And just like when a bubble bursts, there are now people like Krauthammer walking around whistling nonchalantly with their hands in their collective pockets, trying as hard as they can to forget their role in inflating the bubble. Posts like this do a superb job of not letting them off the hook.

In a hundred years’ time, I’ve no doubt historians and laypeople alike will be looking back at this and wondering, a bit like we do now with WW1, quite how it was allowed to happen and shaking their heads in bewilderment.

Scott Esposito: …that fragmented narratives are making greater inroads into the mainstream… people like Wallace, DeLillo, and Coetzee…with very fragmented narratives. …Markson… someone like David Shields… And when you look around at things like Twitter and Facebook, why not?

Lance Olsen: The movement of the last hundred and ten or twenty years in the arts has been toward greater structural sharding. Nietzsche’s epigrammatic composites, Eliot’s appropriation of others’ words in The Waste Land, Picasso’s appropriation of others’ material in his collages, Joyce’s exploded architecture in Ulysses, Cage’s sound collages—such gestures precede the writers you mention, let alone Twitter and Facebook, by decades and decades…it seems those writers you mention and our culture in general are just catching up with what’s been going on in the avant-garde for more than a century.
… a collage imagination (Barthelme: “The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century.”)… liberating fusion and confusion, juxtaposition, …gaining wider acceptance since, not so much Twitter and Facebook, as the hypertextual Web itself, which tends to be all about abrupt and discontinuous lexia…

SE:… instead of telling people, “No, what you need is a nice straight story.”

LO: Existence…comes to us in bright disconnected splinters of experience. We then narrativize those splinters into forms that accommodate them… the dominant form appears…still to be collage—if we define the term liberally, if we keep in mind its French root: coller, i.e., to paste, to glue.

The Quarerly Conversation April 5 2010
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-complexities-of-a-moment-felt-the-lance-olsen-interview
_______

“I suppose when I say that the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God, I mean about the same thing that Conrad meant when he said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible world.”

Flannery O’Connor
The Habit of Being selected letters
___________
Barry:
I’d only ask that you consider that I’m at least capable of recognizing what’s being said there to the degree that I’m prompted to quote those quotes here.
And that I do read my own stuff before I “SUBMIT” it.
Connect those dots.
You’re free as can be to not read what I submit here – and I’ll never even know it!
You’re welcome to disagree and dispute or agree or whatever.
But please don’t try to school me because you don’t like the form.

Regrettably, the example of WWI suggests that, in 100 years time, there will be plenty of military historians lining up to praise Bush and Blair, and probably also Putin. Unless things turn out very differently from the way they stand now, and Saddam is being praised as a martyr in the cause of right.

Maybe we have a war bubble, but that’s only because the TERRORISM BUBBLE broke!

Every January, National Enquirer comes out with top psychic predictions for the coming year. Does anyone put them aside and, a year later, check to see if space aliens really did visit the White House or a new source of unlimited power emerge from the Bermuda triangle? Anyone other than me, that is, for I tried it a few times.

Does the National Enquirer put in a sidebar, “Sorry we were wrong about space aliens visiting the White House last year, but we hope that our psychic predictions for the coming year will be of better quality”?

These things are ephemeral amusements, not to be confused with assertions of fact.

Roy: “But please don’t try to school me because you don’t like the form.”

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

roy, thanks, I’d heard about a few of the exhibitions but wasn’t aware of the online stuff. (in fact, iirc, one of the last times I was in Dublin I’d intended to see the ‘lockout’ one, but accidentaly went drinking instead. Which was fine, all things considered.)

Keep Krauthammer Day special, in memory of those keyboard warriors who went over the top in 2002 – 2003, winding themselves into such a maelstrom of fury about Saddam that they couldn’t remember why they were demanding a war and whether it was legal or legitimate or sensible.

wage