Greenwald

by tristero

Greenwald skewers Friedman, easy pickings as those of us who have been appalled by his writings for years know. But Greenwald truly advances the dubious discipline of Tom Friedman Studies: The poor guy went back and reviewed Friedman’s pre-war columns and noticed among the scrambled metaphors, stupid aphorisms, basic grammatical mistakes, and bad analogies an incredibly dishonest pattern. I’ll leave it to you to go to Glenn’s site and read that part; it is well worth your while. What especially interested me was later on in the post, as it is apropos of our own discussions here:

It is not merely the case that having been pro-war doesn’t count as a strike against anyone. That is accurate. But far worse, the opposite is also true. It is still the case in Establishment Washington that having been pro-war in the first place is a pre-requisite to being considered a ‘responsible, serious’ foreign policy analyst. And having been anti-war from the start is the hallmark of someone unserious. The pro-war Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are serious national security Democrats but Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha are the kind of laughable losers whom Democrats need to repudiate.Establishment Washington really is not interested in how to end this horrendous and despicable debacle we unleashed in Iraq. They are not interested in how to maximize U.S. interests. They are only interested in how to find a way to bring this disaster to some sort of slow resolution that looks as though it is a respectable and decent outcome — anything that makes it seem like it wasn’t a horrendous mistake in the first place.

That is exactly right. And it is outrageous. Why? Because it means that Bush/Iraq will be repeated real soon now somewhere else, by people who think the only problem was that Bush didn’t know how to do war right.